Login
The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.
Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals and $15/mo for families, and promises to remove your personal information from nearly 200 people-search sites. Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites.
A testimonial on onerep.com.
Customer case studies published on onerep.com state that it struck a deal to offer the service to employees of Permanente Medicine, which represents the doctors within the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente. Onerep also says it has made inroads among police departments in the United States.
But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.
A search in the data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence for the name Dimitri Shelest brings up the email address dimitri.shelest@onerep.com. Constella also finds that Dimitri Shelest from Belarus used the email address d.sh@nuwber.com, and the Belarus phone number +375-292-702786.
Nuwber.com is a people search service whose employees all appear to be from Belarus, and it is one of dozens of people-search companies that Onerep claims to target with its data-removal service. Onerep.com’s website disavows any relationship to Nuwber.com, stating quite clearly, “Please note that OneRep is not associated with Nuwber.com.”
However, there is an abundance of evidence suggesting Mr. Shelest is in fact the founder of Nuwber. Constella found that Minsk telephone number (375-292-702786) has been used multiple times in connection with the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com. Recall that Onerep.com’s domain registration records in 2018 list the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.
It appears Mr. Shelest sought to reinvent his online identity in 2015 by adding a “2” to his email address. The Belarus phone number tied to Nuwber.com shows up in the domain records for comversus.com, and DomainTools says this domain is tied to both dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com. Other domains that mention both email addresses in their WHOIS records include careon.me, docvsdoc.com, dotcomsvdot.com, namevname.com, okanyway.com and tapanyapp.com.
Onerep.com CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest, as pictured on the “about” page of onerep.com.
A search in DomainTools for the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com shows it is associated with the registration of at least 179 domain names, including dozens of mostly now-defunct people-search companies targeting citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia and Mexico, among others.
Those include nuwber.fr, a site registered in 2016 which was identical to the homepage of Nuwber.com at the time. DomainTools shows the same email and Belarus phone number are in historic registration records for nuwber.at, nuwber.ch, and nuwber.dk (all domains linked here are to their cached copies at archive.org, where available).
Nuwber.com, circa 2015. Image: Archive.org.
Update, March 21, 11:15 a.m. ET: Mr. Shelest has provided a lengthy response to the findings in this story. In summary, Shelest acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, but said there was “zero cross-over or information-sharing with OneRep.” Mr. Shelest said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.
“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.” The full statement is available here (PDF).
Original story:
Historic WHOIS records for onerep.com show it was registered for many years to a resident of Sioux Falls, SD for a completely unrelated site. But around Sept. 2015 the domain switched from the registrar GoDaddy.com to eNom, and the registration records were hidden behind privacy protection services. DomainTools indicates around this time onerep.com started using domain name servers from DNS provider constellix.com. Likewise, Nuwber.com first appeared in late 2015, was also registered through eNom, and also started using constellix.com for DNS at nearly the same time.
Listed on LinkedIn as a former product manager at OneRep.com between 2015 and 2018 is Dimitri Bukuyazau, who says their hometown is Warsaw, Poland. While this LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/dzmitrybukuyazau) does not mention Nuwber, a search on this name in Google turns up a 2017 blog post from privacyduck.com, which laid out a number of reasons to support a conclusion that OneRep and Nuwber.com were the same company.
“Any people search profiles containing your Personally Identifiable Information that were on Nuwber.com were also mirrored identically on OneRep.com, down to the relatives’ names and address histories,” Privacyduck.com wrote. The post continued:
“Both sites offered the same immediate opt-out process. Both sites had the same generic contact and support structure. They were – and remain – the same company (even PissedConsumer.com advocates this fact: https://nuwber.pissedconsumer.com/nuwber-and-onerep-20160707878520.html).”
“Things changed in early 2016 when OneRep.com began offering privacy removal services right alongside their own open displays of your personal information. At this point when you found yourself on Nuwber.com OR OneRep.com, you would be provided with the option of opting-out your data on their site for free – but also be highly encouraged to pay them to remove it from a slew of other sites (and part of that payment was removing you from their own site, Nuwber.com, as a benefit of their service).”
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Bukuyazau declined to answer questions, such as whether he ever worked at Nuwber.com. However, Constella Intelligence finds two interesting email addresses for employees at nuwber.com: d.bu@nuwber.com, and d.bu+figure-eight.com@nuwber.com, which was registered under the name “Dzmitry.”
PrivacyDuck’s claims about how onerep.com appeared and behaved in the early days are not readily verifiable because the domain onerep.com has been completely excluded from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The Wayback Machine will honor such requests if they come directly from the owner of the domain in question.
Still, Mr. Shelest’s name, phone number and email also appear in the domain registration records for a truly dizzying number of country-specific people-search services, including pplcrwlr.in, pplcrwlr.fr, pplcrwlr.dk, pplcrwlr.jp, peeepl.br.com, peeepl.in, peeepl.it and peeepl.co.uk.
The same details appear in the WHOIS registration records for the now-defunct people-search sites waatpp.de, waatp1.fr, azersab.com, and ahavoila.com, a people-search service for French citizens.
The German people-search site waatp.de.
A search on the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com suggests Mr. Shelest was previously involved in rather aggressive email marketing campaigns. In 2010, an anonymous source leaked to KrebsOnSecurity the financial and organizational records of Spamit, which at the time was easily the largest Russian-language pharmacy spam affiliate program in the world.
Spamit paid spammers a hefty commission every time someone bought male enhancement drugs from any of their spam-advertised websites. Mr. Shelest’s email address stood out because immediately after the Spamit database was leaked, KrebsOnSecurity searched all of the Spamit affiliate email addresses to determine if any of them corresponded to social media accounts at Facebook.com (at the time, Facebook allowed users to search profiles by email address).
That mapping, which was done mainly by generous graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University, revealed that dmitrcox@gmail.com was used by a Spamit affiliate, albeit not a very profitable one. That same Facebook profile for Mr. Shelest is still active, and it says he is married and living in Minsk [Update, Mar. 16: Mr. Shelest’s Facebook account is no longer active].
The Italian people-search website peeepl.it.
Scrolling down Mr. Shelest’s Facebook page to posts made more than ten years ago show him liking the Facebook profile pages for a large number of other people-search sites, including findita.com, findmedo.com, folkscan.com, huntize.com, ifindy.com, jupery.com, look2man.com, lookerun.com, manyp.com, peepull.com, perserch.com, persuer.com, pervent.com, piplenter.com, piplfind.com, piplscan.com, popopke.com, pplsorce.com, qimeo.com, scoutu2.com, search64.com, searchay.com, seekmi.com, selfabc.com, socsee.com, srching.com, toolooks.com, upearch.com, webmeek.com, and many country-code variations of viadin.ca (e.g. viadin.hk, viadin.com and viadin.de).
The people-search website popopke.com.
Domaintools.com finds that all of the domains mentioned in the last paragraph were registered to the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com.
Mr. Shelest has not responded to multiple requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from onerep.com, which likewise has not responded to inquiries about its founder’s many apparent conflicts of interest. In any event, these practices would seem to contradict the goal Onerep has stated on its site: “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”
The people-search website findmedo.com.
Max Anderson is chief growth officer at 360 Privacy, a legitimate privacy company that works to keep its clients’ data off of more than 400 data broker and people-search sites. Anderson said it is concerning to see a direct link between between a data removal service and data broker websites.
“I would consider it unethical to run a company that sells people’s information, and then charge those same people to have their information removed,” Anderson said.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity published an analysis of the people-search data broker giant Radaris, whose consumer profiles are deep enough to rival those of far more guarded data broker resources available to U.S. police departments and other law enforcement personnel.
That story revealed that the co-founders of Radaris are two native Russian brothers who operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of the Radaris founders’ businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
KrebsOnSecurity will continue investigating the history of various consumer data brokers and people-search providers. If any readers have inside knowledge of this industry or key players within it, please consider reaching out to krebsonsecurity at gmail.com.
Update, March 15, 11:35 a.m. ET: Many readers have pointed out something that was somehow overlooked amid all this research: The Mozilla Foundation, the company that runs the Firefox Web browser, has launched a data removal service called Mozilla Monitor that bundles OneRep. That notice says Mozilla Monitor is offered as a free or paid subscription service.
“The free data breach notification service is a partnership with Have I Been Pwned (“HIBP”),” the Mozilla Foundation explains. “The automated data deletion service is a partnership with OneRep to remove personal information published on publicly available online directories and other aggregators of information about individuals (“Data Broker Sites”).”
In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Mozilla said they did assess OneRep’s data removal service to confirm it acts according to privacy principles advocated at Mozilla.
“We were aware of the past affiliations with the entities named in the article and were assured they had ended prior to our work together,” the statement reads. “We’re now looking into this further. We will always put the privacy and security of our customers first and will provide updates as needed.”
Related tags
If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the co-founders of Radaris operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of their businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Formed in 2009, Radaris is a vast people-search network for finding data on individuals, properties, phone numbers, businesses and addresses. Search for any American’s name in Google and the chances are excellent that a listing for them at Radaris.com will show up prominently in the results.
Radaris reports typically bundle a substantial amount of data scraped from public and court documents, including any current or previous addresses and phone numbers, known email addresses and registered domain names. The reports also list address and phone records for the target’s known relatives and associates. Such information could be useful if you were trying to determine the maiden name of someone’s mother, or successfully answer a range of other knowledge-based authentication questions.
Currently, consumer reports advertised for sale at Radaris.com are being fulfilled by a different people-search company called TruthFinder. But Radaris also operates a number of other people-search properties — like Centeda.com — that sell consumer reports directly and behave almost identically to TruthFinder: That is, reel the visitor in with promises of detailed background reports on people, and then charge a $34.99 monthly subscription fee just to view the results.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) assigns Radaris a rating of “F” for consistently ignoring consumers seeking to have their information removed from Radaris’ various online properties. Of the 159 complaints detailed there in the last year, several were from people who had used third-party identity protection services to have their information removed from Radaris, only to receive a notice a few months later that their Radaris record had been restored.
What’s more, Radaris’ automated process for requesting the removal of your information requires signing up for an account, potentially providing more information about yourself that the company didn’t already have (see screenshot above).
Radaris has not responded to requests for comment.
Radaris, TruthFinder and others like them all force users to agree that their reports will not be used to evaluate someone’s eligibility for credit, or a new apartment or job. This language is so prominent in people-search reports because selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically do not include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).
But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and another people-search service Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.
An excerpt from the FTC’s complaint against TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate.
The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.
“All the while, the companies touted the accuracy of their reports in online ads and other promotional materials, claiming that their reports contain “the MOST ACCURATE information available to the public,” the FTC noted. The FTC says, however, that all the information used in their background reports is obtained from third parties that expressly disclaim that the information is accurate, and that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate take no steps to verify the accuracy of the information.
The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.
The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.
According to Radaris’ profile at the investor website Pitchbook.com, the company’s founder and “co-chief executive officer” is a Massachusetts resident named Gary Norden, also known as Gary Nard.
An analysis of email addresses known to have been used by Mr. Norden shows he is a native Russian man whose real name is Igor Lybarsky (also spelled Lubarsky). Igor’s brother Dmitry, who goes by “Dan,” appears to be the other co-CEO of Radaris. Dmitry Lybarsky’s Facebook/Meta account says he was born in March 1963.
The Lybarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Igor a.k.a. “Gary,” in an undated photo.
Indirectly or directly, the Lybarskys own multiple properties in both Sherborn and Wellesley, Mass. However, the Radaris website is operated by an offshore entity called Bitseller Expert Ltd, which is incorporated in Cyprus. Neither Lybarsky brother responded to requests for comment.
A review of the domain names registered by Gary Norden shows that beginning in the early 2000s, he and Dan built an e-commerce empire by marketing prepaid calling cards and VOIP services to Russian expatriates who are living in the United States and seeking an affordable way to stay in touch with loved ones back home.
A Sherborn, Mass. property owned by Barsky Real Estate Trust and Dmitry Lybarsky.
In 2012, the main company in charge of providing those calling services — Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. — was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said Unipoint never applied for a license to provide international telecommunications services.
DomainTools.com shows the email address gnard@unipointtech.com is tied to 137 domains, including radaris.com. DomainTools also shows that the email addresses used by Gary Norden for more than two decades — epop@comby.com, gary@barksy.com and gary1@eprofit.com, among others — appear in WHOIS registration records for an entire fleet of people-search websites, including: centeda.com, virtory.com, clubset.com, kworld.com, newenglandfacts.com, and pub360.com.
Still more people-search platforms tied to Gary Norden– like publicreports.com and arrestfacts.com — currently funnel interested customers to third-party search companies, such as TruthFinder and PersonTrust.com.
The email addresses used by Gary Nard/Gary Norden are also connected to a slew of data broker websites that sell reports on businesses, real estate holdings, and professionals, including bizstanding.com, homemetry.com, trustoria.com, homeflock.com, rehold.com, difive.com and projectlab.com.
Domain records indicate that Gary and Dan for many years operated a now-defunct pay-per-click affiliate advertising network called affiliate.ru. That entity used domain name servers tied to the aforementioned domains comby.com and eprofit.com, as did radaris.ru.
A machine-translated version of Affiliate.ru, a Russian-language site that advertised hundreds of money making affiliate programs, including the Comfi.com prepaid calling card affiliate.
Comby.com used to be a Russian language social media network that looked a great deal like Facebook. The domain now forwards visitors to Privet.ru (“hello” in Russian), a dating site that claims to have 5 million users. Privet.ru says it belongs to a company called Dating Factory, which lists offices in Switzerland. Privet.ru uses the Gary Norden domain eprofit.com for its domain name servers.
Dating Factory’s website says it sells “powerful dating technology” to help customers create unique or niche dating websites. A review of the sample images available on the Dating Factory homepage suggests the term “dating” in this context refers to adult websites. Dating Factory also operates a community called FacebookOfSex, as well as the domain analslappers.com.
Email addresses for the Comby and Eprofit domains indicate Gary Norden operates an entity in Wellesley Hills, Mass. called RussianAmerican Holding Inc. (russianamerica.com). This organization is listed as the owner of the domain newyork.ru, which is a site dedicated to orienting newcomers from Russia to the Big Apple.
Newyork.ru’s terms of service refer to an international calling card company called ComFi Inc. (comfi.com) and list an address as PO Box 81362 Wellesley Hills, Ma. Other sites that include this address are russianamerica.com, russianboston.com, russianchicago.com, russianla.com, russiansanfran.com, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com and russianseattle.com (currently offline).
ComFi is tied to Comfibook.com, which was a search aggregator website that collected and published data from many online and offline sources, including phone directories, social networks, online photo albums, and public records.
The current website for russianamerica.com. Note the ad in the bottom left corner of this image for Channel One, a Russian state-owned media firm that is currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Many of the U.S. city-specific online properties apparently tied to Gary Norden include phone numbers on their contact pages for a pair of Russian media and advertising firms based in southern California. The phone number 323-874-8211 appears on the websites russianla.com, russiasanfran.com, and rosconcert.com, which sells tickets to theater events performed in Russian.
Historic domain registration records from DomainTools show rosconcert.com was registered in 2003 to Unipoint Technologies — the same company fined by the FCC for not having a license. Rosconcert.com also lists the phone number 818-377-2101.
A phone number just a few digits away — 323-874-8205 — appears as a point of contact on newyork.ru, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com, and russianchicago.com. A search in Google shows this 82xx number range — and the 818-377-2101 number — belong to two different entities at the same UPS Store mailbox in Tarzana, Calif: American Russian Media Inc. (armediacorp.com), and Lamedia.biz.
Armediacorp.com is the home of FACT Magazine, a glossy Russian-language publication put out jointly by the American-Russian Business Council, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
Lamedia.biz says it is an international media organization with more than 25 years of experience within the Russian-speaking community on the West Coast. The site advertises FACT Magazine and the Russian state-owned media outlet Channel One. Clicking the Channel One link on the homepage shows Lamedia.biz offers to submit advertising spots that can be shown to Channel One viewers. The price for a basic ad is listed at $500.
In May 2022, the U.S. government levied financial sanctions against Channel One that bar US companies or citizens from doing business with the company.
The website of lamedia.biz offers to sell advertising on two Russian state-owned media firms currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
In 2014, a group of people sued Radaris in a class-action lawsuit claiming the company’s practices violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Court records indicate the defendants never showed up in court to dispute the claims, and as a result the judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs a default judgement and ordered the company to pay $7.5 million.
But the plaintiffs in that civil case had a difficult time collecting on the court’s ruling. In response, the court ordered the radaris.com domain name (~9.4M monthly visitors) to be handed over to the plaintiffs.
However, in 2018 Radaris was able to reclaim their domain on a technicality. Attorneys for the company argued that their clients were never named as defendants in the original lawsuit, and so their domain could not legally be taken away from them in a civil judgment.
“Because our clients were never named as parties to the litigation, and were never served in the litigation, the taking of their property without due process is a violation of their rights,” Radaris’ attorneys argued.
In October 2023, an Illinois resident filed a class-action lawsuit against Radaris for allegedly using people’s names for commercial purposes, in violation of the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.
On Feb. 8, 2024, a company called Atlas Data Privacy Corp. sued Radaris LLC for allegedly violating “Daniel’s Law,” a statute that allows New Jersey law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from people-search services and commercial data brokers. Atlas has filed at least 140 similar Daniel’s Law complaints against data brokers recently.
Daniel’s Law was enacted in response to the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge (his mother). In July 2020, a disgruntled attorney who had appeared before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas disguised himself as a Fedex driver, went to her home and shot and killed her son (the judge was unharmed and the assailant killed himself).
Earlier this month, The Record reported on Atlas Data Privacy’s lawsuit against LexisNexis Risk Data Management, in which the plaintiffs representing thousands of law enforcement personnel in New Jersey alleged that after they asked for their information to remain private, the data broker retaliated against them by freezing their credit and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.
Another data broker sued by Atlas Data Privacy — pogodata.com — announced on Mar. 1 that it was likely shutting down because of the lawsuit.
“The matter is far from resolved but your response motivates us to try to bring back most of the names while preserving redaction of the 17,000 or so clients of the redaction company,” the company wrote. “While little consolation, we are not alone in the suit – the privacy company sued 140 property-data sites at the same time as PogoData.”
Atlas says their goal is convince more states to pass similar laws, and to extend those protections to other groups such as teachers, healthcare personnel and social workers. Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states would limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminals charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and governments records that fuel the people-search industry.
There are some pending changes to the US legal and regulatory landscape that could soon reshape large swaths of the data broker industry. But experts say it is unlikely that any of these changes will affect people-search companies like Radaris.
On Feb. 28, 2024, the White House issued an executive order that directs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to create regulations that would prevent data brokers from selling or transferring abroad certain data types deemed too sensitive, including genomic and biometric data, geolocation and financial data, as well as other as-yet unspecified personal identifiers. The DOJ this week published a list of more than 100 questions it is seeking answers to regarding the data broker industry.
In August 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced it was undertaking new rulemaking related to data brokers.
Justin Sherman, an adjunct professor at Duke University, said neither the CFPB nor White House rulemaking will likely address people-search brokers because these companies typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.
“These dossiers contain everything from individuals’ names, addresses, and family information to data about finances, criminal justice system history, and home and vehicle purchases,” Sherman wrote in an October 2023 article for Lawfare. “People search websites’ business pitch boils down to the fact that they have done the work of compiling data, digitizing it, and linking it to specific people so that it can be searched online.”
Sherman said while there are ongoing debates about whether people search data brokers have legal responsibilities to the people about whom they gather and sell data, the sources of this information — public records — are completely carved out from every single state consumer privacy law.
“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman wrote. “Tennessee’s consumer data privacy law, for example, stipulates that “personal information,” a cornerstone of the legislation, does not include ‘publicly available information,’ defined as:
“…information that is lawfully made available through federal, state, or local government records, or information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public through widely distributed media, by the consumer, or by a person to whom the consumer has disclosed the information, unless the consumer has restricted the information to a specific audience.”
Sherman said this is the same language as the carve-out in the California privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations. He said with a limited set of exceptions for survivors of stalking and domestic violence, even under California’s newly passed Delete Act — which creates a centralized mechanism for consumers to ask some third-party data brokers to delete their information — consumers across the board cannot exercise these rights when it comes to data scraped from property filings, marriage certificates, and public court documents, for example.
“With some very narrow exceptions, it’s either extremely difficult or impossible to compel these companies to remove your information from their sites,” Sherman told KrebsOnSecurity. “Even in states like California, every single consumer privacy law in the country completely exempts publicly available information.”
Below is a mind map that helped KrebsOnSecurity track relationships between and among the various organizations named in the story above:
A mind map of various entities apparently tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.
Related tags
A Canadian man who says he’s been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve “triangulation fraud,” which occurs when a consumer purchases something online — from a seller on Amazon or eBay, for example — but the seller doesn’t actually own the item for sale. Instead, the seller purchases the item from an online retailer using stolen payment card data. In this scam, the unwitting buyer pays the scammer and receives what they ordered, and very often the only party left to dispute the transaction is the owner of the stolen payment card.
Triangulation fraud. Image: eBay Enterprise.
Timothy Barker, 56, was until recently a Band Manager at Duncan’s First Nation, a First Nation in northwestern Alberta, Canada. A Band Manager is responsible for overseeing the delivery of all Band programs, including community health services, education, housing, social assistance, and administration.
Barker told KrebsOnSecurity that during the week of March 31, 2023 he and the director of the Band’s daycare program discussed the need to purchase items for the community before the program’s budget expired for the year.
“There was a rush to purchase items on the Fiscal Year 2023 timeline as the year ended on March 31,” Barker recalled.
Barker said he bought seven “Step2 All Around Playtime Patio with Canopy” sets from a seller on Amazon.ca, using his payment card on file to pay nearly $2,000 for the items.
On the morning of April 7, Barker’s Facebook account received several nasty messages from an Ontario woman he’d never met. She demanded to know why he’d hacked her Walmart account and used it to buy things that were being shipped to his residence. Barker shared a follow-up message from the woman, who later apologized for losing her temper.
One of several messages from the Ontario woman whose Walmart account was used to purchase the goods that Barker ordered from Amazon.
“If this is not the person who did this to me, I’m sorry, I’m pissed,” the lady from Ontario said. “This order is being delivered April 14th to the address above. If not you, then someone who has the same name. Now I feel foolish.”
On April 12, 2023, before the Amazon purchases had even arrived at his home, Barker received a call from an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who said Barker urgently needed to come down to the local RCMP office for an interview related to “an investigation.” Barker said the officer wouldn’t elaborate at the time on the nature of the investigation, and that he told the officer he was in Halifax for several days but could meet after his return home.
According to Barker, the investigator visited his home anyway the following day and began questioning his wife, asking about his whereabouts, his work, and when he might return home.
On April 14, six boxes arrived to partially fulfill his Amazon order; another box was delayed, and the Amazon.ca seller he’d purchased from said the remaining box was expected to ship the following week. Barker said he was confused because all six boxes came from Walmart instead of Amazon, and the shipping labels had his name and address on them but carried a contact phone number in Mexico.
Three days later, the investigator called again, demanding he submit to an interview.
“He then asked where my wife was and what her name is,” Barker said. “He wanted to know her itinerary for the day. I am now alarmed and frightened — this doesn’t feel right.”
Barker said he inquired with a local attorney about a consultation, but that the RCMP investigator showed up at his house before he could speak to the lawyer. The investigator began taking pictures of the boxes from his Amazon order.
“The [investigator] derisively asked why would anyone order so many play sets?” Barker said. “I started to give the very logical answer that we are helping families improve their children’s home life and learning for toddlers when he cut me off and gave the little speech about giving a statement after my arrest. He finally told me that he believes that I used someone’s credit card in Ontario to purchase the Walmart products.”
Eager to clear his name, Barker said he shared with the police copies of his credit card bills and purchase history at Amazon. But on April 21, the investigator called again to say he was coming to arrest Barker for theft.
“He said that if I was home at five o’clock then he would serve the papers at the house and it would go easy and I wouldn’t have to go to the station,” Barker recalled. “If I wasn’t home, then he would send a search team to locate me and drag me to the station. He said he would kick the door down if I didn’t answer my phone. He said he had every right to break our door down.”
Barker said he briefly conferred with an attorney about how to handle the arrest. Later that evening, the RCMP arrived with five squad cars and six officers.
“I asked if handcuffs were necessary – there is no danger of violence,” Barker said. “I was going to cooperate. His response was to turn me around and cuff me. He walked me outside and stood me beside the car for a full 4 or 5 minutes in full view of all the neighbors.”
Barker believes he and the Ontario woman are both victims of triangulation fraud, and that someone likely hacked the Ontario woman’s Walmart account and added his name and address as a recipient.
But he says he has since lost his job as a result of the arrest, and now he can’t find new employment because he has a criminal record. Barker’s former employer — Duncan’s First Nation — did not respond to requests for comment.
“In Canada, a criminal record is not a record of conviction, it’s a record of charges and that’s why I can’t work now,” Barker said. “Potential employers never find out what the nature of it is, they just find out that I have a criminal arrest record.”
Barker said that right after his arrest, the RCMP called the Ontario woman and told her they’d solved the crime and arrested the perpetrator.
“They even told her my employer had put me on administrative leave,” he said. “Surely, they’re not allowed to do that.”
Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, the woman whose Walmart account was used to fraudulently purchase the child play sets said she’s not convinced this was a case of triangulation fraud. She declined to elaborate on why she believed this, other than to say the police told her Barker was a bad guy.
“I don’t think triangulation fraud was used in this case,” she said. “My actual Walmart.ca account was hacked and an order was placed on my account, using my credit card. The only thing Mr. Barker did was to order the item to be delivered to his address in Alberta.”
Barker shared with this author all of the documentation he gave to the RCMP, including screenshots of his Amazon.ca account showing that the items in dispute were sold by a seller named “Adavio,” and that the merchant behind this name was based in Turkey.
That Adavio account belongs to a young computer engineering student and “SEO expert” based in Adana, Turkey who did not respond to requests for comment.
Amazon.ca said it conducted an investigation and found that Mr. Barker never filed a complaint about the seller or transaction in question. The company noted that Adavio currently has a feedback rating of 4.5 stars out of 5.
“Amazon works hard to provide customers with a great experience and it’s our commitment to go above and beyond to make things right for customers,” Amazon.ca said in a written statement. “If a customer has an issue with an order, they may flag to Amazon through our Customer Service page.”
Barker said when he went to file a complaint with Amazon last year he could no longer find the Adavio account on the website, and that the site didn’t have a category for the type of complaint he wanted to file.
When he first approached KrebsOnSecurity about his plight last summer, Barker said he didn’t want any media attention to derail the chances of having his day in court, and confronting the RCMP investigator with evidence proving that he was being wrongfully prosecuted and maligned.
But a week before his court date arrived at the end of November 2023, prosecutors announced the charges against him would be stayed, meaning they had no immediate plans to prosecute the case further but that the investigation could still be reopened at some point in the future.
The RCMP declined to comment for this story, other than to confirm they had issued a stay of proceedings in the case.
Barker says the stay has left him in legal limbo — denying him the ability to clear his name, while giving the RCMP a free pass for a botched investigation. He says he has considered suing the investigating officer for defamation, but has been told by his attorney that the bar for success in such cases against the government is extremely high.
“I’m a 56-year-old law-abiding citizen, and I haven’t broken any laws,” Barker said, wondering aloud who would be stupid enough to use someone else’s credit card and have the stolen items shipped directly to their home.
“Their putting a stay on the proceedings without giving any evidence or explanation allows them to cover up bad police work,” he said. “It’s all so stupid.”
Triangulation fraud is hardly a new thing. KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about it from an e-commerce vendor’s perspective in 2015, but the scam predates that story by many years and is now a well-understood problem. The Canadian authorities should either let Mr. Barker have his day in court, or drop the charges altogether.
More than five years after domain name registrars started redacting personal data from all public domain registration records, the non-profit organization overseeing the domain industry has introduced a centralized online service designed to make it easier for researchers, law enforcement and others to request the information directly from registrars.
In May 2018, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the nonprofit entity that manages the global domain name system — instructed all registrars to redact the customer’s name, address, phone number and email from WHOIS, the system for querying databases that store the registered users of domain names and blocks of Internet address ranges.
ICANN made the policy change in response to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a law enacted by the European Parliament that requires companies to gain affirmative consent for any personal information they collect on people within the European Union. In the meantime, registrars were to continue collecting the data but not publish it, and ICANN promised it would develop a system that facilitates access to this information.
At the end of November 2023, ICANN launched the Registration Data Request Service (RDRS), which is designed as a one-stop shop to submit registration data requests to participating registrars. This video from ICANN walks through how the system works.
Accredited registrars don’t have to participate, but ICANN is asking all registrars to join and says participants can opt out or stop using it at any time. ICANN contends that the use of a standardized request form makes it easier for the correct information and supporting documents to be provided to evaluate a request.
ICANN says the RDRS doesn’t guarantee access to requested registration data, and that all communication and data disclosure between the registrars and requestors takes place outside of the system. The service can’t be used to request WHOIS data tied to country-code top level domains (CCTLDs), such as those ending in .de (Germany) or .nz (New Zealand), for example.
The RDRS portal.
As Catalin Cimpanu writes for Risky Business News, currently investigators can file legal requests or abuse reports with each individual registrar, but the idea behind the RDRS is to create a place where requests from “verified” parties can be honored faster and with a higher degree of trust.
The registrar community generally views public WHOIS data as a nuisance issue for their domain customers and an unwelcome cost-center. Privacy advocates maintain that cybercriminals don’t provide their real information in registration records anyway, and that requiring WHOIS data to be public simply causes domain registrants to be pestered by spammers, scammers and stalkers.
Meanwhile, security experts argue that even in cases where online abusers provide intentionally misleading or false information in WHOIS records, that information is still extremely useful in mapping the extent of their malware, phishing and scamming operations. What’s more, the overwhelming majority of phishing is performed with the help of compromised domains, and the primary method for cleaning up those compromises is using WHOIS data to contact the victim and/or their hosting provider.
Anyone looking for copious examples of both need only to search this Web site for the term “WHOIS,” which yields dozens of stories and investigations that simply would not have been possible without the data available in the global WHOIS records.
KrebsOnSecurity remains doubtful that participating registrars will be any more likely to share WHOIS data with researchers just because the request comes through ICANN. But I look forward to being wrong on this one, and will certainly mention it in my reporting if the RDRS proves useful.
Regardless of whether the RDRS succeeds or fails, there is another European law that takes effect in 2024 which is likely to place additional pressure on registrars to respond to legitimate WHOIS data requests. The new Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), which EU member states have until October 2024 to implement, requires registrars to keep much more accurate WHOIS records, and to respond within as little as 24 hours to WHOIS data requests tied everything from phishing, malware and spam to copyright and brand enforcement.
Amir Golestan, the 40-year-old CEO of the Charleston, S.C. based technology company Micfo LLC, has been sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud. Golestan’s sentencing comes nearly two years after he pleaded guilty to using an elaborate network of phony companies to secure more than 735,000 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit which oversees IP addresses assigned to entities in the U.S., Canada, and parts of the Caribbean.
Amir Golestan, the former CEO of Micfo.
In 2018, ARIN sued Golestan and Micfo, alleging they had obtained hundreds of thousands of IP addresses under false pretenses. ARIN and Micfo settled that dispute in arbitration, with Micfo returning most of the addresses that it hadn’t already sold.
ARIN’s civil case caught the attention of federal prosecutors in South Carolina, who in May 2019 filed criminal wire fraud charges against Golestan, alleging he’d orchestrated a network of shell companies and fake identities to prevent ARIN from knowing the addresses were all going to the same buyer.
Prosecutors showed that each of those shell companies involved the production of notarized affidavits in the names of people who didn’t exist. As a result, the government was able to charge Golestan with 20 counts of wire fraud — one for each payment made by the phony companies that bought the IP addresses from ARIN.
Golestan initially sought to fight those charges. But on just the second day of his trial in November 2021, Golestan changed his mind and pleaded guilty to 20 counts of wire fraud in connection with the phantom companies he used to secure the IP addresses. Prosecutors estimated those addresses were valued at between $10 million and $14 million.
ARIN says the 5-year sentence handed down by the South Carolina judge “sends an important message of deterrence to other parties contemplating fraudulent schemes to obtain or transfer Internet resources.”
“Those who seek to defraud ARIN (or other Regional Internet Registries) are subject to costly and serious civil litigation, criminal charges, and, ultimately, a lengthy term of incarceration,” reads a statement from ARIN on Golestan’s sentencing.
By 2013, a number of Micfo’s customers had landed on the radar of Spamhaus, a group that many network operators rely upon to stem the tide of junk email. Shortly after Spamhaus started blocking Micfo’s IP address ranges, Micfo shifted gears and began reselling IP addresses mainly to companies marketing “virtual private networking” or VPN services that help customers hide their real IP addresses online.
Golestan did not respond to a request for comment. But in a 2020 interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Golestan claimed that Micfo was at one point responsible for brokering roughly 40 percent of the IP addresses used by the world’s largest VPN providers. Throughout that conversation, Golestan maintained his innocence, even as he explained that the creation of the phony companies was necessary to prevent entities like Spamhaus from interfering with his business going forward.
There are fewer than four billion so-called “Internet Protocol version 4” or IPv4 addresses available for use, but the vast majority of them have already been allocated. The global dearth of available IP addresses has turned them into a commodity wherein each IPv4 address can fetch between $15-$25 on the open market.
This has led to boom times for those engaged in the acquisition and sale of IP address blocks, but it has likewise emboldened those who specialize in absconding with and spamming from dormant IP address blocks without permission from the rightful owners.
The U.S Department of Justice says Golestan will serve 60 months in prison, followed by a 2-year term of court-ordered supervision. The Micfo CEO also was ordered to pay nearly $77,000 in restitution to ARIN for its work in assisting federal prosecutors.
The fake USPS phishing page.
Recent weeks have seen a sizable uptick in the number of phishing scams targeting U.S. Postal Service (USPS) customers. Here’s a look at an extensive SMS phishing operation that tries to steal personal and financial data by spoofing the USPS, as well as postal services in at least a dozen other countries.
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who received an SMS purporting to have been sent by the USPS, saying there was a problem with a package destined for the reader’s address. Clicking the link in the text message brings one to the domain usps.informedtrck[.]com.
The landing page generated by the phishing link includes the USPS logo, and says “Your package is on hold for an invalid recipient address. Fill in the correct address info by the link.” Below that message is a “Click update” button that takes the visitor to a page that asks for more information.
The remaining buttons on the phishing page all link to the real USPS.com website. After collecting your address information, the fake USPS site goes on to request additional personal and financial data.
This phishing domain was recently registered and its WHOIS ownership records are basically nonexistent. However, we can find some compelling clues about the extent of this operation by loading the phishing page in Developer Tools, a set of debugging features built into Firefox, Chrome and Safari that allow one to closely inspect a webpage’s code and operations.
Check out the bottom portion of the screenshot below, and you’ll notice that this phishing site fails to load some external resources, including an image from a link called fly.linkcdn[.]to.
Click the image to enlarge.
A search on this domain at the always-useful URLscan.io shows that fly.linkcdn[.]to is tied to a slew of USPS-themed phishing domains. Here are just a few of those domains (links defanged to prevent accidental clicking):
usps.receivepost[.]com
usps.informedtrck[.]com
usps.trckspost[.]com
postreceive[.]com
usps.trckpackages[.]com
usps.infortrck[.]com
usps.quicktpos[.]com
usps.postreceive].]com
usps.revepost[.]com
trackingusps.infortrck[.]com
usps.receivepost[.]com
usps.trckmybusi[.]com
postreceive[.]com
tackingpos[.]com
usps.trckstamp[.]com
usa-usps[.]shop
usps.infortrck[.]com
unlistedstampreceive[.]com
usps.stampreceive[.]com
usps.stamppos[.]com
usps.stampspos[.]com
usps.trckmypost[.]com
usps.trckintern[.]com
usps.tackingpos[.]com
usps.posinformed[.]com
As we can see in the screenshot below, the developer tools console for informedtrck[.]com complains that the site is unable to load a Google Analytics code — UA-80133954-3 — which apparently was rejected for pointing to an invalid domain.
Notice the highlighted Google Analytics code exposed by a faulty Javascript element on the phishing website. Click to enlarge. That code actually belongs to the USPS.
The valid domain for that Google Analytics code is the official usps.com website. According to dnslytics.com, that same analytics code has shown up on at least six other nearly identical USPS phishing pages dating back nearly as many years, including onlineuspsexpress[.]com, which DomainTools.com says was registered way back in September 2018 to an individual in Nigeria.
A different domain with that same Google Analytics code that was registered in 2021 is peraltansepeda[.]com, which archive.org shows was running a similar set of phishing pages targeting USPS users. DomainTools.com indicates this website name was registered by phishers based in Indonesia.
DomainTools says the above-mentioned USPS phishing domain stamppos[.]com was registered in 2022 via Singapore-based Alibaba.com, but the registrant city and state listed for that domain says “Georgia, AL,” which is not a real location.
Alas, running a search for domains registered through Alibaba to anyone claiming to reside in Georgia, AL reveals nearly 300 recent postal phishing domains ending in “.top.” These domains are either administrative domains obscured by a password-protected login page, or are .top domains phishing customers of the USPS as well as postal services serving other countries.
Those other nations include the Australia Post, An Post (Ireland), Correos.es (Spain), the Costa Rican post, the Chilean Post, the Mexican Postal Service, Poste Italiane (Italy), PostNL (Netherlands), PostNord (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), and Posti (Finland). A complete list of these domains is available here (PDF).
A phishing page targeting An Post, the state-owned provider of postal services in Ireland.
The Georgia, AL domains at Alibaba also encompass several that spoof sites claiming to collect outstanding road toll fees and fines on behalf of the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
An anonymous reader wrote in to say they submitted fake information to the above-mentioned phishing site usps.receivepost[.]com via the malware sandbox any.run. A video recording of that analysis shows that the site sends any submitted data via an automated bot on the Telegram instant messaging service.
The traffic analysis just below the any.run video shows that any data collected by the phishing site is being sent to the Telegram user @chenlun, who offers to sell customized source code for phishing pages. From a review of @chenlun’s other Telegram channels, it appears this account is being massively spammed at the moment — possibly thanks to public attention brought by this story.
Meanwhile, researchers at DomainTools recently published a report on an apparently unrelated but equally sprawling SMS-based phishing campaign targeting USPS customers that appears to be the work of cybercriminals based in Iran.
Phishers tend to cast a wide net and often spoof entities that are broadly used by the local population, and few brands are going to have more household reach than domestic mail services. In June, the United Parcel Service (UPS) disclosed that fraudsters were abusing an online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing messages that spoofed the UPS and other brands.
With the holiday shopping season nearly upon us, now is a great time to remind family and friends about the best advice to sidestep phishing scams: Avoid clicking on links or attachments that arrive unbidden in emails, text messages and other mediums. Most phishing scams invoke a temporal element that warns of negative consequences should you fail to respond or act quickly.
If you’re unsure whether the message is legitimate, take a deep breath and visit the site or service in question manually — ideally, using a browser bookmark so as to avoid potential typosquatting sites.
Update: Added information about the Telegram bot and any.run analysis.
In large metropolitan areas, tourists are often easy to spot because they’re far more inclined than locals to gaze upward at the surrounding skyscrapers. Security experts say this same tourist dynamic is a dead giveaway in virtually all computer intrusions that lead to devastating attacks like data theft and ransomware, and that more organizations should set simple virtual tripwires that sound the alarm when authorized users and devices are spotted exhibiting this behavior.
In a blog post published last month, Cisco Talos said it was seeing a worrisome “increase in the rate of high-sophistication attacks on network infrastructure.” Cisco’s warning comes amid a flurry of successful data ransom and state-sponsored cyber espionage attacks targeting some of the most well-defended networks on the planet.
But despite their increasing complexity, a great many initial intrusions that lead to data theft could be nipped in the bud if more organizations started looking for the telltale signs of newly-arrived cybercriminals behaving like network tourists, Cisco says.
“One of the most important things to talk about here is that in each of the cases we’ve seen, the threat actors are taking the type of ‘first steps’ that someone who wants to understand (and control) your environment would take,” Cisco’s Hazel Burton wrote. “Examples we have observed include threat actors performing a ‘show config,’ ‘show interface,’ ‘show route,’ ‘show arp table’ and a ‘show CDP neighbor.’ All these actions give the attackers a picture of a router’s perspective of the network, and an understanding of what foothold they have.”
Cisco’s alert concerned espionage attacks from China and Russia that abused vulnerabilities in aging, end-of-life network routers. But at a very important level, it doesn’t matter how or why the attackers got that initial foothold on your network.
It might be zero-day vulnerabilities in your network firewall or file-transfer appliance. Your more immediate and primary concern has to be: How quickly can you detect and detach that initial foothold?
The same tourist behavior that Cisco described attackers exhibiting vis-a-vis older routers is also incredibly common early on in ransomware and data ransom attacks — which often unfurl in secret over days or weeks as attackers methodically identify and compromise a victim’s key network assets.
These virtual hostage situations usually begin with the intruders purchasing access to the target’s network from dark web brokers who resell access to stolen credentials and compromised computers. As a result, when those stolen resources first get used by would-be data thieves, almost invariably the attackers will run a series of basic commands asking the local system to confirm exactly who and where they are on the victim’s network.
This fundamental reality about modern cyberattacks — that cybercriminals almost always orient themselves by “looking up” who and where they are upon entering a foreign network for the first time — forms the business model of an innovative security company called Thinkst, which gives away easy-to-use tripwires or “canaries” that can fire off an alert whenever all sorts of suspicious activity is witnessed.
“Many people have pointed out that there are a handful of commands that are overwhelmingly run by attackers on compromised hosts (and seldom ever by regular users/usage),” the Thinkst website explains. “Reliably alerting when a user on your code-sign server runs whoami.exe can mean the difference between catching a compromise in week-1 (before the attackers dig in) and learning about the attack on CNN.”
These canaries — or “canary tokens” — are meant to be embedded inside regular files, acting much like a web beacon or web bug that tracks when someone opens an email.
The Canary Tokens website from Thinkst Canary lists nearly two-dozen free customizable canaries.
“Imagine doing that, but for file reads, database queries, process executions or patterns in log files,” the Canary Tokens documentation explains. “Canarytokens does all this and more, letting you implant traps in your production systems rather than setting up separate honeypots.”
Thinkst operates alongside a burgeoning industry offering so-called “deception” or “honeypot” services — those designed to confuse, disrupt and entangle network intruders. But in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Thinkst founder and CEO Haroon Meer said most deception techniques involve some degree of hubris.
“Meaning, you’ll have deception teams in your network playing spy versus spy with people trying to break in, and it becomes this whole counterintelligence thing,” Meer said. “Nobody really has time for that. Instead, we are saying literally the opposite: That you’ve probably got all these [security improvement] projects that are going to take forever. But while you’re doing all that, just drop these 10 canaries, because everything else is going to take a long time to do.”
The idea here is to lay traps in sensitive areas of your network or web applications where few authorized users should ever trod. Importantly, the canary tokens themselves are useless to an attacker. For example, that AWS canary token sure looks like the digital keys to your cloud, but the token itself offers no access. It’s just a lure for the bad guys, and you get an alert when and if it is ever touched.
One nice thing about canary tokens is that Thinkst gives them away for free. Head over to canarytokens.org, and choose from a drop-down menu of available tokens, including:
-a web bug / URL token, designed to alert when a particular URL is visited;
-a DNS token, which alerts when a hostname is requested;
-an AWS token, which alerts when a specific Amazon Web Services key is used;
-a “custom exe” token, to alert when a specific Windows executable file or DLL is run;
-a “sensitive command” token, to alert when a suspicious Windows command is run.
-a Microsoft Excel/Word token, which alerts when a specific Excel or Word file is accessed.
Much like a “wet paint” sign often encourages people to touch a freshly painted surface anyway, attackers often can’t help themselves when they enter a foreign network and stumble upon what appear to be key digital assets, Meer says.
“If an attacker lands on your server and finds a key to your cloud environment, it’s really hard for them not to try it once,” Meer said. “Also, when these sorts of actors do land in a network, they have to orient themselves, and while doing that they are going to trip canaries.”
Meer says canary tokens are as likely to trip up attackers as they are “red teams,” security experts hired or employed by companies seeking to continuously probe their own computer systems and networks for security weaknesses.
“The concept and use of canary tokens has made me very hesitant to use credentials gained during an engagement, versus finding alternative means to an end goal,” wrote Shubham Shah, a penetration tester and co-founder of the security firm Assetnote. “If the aim is to increase the time taken for attackers, canary tokens work well.”
Thinkst makes money by selling Canary Tools, which are honeypots that emulate full blown systems like Windows servers or IBM mainframes. They deploy in minutes and include a personalized, private Canarytoken server.
“If you’ve got a sophisticated defense team, you can start putting these things in really interesting places,” Meer said. “Everyone says their stuff is simple, but we obsess over it. It’s really got to be so simple that people can’t mess it up. And if it works, it’s the best bang for your security buck you’re going to get.”
Further reading:
Dark Reading: Credential Canaries Create Minefield for Attackers
NCC Group: Extending a Thinkst Canary to Become an Interactive Honeypot
Cruise Automation’s experience deploying canary tokens
[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.
Jordan Evan Bloom, posing in front of his Lamborghini.
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.
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.”
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.
An administrator account Xerx3s on Abusewithus.
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.
Pictrace, one of Jordan Bloom’s early IT successes.
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.”
A scene from the MMORPG RuneScape.
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.”
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
The United Parcel Service (UPS) says fraudsters have been harvesting phone numbers and other information from its online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) messages that spoofed UPS and other top brands. The missives addressed recipients by name, included details about recent orders, and warned that those orders wouldn’t be shipped unless the customer paid an added delivery fee.
In a snail mail letter sent this month to Canadian customers, UPS Canada Ltd. said it is aware that some package recipients have received fraudulent text messages demanding payment before a package can be delivered, and that it has been working with partners in its delivery chain to try to understand how the fraud was occurring.
The recent letter from UPS about SMS phishers harvesting shipment details and phone numbers from its website.
“During that review, UPS discovered a method by which a person who searched for a particular package or misused a package look-up tool could obtain more information about the delivery, potentially including a recipient’s phone number,” the letter reads. “Because this information could be misused by third parties, including potentially in a smishing scheme, UPS has taken steps to limit access to that information.”
The written notice goes on to say UPS believes the data exposure “affected packages for a small group of shippers and some of their customers from February 1, 2022 to April 24, 2023.”
As early as April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity began receiving tips from Canadian readers who were puzzling over why they’d just received one of these SMS phishing messages that referenced information from a recent order they’d legitimately placed at an online retailer.
In March, 2023, a reader named Dylan from British Columbia wrote in to say he’d received one of these shipping fee scam messages not long after placing an order to buy gobs of building blocks directly from Lego.com. The message included his full name, phone number, and postal code, and urged him to click a link to mydeliveryfee-ups[.]info and pay a $1.55 delivery fee that was supposedly required to deliver his Legos.
“From searching the text of this phishing message, I can see that a lot of people have experienced this scam, which is more convincing because of the information the phishing text contains,” Dylan wrote. “It seems likely to me that UPS is leaking information somehow about upcoming deliveries.”
Josh is a reader who works for a company that ships products to Canada, and in early January 2023 he inquired whether there was any information about a breach at UPS Canada.
“We’ve seen many of our customers targeted with a fraudulent UPS text message scheme after placing an order,” Josh said. “A link is provided (often only after the customer responds to the text) which takes you to a captcha page, followed by a fraudulent payment collection page.”
Pivoting on the domain in the smishing message sent to Dylan shows the phishing domain shared an Internet host in Russia [91.215.85-166] with nearly two dozen other smishing related domains, including upsdelivery[.]info, legodelivery[.]info, adidascanadaltd[.]com, crocscanadafee[.]info, refw0234apple[.]info, vista-printcanada[.]info and telus-ca[.]info.
The inclusion of big-name brands in the domains of these UPS smishing campaigns suggests the perpetrators had the ability to focus their lookups on UPS customers who had recently ordered items from specific companies.
Attempts to visit these domains with a web browser failed, but loading them in a mobile device (or in my case, emulating a mobile device using a virtual machine and Developer Tools in Firefox) revealed the first stage of this smishing attack. As Josh mentioned, what first popped up was a CAPTCHA; after the visitor solved the CAPTCHA, they were taken through several more pages that requested the user’s full name, date of birth, credit card number, address, email and phone number.
A smishing website targeting Canadians who recently purchased from Adidas online. The site would only load in a mobile browser.
In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Alex, the CEO of a technology company in Canada who asked to leave his last name out of this story. Alex reached out when he began receiving the smishing messages almost immediately after ordering two sets of Airpods directly from Apple’s website.
What puzzled Alex most was that he’d instructed Apple to send the Airpods as a gift to two different people, and less than 24 hours later the phone number he uses for his Apple account received two of the phishing messages, both of which contained salutations that included the names of the people for whom he’d bought Airpods.
“I’d put the recipient as different people on my team, but because it was my phone number on both orders I was the one getting the texts,” Alex explained. “That same day, I got text messages referring to me as two different people, neither of whom were me.”
Alex said he believes UPS Canada either doesn’t fully understand what happened yet, or it is being coy about what it knows. He said the wording of UPS’s response misleadingly suggests the smishing attacks were somehow the result of hackers randomly looking up package information via the company’s tracking website.
Alex said it’s likely that whoever is responsible figured out how to query the UPS Canada website for only pending orders from specific brands, perhaps by exploiting some type of application programming interface (API) that UPS Canada makes or made available to its biggest retail partners.
“It wasn’t like I put the order through [on Apple.ca] and some days or weeks later I got a targeted smishing attack,” he said. “It was more or less the same day. And it was as if [the phishers] were being notified the order existed.”
The letter to UPS Canada customers does not mention whether any other customers in North America were affected, and it remains unclear whether any UPS customers outside of Canada may have been targeted.
In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Sandy Springs, Ga. based UPS [NYSE:UPS] said the company has been working with partners in the delivery chain to understand how that fraud was being perpetrated, as well as with law enforcement and third-party experts to identify the cause of this scheme and to put a stop to it.
“Law enforcement has indicated that there has been an increase in smishing impacting a number of shippers and many different industries,” reads an email from Brian Hughes, director of financial and strategy communications at UPS.
“Out of an abundance of caution, UPS is sending privacy incident notification letters to individuals in Canada whose information may have been impacted,” Hughes said. “We encourage our customers and general consumers to learn about the ways they can stay protected against attempts like this by visiting the UPS Fight Fraud website.”
The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. The move comes after the Dutch registrar was sued by Meta, which alleges the company ignores abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.
Freenom’s website features a message saying it is not currently allowing new registrations.
Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called “country code top level domains” (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau.
Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, presumably as a way to encourage users to pay for related services, such as registering a .com or .net domain, for which Freenom does charge a fee.
On March 3, 2023, social media giant Meta sued Freenom in a Northern California court, alleging cybersquatting violations and trademark infringement. The lawsuit also seeks information about the identities of 20 different “John Does” — Freenom customers that Meta says have been particularly active in phishing attacks against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users.
The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.
“The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers’ identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes,” the complaint charges. “Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers.”
Meta further alleges that “Freenom has repeatedly failed to take appropriate steps to investigate and respond appropriately to reports of abuse,” and that it monetizes the traffic from infringing domains by reselling them and by adding “parking pages” that redirect visitors to other commercial websites, websites with pornographic content, and websites used for malicious activity like phishing.
Freenom has not yet responded to requests for comment. But attempts to register a domain through the company’s website as of publication time generated an error message that reads:
“Because of technical issues the Freenom application for new registrations is temporarily out-of-order. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. We are working on a solution and hope to resume operations shortly. Thank you for your understanding.”
Image: Interisle Consulting Group, Phishing Landscape 2021, Sept. 2021.
Although Freenom is based in The Netherlands, some of its other sister companies named as defendants in the lawsuit are incorporated in the United States.
Meta initially filed this lawsuit in December 2022, but it asked the court to seal the case, which would have restricted public access to court documents in the dispute. That request was denied, and Meta amended and re-filed the lawsuit last week.
According to Meta, this isn’t just a case of another domain name registrar ignoring abuse complaints because it’s bad for business. The lawsuit alleges that the owners of Freenom “are part of a web of companies created to facilitate cybersquatting, all for the benefit of Freenom.”
“On information and belief, one or more of the ccTLD Service Providers, ID Shield, Yoursafe, Freedom Registry, Fintag, Cervesia, VTL, Joost Zuurbier Management Services B.V., and Doe Defendants were created to hide assets, ensure unlawful activity including cybersquatting and phishing goes undetected, and to further the goals of Freenom,” Meta charged.
It remains unclear why Freenom has stopped allowing domain registration. In June 2015, ICANN suspended Freenom’s ability to create new domain names or initiate inbound transfers of domain names for 90 days. According to Meta, the suspension was premised on ICANN’s determination that Freenom “has engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking in or use of domain names identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark of a third party in which the Registered Name Holder has no rights or legitimate interest.”
A spokesperson for ICANN said the organization has no insight as to why Freenom might have stopped registering domain names. But it said Freenom (d/b/a OpenTLD B.V.) also received formal enforcement notices from ICANN in 2017 and 2020 for violating different obligations.
A copy of the amended complaint against Freenom, et. al, is available here (PDF).
March 8, 6:11 p.m. ET: Updated story with response from ICANN. Corrected attribution of the domain abuse report.
Every few months, an important ceremony takes place. It’s not splashed all over the news, and it’s not attended by global dignitaries. It goes unnoticed by many, but its effects are felt across the globe. This ceremony helps make the internet more secure for billions of people.
This unique ceremony began in 2010 when Verisign, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration collaborated – with input from the global internet community – to deploy a technology called Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to the Domain Name System (DNS) root zone in a special ceremony. This wasn’t a one-off occurrence in the history of the DNS, though. Instead, these organizations developed a set of processes, procedures, and schedules that would be repeated for years to come. Today, these recurring ceremonies help ensure that the root zone is properly signed, and as a result, the DNS remains secure, stable, and resilient.
In this blog, we take the opportunity to explain these ceremonies in greater detail and describe the critical role that Verisign is honored to perform.
DNSSEC is a series of technical specifications that allow operators to build greater security into the DNS. Because the DNS was not initially designed as a secure system, DNSSEC represented an essential leap forward in securing DNS communications. Deploying DNSSEC allows operators to better protect their users, and it helps to prevent common threats such as “man-in-the-middle” attacks. DNSSEC works by using public key cryptography, which allows zone operators to cryptographically sign their zones. This allows anyone communicating with and validating a signed zone to know that their exchanges are genuine.
The root zone, like most signed zones, uses separate keys for zone signing and for key signing. The Key Signing Key (KSK) is separate from the Zone Signing Key (ZSK). However, unlike most zones, the root zone’s KSK and ZSK are operated by different organizations; ICANN serves as the KSK operator and Verisign as the ZSK operator. These separate roles for DNSSEC align naturally with ICANN as the Root Zone Manager and Verisign as the Root Zone Maintainer.
In practice, the KSK/ZSK split means that the KSK only signs the DNSSEC keys, and the ZSK signs all the other records in the zone. Signing with the KSK happens infrequently – only when the keys change. However, signing with the ZSK happens much more frequently – whenever any of the zone’s other data changes.
Something to keep in mind before we go further: remember that DNSSEC utilizes public key cryptography, in which keys have both a private and public component. The private component is used to generate signatures and must be guarded closely. The public component is used to verify signatures and can be shared openly. Good cryptographic hygiene says that these keys should be changed (or “rolled”) periodically.
In DNSSEC, changing a KSK is generally difficult, whereas changing a ZSK is relatively easy. This is especially true for the root zone where a KSK rollover requires all validating recursive name servers to update their copy of the trust anchor. Whereas the first and only KSK rollover to date happened after a period of eight years, ZSK rollovers take place every three months. Not coincidentally, this is also how often root zone key signing ceremonies take place.
The notion of holding a “ceremony” for such an esoteric technical function may seem strange, but this ceremony is very different from what most people are used to. Our common understanding of the word “ceremony” brings to mind an event with speeches and formal attire. But in this case, the meaning refers simply to the formality and ritual aspects of the event.
There are two main reasons for holding key signing ceremonies. One is to bring participants together so that everyone may transparently witness the process. Ceremony participants include ICANN staff, Verisign staff, Trusted Community Representatives (TCRs), and external auditors, plus guests on occasion.
The other important reason, of course, is to generate DNSSEC signatures. Occasionally other activities take place as well, such as generating new keys, retiring equipment, and changing TCRs. In this post, we’ll focus only on the signature generation procedures.
A month or two before each ceremony, Verisign generates a file called the Key Signing Request (KSR). This is an XML document which includes the set of public key records (both KSK and ZSK) to be signed and then used during the next calendar quarter. The KSR is securely transmitted from Verisign to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which is a function of ICANN that performs root zone management. IANA securely stores the KSR until it is needed for the upcoming key signing ceremony.
Each quarter is divided into nine 10-day “slots” (for some quarters, the last slot is extended by a day or two) and the XML file contains nine key “bundles” to be signed. Each bundle, or slot, has a signature inception and expiration timestamp, such that they overlap by at least five days. The first and last slots in each quarter are used to perform ZSK rollovers. During these slots we publish two ZSKs and one KSK in the root zone.
The root zone KSK private component is held inside secure Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). These HSMs are stored inside locked safes, which in turn are kept inside locked rooms. At a key signing ceremony, the HSMs are taken out of their safes and activated for use. This all occurs according to a pre-defined script with many detailed steps, as shown in the figure below.
Also stored inside the safe is a laptop computer, its operating system on non-writable media (i.e., DVD), and a set of credentials for the TCRs, stored on smart cards and locked inside individual safe deposit boxes. Once all the necessary items are removed from the safes, the equipment can be turned on and activated.
The laptop computer is booted from its operating system DVD and the HSM is connected via Ethernet for data transfer and serial port for console logging. The TCR credentials are used to activate the HSM. Once activated, a USB thumb drive containing the KSR file is connected to the laptop and the signing program is started.
The signing program reads the KSR, validates it, and then displays information about the keys about to be signed. This includes the signature inception and expiration timestamps, and the ZSK key tag values.
FreshRSS Validate and Process KSR /media/KSR/KSK46/ksr-root-2022-q4-0.xml...
# Inception Expiration ZSK Tags KSK Tag(CKA_LABEL)
1 2022-10-01T00:00:00 2022-10-22T00:00:00 18733,20826
2 2022-10-11T00:00:00 2022-11-01T00:00:00 18733
3 2022-10-21T00:00:00 2022-11-11T00:00:00 18733
4 2022-10-31T00:00:00 2022-11-21T00:00:00 18733
5 2022-11-10T00:00:00 2022-12-01T00:00:00 18733
6 2022-11-20T00:00:00 2022-12-11T00:00:00 18733
7 2022-11-30T00:00:00 2022-12-21T00:00:00 18733
8 2022-12-10T00:00:00 2022-12-31T00:00:00 18733
9 2022-12-20T00:00:00 2023-01-10T00:00:00 00951,18733
...PASSED.
It also displays an SHA256 hash of the KSR file and a corresponding “PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) Word List.” The PGP Word List is a convenient and efficient way of verbally expressing hexadecimal values:
SHA256 hash of KSR:
ADCE9749F3DE4057AB680F2719B24A32B077DACA0F213AD2FB8223D5E8E7CDEC
>> ringbolt sardonic preshrunk dinosaur upset telephone crackdown Eskimo rhythm gravity artist celebrate bedlamp pioneer dogsled component ruffled inception surmount revenue artist Camelot cleanup sensation watchword Istanbul blowtorch specialist trauma truncated spindle unicorn <<
At this point, a Verisign representative comes forward to verify the KSR. The following actions then take place:
The signing program outputs a new XML document, called the Signed Key Response (SKR). This document contains signatures over the DNSKEY resource record sets in each of the nine slots. The SKR is saved to a USB thumb drive and given to a member of the Root Zone KSK Operations Security team. Usually sometime the next day, IANA securely transmits the SKR back to Verisign. Following several automatic and manual verification steps, the signature data is imported into Verisign’s root zone management system for use at the appropriate times in the next calendar quarter.
Keeping the internet’s DNS secure, stable, and resilient is a crucial aspect of Verisign’s role as the Root Zone Maintainer. We are honored to participate in the key signing ceremonies with ICANN and the TCRs and do our part to help the DNS operate as it should.
For more information on root key signing ceremonies, visit the IANA website. Visitors can watch video recordings of previous ceremonies and even sign up to witness the next ceremony live. It’s a great resource, and a unique opportunity to take part in a process that helps keep the internet safe for all.
The post Verisign’s Role in Securing the DNS Through Key Signing Ceremonies appeared first on Verisign Blog.
As we passed five years since the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition took place, my co-authors and I paused to look back on this pivotal moment; to take stock of what we’ve learned and to re-examine some of the key events leading up to the transition and how careful planning ensured a successful transfer of IANA responsibilities from the United States Government to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I’ve excerpted the main themes from our work, which can be found in full on the Internet Governance Project blog.
In March 2014, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce, announced its intent to “transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multi-stakeholder community” and asked ICANN to “convene global stakeholders to develop a proposal to transition the current role played by NTIA in the coordination of the Internet’s domain name system.” This transition, as announced by NTIA, was a natural progression of ICANN’s multi-stakeholder evolution, and an outcome that was envisioned by its founders.
While there was general support for a transition to the global multi-stakeholder community, many in the ICANN community raised concerns about ICANN’s accountability, transparency and organizational readiness to “stand alone” without NTIA’s legacy supervision. In response, the ICANN community began a phase of intense engagement to ensure a successful transition with all necessary accountability and transparency structures and mechanisms in place.
As a result of this meticulous planning, we believe the IANA functions have been well-served by the transition and the new accountability structures designed and developed by the ICANN community to ensure the security, stability and resiliency of the internet’s unique identifiers.
But what does the future hold? While ICANN’s multi-stakeholder processes and accountability structures are functioning, even in the face of a global pandemic that interrupted our ability to gather and engage in person, they will require ongoing care to ensure they deliver on the original vision of private-sector-led management of the DNS.
The post ICANN’s Accountability and Transparency – a Retrospective on the IANA Transition appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Safety has a feeling all its own, and that’s what’s at the heart of McAfee+.
We created McAfee+ so people can not only be safe but feel safe online, particularly in a time when there’s so much concern about identity theft and invasion of our online privacy.
And those concerns have merit. Last year, reported cases of identity theft and fraud in the U.S. shot up to 5.7 million, to the tune of $5.8 billion in losses, a 70% increase over the year prior. Meanwhile, online data brokers continue to buy and sell highly detailed personal profiles with the data cobbled together from websites, apps, smartphones, connected appliances, and more, all as part of a global data-gathering economy estimated at well over $200 billion a year.
Yet despite growing awareness of the ways personal information is collected, bought, sold, and even stolen, it remains a somewhat invisible problem. You simply don’t see it as it happens, let alone know who’s collecting what information about you and toward what ends—whether legal, illegal, or somewhere in between. A recent study we conducted showed that 74% of consumers are concerned about keeping their personal information private online. Yet, most of us have found out the hard way (when we search for our name on the internet) that there is a lot of information about us that has been made public. It is our belief that every individual should have the right to be private, yet we know too many individuals don’t know where to begin. It is this very worry that made us focus our new product line on empowering our users to take charge of their privacy and identity online.
McAfee+ gives you that control.
Now available in the U.S., McAfee+ provides all-in-one online protection for your identity, privacy, and security. With McAfee+, you’ll feel safer online because you’ll have the tools, guidance and support to take the steps to be safer online. Here’s how:
You can see the entire range of features that cover your identity, privacy, and security with a visit to our McAfee+ page.
McAfee+ Ultimate offers our most thorough protection, with which you can lock your credit with a click or put a comprehensive security freeze in place, both to thwart potential identity theft. You can keep tabs on your credit with daily credit monitoring and get an alert when there’s credit activity to spot any irregularities quickly.
You’ll also feel like someone has your back. Even with the most thorough measures in place, identity theft and ransomware attacks can still strike, which can throw your personal and financial life into a tailspin. What do you do? Where do you start? Here, we have you covered. We offer two kinds of coverage that can help you recover your time, money, and good name:
Starting today, customers in the U.S. can purchase McAfee+ online at McAfee.com in Premium, Advanced, and Ultimate plans, in addition to individual and family subscriptions. McAfee+ will also be available online in the U.K., Canada, and Australia in the coming weeks with additional regions coming in the months ahead (features may vary by region).
We are very excited about bringing these new protections to you and we hope you will be too.
The post The Feeling of Safety with McAfee+ appeared first on McAfee Blog.
It’s Social Media Day! How are you celebrating? Reposting your very first profile picture from a decade ago? Sharing your most-loved status update or the photo you’re most proud of? This year, consider commemorating the day by learning more about how to keep your information safe. Enjoy your favorite platform, but be on the lookout for scams, such as social engineering.
Social engineering is a cybercrime common to social media sites. It is a tactic where a cybercriminal lurks on people’s social media pages, gleaning personal information that they then use to impersonate them elsewhere.
With more than half of the global population on social media, you may think that a cybercriminal will never single you out from such a huge pool; however, it is possible.1 Luckily, you only have to make a few, easy changes to your online habits to keep your valuable private information just that: private. Check out these tips to make smart decisions and be more confident about your and your family’s online security.
Think of the types of posts you share with your dozens – or even hundreds or thousands! – of followers: updates about your life, where you live, work, or favorite travel destinations, your hobbies, pets, family members, etc. All of these details, that only you and those closest to you should know, are a valuable commodity to cybercriminals. Plus, now that social media shopping is growing in popularity, the credit card information linked to accounts is sweetening the deal for cybercriminals.
Here are a few social engineering scams that are common to social media.
People commonly create passwords based on things, places, and people that are important. Have you ever published a 20 questions-style get-to-know-me post? Those contain a lot of valuable personally identifiable information (PII). With just a few of those details about your personal life, cybercriminals can make educated guesses at your passwords, a tactic called credential stuffing. If they’re able to crack the code to one of your accounts, they’ll then input that password and login variations in several other sites, especially online banking portals, to see if they can gain entry to those too.
You’ve won! Send us your banking information and address, and you’ll receive a package in the mail or a direct deposit to your bank account!
But did you enter a drawing for a prize? Very rarely does anyone win something just by being a follower of a certain page. If you receive a message similar to the above, it’s likely a phisher trying to draw more PII and sensitive banking information out of you. Or, the message may have links within it that redirect to an untrustworthy site. If you regularly enter social media contests, keep a list and only respond to legitimate ones. Also, never give your banking information out over social media, private messages, or email.
There are plenty of valid fundraisers and petitions circulating around social media; however, there are just as many social engineering scams that dupe social media users because they inspire a strong emotion in them. For example, there have been several scams around Ukrainian donation sites. Cybercriminals often use fear, anger, or sadness to inspire people to open their wallets and share confidential banking information.
Luckily, all it takes is a few smart habits to stop social engineers in their tracks. Consider the following tips and make these small changes to your social media usage:
At this point, you’ve probably had several of your social media accounts active for over a decade. That means it’s time to do some cleaning out of your friends and followers lists. It’s best to only accept requests from people you personally know and would actually like to keep in the loop about your life. A friend and follower request from strangers could be cyber criminals in disguise. Also, consider setting your account to private so that your posts are invisible to strangers.
Social engineering hacks often bank on people acting rashly and quickly because of strong emotion, either excitement, fear, sadness, or anger. If you see a post on your newsfeed or receive a direct message that gives you a tight window to respond and asks for PII, slow down and think before acting. Double-check the destination of every link in the message by hovering over it with your cursor and checking the link preview at the bottom of your browser screen. Be careful, because some link previews include slight misspellings of legitimate websites. As a great rule of thumb, be automatically skeptical of direct messages from people you do not personally know. And if a DM from a friend seems out of the ordinary, shoot them a text to confirm they actually sent it. It could be that their social media account was hacked and a criminal is spamming their followers.
A password manager will go a long way toward ensuring you have unique, strong passwords and passphrases for every account. Not reusing passwords makes credential stuffing impossible. McAfee True Key stores all your logins and passwords and guards them with one of the strongest encryption algorithms available. All you need to do is remember your master password. It’s a great practice to also enable multifactor authentication whenever a website offers it. This makes it incredibly difficult for a cybercriminal to break into your online accounts with their educated guesses at your password.
Now that you know what to look for and the best tricks to be safe, you can feel more confident that you’re doing everything you can to protect your online accounts and private information. McAfee Protection Score can also help you take control of your online safety. This service allows you to monitor your current online safety and encourages you to take specific steps to improve it. Now you can enjoy digitally keeping in touch with your friends with peace of mind!
1Smart Insights, “Global social media statistics research summary 2022”
The post It’s Social Media Day! Here’s How to Protect Yourself From Social Engineering Online appeared first on McAfee Blog.
At the outset of their federal criminal trial for hijacking vast swaths of Internet addresses for use in large-scale email spam campaigns, three current or former executives at online advertising firm Adconion Direct (now Amobee) have pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges of fraud and misrepresentation via email.
In October 2018, prosecutors in the Southern District of California named four Adconion employees — Jacob Bychak, Mark Manoogian, Petr Pacas, and Mohammed Abdul Qayyum — in a ten-count indictment (PDF) on felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and electronic mail fraud.
The government alleged that between December 2010 and September 2014, the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to identify or pay to identify blocks of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registered to others but which were otherwise inactive.
Prosecutors said the men also sent forged letters to an Internet hosting firm claiming they had been authorized by the registrants of the inactive IP addresses to use that space for their own purposes.
All four defendants pleaded not guilty when they were charged back in 2018, but this week Bychak, Manoogian and Qayyum each entered a plea deal.
“The defendants’ jobs with Adconion were to acquire fresh IP addresses and employ other measures to circumvent the spam filters,” reads a statement released today by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, which said the defendants would pay $100,000 in fines each and perform 100 hours of community service.
“To conceal Adconion’s ties to the stolen IP addresses and the spam sent from these IP addresses, the defendants used a host of DBAs, virtual addresses, and fake names provided by the company,” the statement continues. “While defendants touted ties to well-known name brands, the email marketing campaigns associated with the hijacked IP addresses included advertisements such as ‘BigBeautifulWomen,’ ‘iPhone4S Promos,’ and ‘LatinLove[Cost-per-Click].'”
None of the three plea agreements are currently available on PACER, the online federal court document clearinghouse. However, PACER does show that on June 7 — the same day the pleas were entered by the defendants — the government submitted to the court a superseding set of just two misdemeanor charges (PDF) of fraud in connection with email.
Another document filed in the case says the fourth defendant — Pacas — accepted a deferred prosecution deal, which includes a probationary period and a required $50,000 “donation” to a federal “crime victims fund.”
There are fewer than four billion so-called “Internet Protocol version 4” or IPv4 addresses available for use, but the vast majority of them have already been allocated. The global dearth of available IP addresses has turned them into a commodity wherein each IP can fetch between $15-$25 on the open market.
This has led to boom times for those engaged in the acquisition and sale of IP address blocks, but it has likewise emboldened those who specialize in absconding with and spamming from dormant IP address blocks without permission from the rightful owners.
In May, prosecutors published information about the source of some IP address ranges from which the Adconion employees allegedly spammed. For example, the government found the men leased some of their IP address ranges from a Dutch company that’s been tied to a scandal involving more than four million addresses siphoned from the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), the nonprofit responsible for overseeing IP address allocation for African organizations.
In 2019, AFRINIC fired a top employee after it emerged that in 2013 he quietly commandeered millions of IPs from defunct African entities or from those that were long ago acquired by other firms, and then conspired to sell an estimated $50 million worth of the IPs to marketers based outside Africa.
“Exhibit A” in a recent government court filing shows that in 2013 Adconion leased more than 65,000 IP addresses from Inspiring Networks, a Dutch network services company. In 2020, Inspiring Networks and its director Maikel Uerlings were named in a dogged, multi-part investigation by South African news outlet MyBroadband.co.za and researcher Ron Guilmette as one of two major beneficiaries of the four million IP addresses looted from AFRINIC by its former employee.
Exhibit A, from a May 2022 filing by U.S. federal prosecutors.
The address block in the above image — 196.246.0.0/16 — was reportedly later reclaimed by AFRINIC following an investigation. Inspiring Networks has not responded to requests for comment.
Prosecutors allege the Adconion employees also obtained hijacked IP address blocks from Daniel Dye, another man tied to this case who was charged separately. For many years, Dye was a system administrator for Optinrealbig, a Colorado company that relentlessly pimped all manner of junk email, from mortgage leads and adult-related services to counterfeit products and Viagra. In 2018, Dye pleaded guilty to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.
Optinrealbig’s CEO was the spam king Scott Richter, who changed the name of the company to Media Breakaway after being successfully sued for spamming by AOL, Microsoft, MySpace, and the New York Attorney General Office, among others. In 2008, this author penned a column for The Washington Post detailing how Media Breakaway had hijacked tens of thousands of IP addresses from a defunct San Francisco company for use in its spamming operations.
The last-minute plea deals by the Adconion employees were reminiscent of another recent federal criminal prosecution for IP address sleight-of-hand. In November 2021, the CEO of South Carolina technology firm Micfo pleaded guilty just two days into his trial, admitting 20 counts of wire fraud in connection with an elaborate network of phony companies set up to obtain more than 700,000 IPs from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) — AFRINIC’s counterpart in North America.
Adconion was acquired in June 2014 by Amobee, a Redwood City, Calif. online ad platform that has catered to some of the world’s biggest brands. Amobee’s parent firm — Singapore-based communications giant Singtel — bought Amobee for $321 million in March 2012.
But as Reuters reported in 2021, Amobee cost Singtel nearly twice as much in the last year alone — $589 million — in a “non-cash impairment charge” Singtel disclosed to investors. Marketing industry blog Digiday.com reported in February that Singtel was seeking to part ways with its ad tech subsidiary.
One final note about Amobee: In response to my 2019 story on the criminal charges against the Adconion executives, Amobee issued a statement saying “Amobee has fully cooperated with the government’s investigation of this 2017 matter which pertains to alleged activities that occurred years prior to Amobee’s acquisition of the company.”
Yet as the government’s indictment points out, the alleged hijacking activities took place up until September 2014, which was after Amobee’s acquisition of Adconion Direct in June 2014. Also, the IP address ranges that the Adconion executives were prosecuted for hijacking were all related to incidents in 2013 and 2014, which is hardly “years prior to Amobee’s acquisition of the company.”
Amobee has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Whether you think you might have a virus on your computer or devices, or just want to keep them running smoothly, it’s easy to do a virus scan. How to check for viruses depends on the software and device you have, so we’ll go through everything you need to know to run a scan effectively and keep your computers, phones and tablets in tip-top shape.
First, let’s cover a few of the telltale signs your device might have a virus. Is your computer or device acting sluggish or having a hard time booting up? Have you noticed missing files or a lack of storage space? Have you noticed emails or messages sent from your account that you did not write? Perhaps you’ve noticed changes to your browser homepage or settings? Or maybe, you’re seeing unexpected pop-up windows, or experiencing crashes and other program errors. These are all examples of signs that you may have a virus, but don’t get too worried yet, because many of these issues can be resolved with a virus scan.
Each antivirus program works a little differently, but in general the software will look for known malware that meets a specific set of characteristics. It may also look for variants of these known threats that have a similar code base. Some antivirus software even checks for suspicious behavior. If the software comes across a dangerous program or piece of code, it removes it. In some cases, a dangerous program can be replaced with a clean one from the manufacturer.
The process of checking for viruses depends on the device type and its operating system. Check out these tips to help you scan your computers, phones and tablets.
If you use Windows 10, go into “Settings” and look for the “Updates & Security” tab. From there you can locate a “Scan Now” button.
Of course, many people have invested in more robust antivirus software that has a high accuracy rate and causes less drain on their system resources, such as McAfee Total Protection. To learn how to run a virus scan using your particular antivirus software, search the software’s help menu or look online for instructions.
Mac computers don’t have a built-in antivirus program, so you will have to download security software to do a virus scan. There are some free antivirus applications available online, but we recommend investing in trusted software that can protect you from a variety of threats. Downloading free software and free online virus scans can be risky, since cybercriminals know that this is a good way to spread malware.
Whichever program you choose, follow their step-by-step instructions on how to perform a virus scan, either by searching under “help” or looking it up on their website.
Yes, you can get a virus on your phone or tablet, although they are less common than on computers. However, the wider category of mobile malware is on the rise and your device can get infected if you download a risky app, click on an attachment in a text message, visit a dangerous webpage, or connect to another device that has malware on it.
Fortunately, you can protect your devices with mobile security software. It doesn’t usually come installed, so you will have to download an application and follow the instructions.
Because the Android platform is an open operating system, there are a number of antivirus products for Android devices, that allows you to do a virus scan.
Apple devices are a little different because they have a closed operating system that doesn’t allow third parties to see their code. Although Apple has taken other security precautions to reduce malware risks, such as only allowing the installation of apps from Apple’s official app store, these measures aren’t the same as an antivirus program.
For more robust protection on your Apple devices, you can install mobile security software to protect the private data you have stored on your phone or tablet, such as contacts, photos and messages.
If safeguarding all your computers and devices individually sounds overwhelming, you can opt for a comprehensive security product that protects computers, smartphones and tablets from a central control center, making virus prevention a breeze.
New online threats emerge every day, putting our personal information, money and devices at risk. In the first quarter of 2019 alone McAfee detected 504 new threats per minute, as cybercriminals employed new tactics. That’s why it is essential to stay ahead of these threats by using security software that is constantly monitoring and checking for new known threats, while safeguarding all of your sensitive information. Virus scans are an essential part of this process when it comes to identifying and removing dangerous code.
Most antivirus products are regularly scanning your computer or device in the background, so you will only need to start a manual scan if you notice something suspicious, like crashes or excessive pop-ups. You can also program regular scans on your schedule.
Of course, the best protection is to avoid getting infected in the first place. Here are a few smart tips to sidestep viruses and other malware:
The post How To Do A Virus Scan appeared first on McAfee Blog.
What’s worse than a surprise call from a law enforcement official telling you to pay a fine or be forced to serve time? Providing your personal information and paying that fine only to find out that it was all a scam. You didn’t miss jury duty; you didn’t commit a crime — you were just tricked into thinking that you did.
Sound unbelievable? It’s more likely than you’d think.
According to ZDNet1, the FBI released a warning about scammers impersonating government officials or law enforcement agencies to steal personal information and money from unsuspecting people.
After acquiring phone numbers and names from real users, scammers use fake credentials from well-known law enforcement agencies to contact victims. Under the guise of these officials, scammers claim that the user’s identity was used in a crime and ask them to provide their social security number and date of birth for verification. The fraudsters will also call or text about apparently missed jury duty, missed court dates, warrants out for arrest, or other local fines that require payment to be solved.
These criminals demand payment in multiple forms, but the most common are prepaid cards, wire transfers, and cash sent through mail or through cryptocurrency ATMs. If victims do not pay these fines or provide their personal information, the scammers in disguise will threaten them with potential prosecution or arrest.
The FBI states that no law enforcement agency will ever contact you asking for money, but if you’re still unsure whether you’re being scammed, here are a few more phishing tips that can help:
Unsolicited phone calls or texts are best avoided altogether or confirmed with a second source. Verify the caller’s identity with the organization they claim they represent. Ask for a name and position and make it clear you will be following up to verify their identity.
Do not reveal any personal or financial information over the phone, through text, or through a link provided in a text message.
Generic greetings that do not address you by name, especially when asking you to verify your identity or pay a fine, are a definite indicator that you may be being scammed.
Any strange grammar or spelling mistakes in a text message can be signs that this is someone impersonating an official agency, company, or higher-up to scam you.
Although scammers try to trick users over the phone, phishing scams can also happen over email. In addition to the tactics mentioned above, here are some extra tips on how to detect and avoid phishing emails:
Cybercriminals will often impersonate well-known brands or individuals by using fraudulent email addresses with just a few alterations of letters or characters. An example is an email address that appears as “bank0famerica.con.”
If you receive a message or email with a link, hover over the link without clicking on it. This will allow you to see a link preview. If the URL looks suspicious or doesn’t match up with the content in the email, do not interact with it and delete the entire message.
Be cautious of any attachment in an email. Scammers often use attachments as a sneaky way to deliver viruses and malware onto unsuspecting people’s devices.
Phishing scams can be deceitful, especially with the added pressure of a seemingly real (but definitely fake) government official or law enforcement agency accusing you of breaking the law. However, by following the tips outlined above, you’ll be able to spot these scams from a mile away and stay safer online!
The post What the FBI Wants You to Know About the Latest Phishing Scheme appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Can thieves steal identities with only a name and address?
In short, the answer is “no.” Which is a good thing, as your name and address are in fact part of the public record. Anyone can get a hold of them. However, because they are public information, they are still tools that identity thieves can use.
If you think of your identity as a jigsaw puzzle, your name and address are the first two pieces that they can use to build a bigger picture and ultimately put your identity at risk.
With that, let’s look at some other key pieces of your identity that are associated with your name and address—and what you can do to protect them.
For starters, this information is so general that it is of little value in of itself to an identity thief. Yet a determined identity thief can do a bit of legwork and take a few extra steps to use them as a springboard for other scams.
For example, with your name and address a thief could:
There are volumes of public information that are readily available should someone want to add some more pieces to your identity jigsaw puzzle, such as:
In the U.S., the availability of such information will vary from state-to-state and different levels of government may have different regulations about what information gets filed—in addition to whether and how those reports are made public. Globally, different nations and regions will collect varying amounts of public information and have their own regulations in place as well. More broadly, though, many of these public databases are now online. Consequently, accessing them is easier than the days when getting a hold of that information required an in-person visit a library or public office.
Thieves can gain additional information about you from other online sources, such as data brokers. And data brokerage is a big business, a global economy estimated at $200 billion U.S. dollars a year. What fuels it? Personal information, representing thousands of data points on billions of people scraped from public records, social media, smartphone apps, shopper loyalty cards, third-party sources, and sometimes other data broker sites as well.
The above-the-board legal intent of data broker sites is to sell that information to advertisers so that they can create highly targeted campaigns based on people’s behaviors, travels, interests, and even political leanings. Others such as law enforcement officials, journalists, and others who are conducting background checks will use them too.
On the dark side, hackers, scammers, and thieves will buy this information as well, which they can use to commit identity theft and fraud. The thing is, data brokers will sell to anyone. They don’t discriminate.
Phishing attacks aren’t just for email, texts, and direct messages. In fact, thieves are turning to old tricks via old-fashioned physical mail. That includes sending phony offers or by impersonating officials of government institutions, all designed to trick you into giving up your personally identifiable information (PII).
What might that look like in your mailbox? They can take the form of bogus lottery prizes that request bank information for routing (non-existent) winnings. Another favorite of scammers are bogus tax notifications that demand immediate payment. In all, many can look quite convincing at first blush, yet there are ready ways you can spot them. In fact, many of the tips for avoiding these physical mail phishing attacks are the same for avoiding phishing attacks online, which we outline in detail here.
Recently, I’ve seen a few news stories like this where thieves reportedly abuse the change-of-address system with the U.S. Postal Service. Thieves will simply forward your mail to an address of their choosing, which can drop sensitive information like bank and credit card statements in their mailbox. From there, they could potentially have new checks sent to them or perhaps an additional credit card—both of which they can use to drain your accounts and run up your bills.
The Postal Service has mechanisms in place to prevent this, however. Among which, the Postal Service will send you a physical piece of mail to confirm the forwarding. So, if you ever receive mail from the Postal Service, open it and give it a close look. If you get such a notice and didn’t order the forwarding, visit your local post office to get things straightened out. Likewise, if it seems like you’re missing bills in the mail, that’s another good reason to follow up with your post office and the business in question to see if there have been any changes made in your mail forwarding.
So while your name and address are out there for practically all to see, they’re largely of little value to an identity thief on their own. But as mentioned above, they are key puzzle pieces to your overall identity. With enough of those other pieces in hand, that’s where an identity thief can cause trouble.
Other crucial pieces of your identity include:
Let’s start with the biggest one. This is the master key to your identity, as it is one of the most unique identifiers you have. As I covered in my earlier blog on Social Security fraud, a thief can unlock everything from credit history and credit line to tax refunds and medical care with your Social Security or tax ID number. In extreme cases, they can use it to impersonate you for employment, healthcare, and even in the event of an arrest.
You can protect your Social Security Number by keeping it locked in a safe place (rather than in your wallet) and by providing your number only when absolutely necessary. For more tips on keeping your number safe, drop by that blog on Social Security fraud I mentioned.
Thieves have figured out ways of getting around the fact that IDs like these include a photo. They may be able to modify or emulate these documents “well enough” to pull off certain types of fraud, particularly if the people requesting their bogus documents don’t review them with a critical eye.
Protecting yourself in this case means knowing where these documents are at any time. (With passports, you may want to store those securely like your Social Security or tax ID number.) Also be careful when you share this information, as the identifiers on these documents are highly unique. If you’re uncomfortable with sharing this information, you can ask if other forms of ID might work—or if this information is really needed at all. Also, take a moment to make copies of these documents and store them in a secure place. This can help you provide important info to the proper authorities if they’re lost or stolen.
With data breaches large and small making the news (and many more that do not), keeping a sharp eye on your accounts is a major part of identity theft prevention. We talk about this topic quite often, and it’s worth another mention because protecting these means protecting yourself from thieves who’re after direct access to your finances and more.
Secure your digital accounts for banking, credit cards, financials, and shopping by using strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts that you change every 60 days. Sound like a lot of work? Let a password manager do it for you, which you can find in comprehensive online protection software. By changing your strong passwords and keeping them unique can help prevent you from becoming a victim if your account information is part of a breach—by the time a crook attempts to use it, you may have changed it and made it out of date.
In addition to protecting the core forms of identity mentioned above, a few other good habits go a long way toward keeping your identity secure.
By protecting your devices, you protect what’s on them, like your personal information. Comprehensive online protection software can protect your identity in several ways, like creating and managing the strong, unique passwords we talked about and providing further services that monitor and protect your identity—in addition to digital shredders that can permanently remove sensitive documents (simply deleting them won’t do that alone.) Further, it can monitor your identity and monitor your credit, further protecting you from theft and fraud.
Identity theft where thieves dig through trash or go “dumpster diving” for literal scraps of personal info in bills and statements, has been an issue for some time. You can prevent it by shredding up any paper medical bills, tax documents, and checks once you’re through with them. Paper shredders are inexpensive, and let’s face it, kind of fun too. Also, if you’re traveling, have a trusted someone collects your mail or have the post office put a temporary hold on your mail. Thieves still poach mail from mailboxes too.
Getting statements online cuts the paper out of the equation and thus removes another thing that a thief can physically steal and possibly use against you. Whether you use electronic statements through your bank, credit card company, medical provider, or insurance company, use a secure password and a secure connection provided by a VPN. Both will make theft of your personal info far tougher on identity thieves.
A VPN is a Virtual Private Network, a service that protects your data and privacy online. It creates an encrypted tunnel to keep you more anonymous online by masking your IP address, device information, and the data you’re passing along that connection. In this way, it makes if far more difficult for advertisers, data brokers, and bad actors to skim your private information—in addition to shielding your information from crooks and snoops while you’re banking, shopping, or handling any kind of sensitive information online.
Give your statements a close look each time they come around. While many companies and institutions have fraud detection mechanisms in place, they don’t always catch every instance of fraud. Look out for strange purchases or charges and follow up with your bank or credit card company if you suspect fraud. Even the smallest charge could be a sign that something shady is afoot.
This is a powerful tool for spotting identity theft. And in many cases, it’s free to do so. In the U.S., the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires the major credit agencies to provide you with a free credit check at least once every 12 months. Canada provides this service, and the UK has options to receive free reports as well, along with several other nations. It’s a great idea to check your credit report, even if you don’t suspect a problem.
If the thought of your personal info being bought and sold puts you off, there’s something you can do about it. Our Personal Data Cleanup service can scan some of the riskiest data broker sites and show you which ones are selling your personal info. It also provides guidance on how you can remove your data from those sites, and with select products, it can even manage the removal for you.
While thieves need more than just your name and address to commit the overwhelming majority of fraud, your name and address are centerpieces of the larger jigsaw puzzle that is your overall identity.
And the interesting thing is your puzzle gets larger and larger as time goes on. With each new account you create and service that you sign into, that’s one more piece added to the puzzle. Thieves love getting their hands on any pieces they can because with enough of them in place they can try and pull a fast one in your name. By looking after each piece and knowing what your larger jigsaw puzzle looks like, you can help keep identity thieves out of your business and your life.
The post Can Thieves Steal Identities With Only a Name and Address? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
A good time to check if someone is using your identity is before it even happens.
One of identity theft’s several downsides is how people discover they’ve become a victim in the first place—by surprise. They go to rent an apartment, open a line of credit, or apply for financing, only to discover that their finances or reputation has taken a hit because of identity thief.
And those hits add up, particularly when you look at the dollars involved. In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported $3.3 billion in financial losses from 4.7 million reported cases of fraud, a 45% increase over the year prior. Of those reports, identity theft was the leading fraud category, accounting for 29% of fraud incidents.
Plenty. Depending on the type and amount of information an identity thief gets their hands on, they can harm your finances and reputation in several ways, including:
Rather than ending up with a rude and potentially costly surprise of your own, you can get ahead of thieves by checking to see if someone is using your identity before it’s a problem or before it really takes root.
Major data breaches that expose personal information seem to hit the headlines with some regularity, not to mention the many, many more that don’t get national or international press coverage. Most recently we have the Neiman Marcus breach, where this major retailer alerted 4.6 million customers that “an unauthorized party obtained personal information associated with certain Neiman Marcus customers’ online accounts.”
And as it is with many such breaches, it took quite some time before the theft of information was discovered. Per Neiman Marcus, it’s believed that the breach occurred in May 2020 and only discovered in September of 2021. Potentially compromised information included:
Whether or not you have reason to suspect that your information got caught up in this recent large-scale breach, it serves as a good reminder that any time is the right time to check up on your identity. Acting now can save headaches, potentially big headaches, later.
Quite a bit of identity theft prevention begins with taking stock of the accounts and services you have in your name. This ranges anywhere from bank accounts to public utilities and from credit cards to loans, all of which contain varying degrees of personal information about you. With a sense of where your personal identity is being used, you can better look for instances where it’s being misused.
Ways you can spot for possible identity theft include:
If you stop receiving a bill that normally comes to you, such as a utility bill or for a department store credit card, that could be a sign that a thief has changed the mailing address and has potentially hijacked your identity.
This is rather straightforward, yet it reminds us how important it is to look at our statements closely. Charges that you didn’t ring up or that seem slightly higher than normal are a surefire sign that you should follow up with the bank or company involved and let them know of possible fraud.
In the U.S., you have annual access to free credit reports from the major credit reporting agencies. Not only will this give you a sense of your credit score, but it will also show the credit that’s open in your name, along with addresses associated with your identity. Spotting an account that you haven’t signed up for or seeing an address of a residence that you’re not renting are other common signs that your identity may have been compromised.
With the number of accounts many of us have these days, a credit monitoring service can help you stay on top of what’s happening in your name. Often offered through banks, credit unions, and even insurance providers, credit monitoring can alert you in several instances, including:
Overall, credit monitoring can act as another set of eyes for you and spot potential identity issues. Different services provide different levels of monitoring, so consider reviewing a few options to find the one that works best for you.
One like our own Identity Protection Service will monitor several types of personally identifiable information, alert you of potentially stolen personal info, and offer guided help to neutralize the threat—in addition to offering several preventative steps to help keep theft from happening in the first place. With this set up on your computers and smartphone you can stay in the know and address issues immediately.
Along with keeping an eye on what’s happening with your identity online and elsewhere, there are a few more things you can do to make it tougher for thieves to steal your identity.
Given all the banking and shopping we do on our computers and phones, installing and using comprehensive online protection software is a must these days. It puts several layers of security in place, such as creating complex passwords automatically, shielding credit card info from prying eyes, and protecting your privacy and data online by connecting with a VPN. In short, online protection software acts as a solid first line of defense.
As mentioned above, comprehensive online protection software often includes a password manager that can generate strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts and remember them for you. It’s extra protection that makes life a lot easier for you by managing all the accounts you’re juggling. Also, use MFA (multi-factor authentication) on the accounts that give you the option, which makes it harder for a thief to crack your accounts with a password alone.
Sensitive documents come in all forms. Top-of-the-line examples include things like tax returns, bank statements, and financial records. Yet there are also things like your phone and utility bills, statements from your doctor’s office, and offers that come to you via mail. Together, these things can contain personal information such as account numbers, your full Social Security Number, the last four digits of your Social Security Number (which can still be useful to thieves), and other information that may uniquely identify you. You’ll want to dispose of sensitive documents like these so that they can’t be harvested by hackers.
For physical documents, consider the low-cost investment of a paper shredder to help ensure they don’t fall into the wrong hands when you are done with them. (And let’s face it, they’re fun to use!) For digital documents, simply deleting a file is not enough – online protection software is a great resource that often includes a digital document shredder, designed to render the data practically unusable when you’re ready to trash the file.
Your Social Security Number is one of the most prized possessions a thief can run away with because it is so closely associated with you and things like your tax returns, employment, and so on. Keep it stored in a safe location rather than on your person or in your wallet. Likewise, be careful about giving out your SSN. While organizations like the IRS, your bank, and employer require it, there are other organizations who do not—but may ask for it anyway. (Doctor’s offices are a prime example.) If you get such a request, ask them what they intend to use it for and then ask if another form of identification will work instead.
Phishing attacks are one of the primary ways identity thieves steal personal information. Whether they come via a direct message, on social media, or through email, text, or phone calls, thieves use them to harvest your personal info by posing as a legitimate organization—such as in this recent IRS phishing scam. Phishing is a topic all unto itself, and you can check out this quick read to see how you can spot phishing scams and protect yourself from them.
Like any criminal, identity thieves do their dirtiest work in the shadows—quietly stealing money under your nose, or worse, as we outlined above. By shining a light on your identity and keeping regular track of what’s happening with it, you can spot unusual activity right away. Even the small stuff is important. A co-worker of mine once saw an incorrect address listed on his credit report. Turned out, that address was used to rack up several large charges at a retailer, which he was able to fix with the aid of the credit reporting agency and the retailer in question.
No doubt about it. Identity theft is indeed on the rise, and your best bet to avoid such a nasty surprise is to keep an eye on your digital identity the same way you keep an eye on your actual wallet.
The post How to Check if Someone is Using Your Identity appeared first on McAfee Blog.
We’ve all come to a realization that we don’t go anywhere without our phone. It’s a utility that helps us navigate our daily lives: directions, schedules, shopping, discounts, banking, and so on. And as our reliance on our smartphone continues to grow, it’s no wonder that hackers have taken notice. This time, it’s another case of an app gone rogue.
With over 10 million downloads, the Barcode Scanner app provided users with a basic QR code reader and barcode generator, useful for things like making purchases and redeeming discounts. Then, most likely in a recent update, the app began to deliver ad-producing malware onto users’ phones – with the malware being traced back to the Android Barcode Scanner app. While Barcode Scanner was previously benign, it is believed that a hacker injected malicious code into the app before the latest update, pushing malware onto Android devices. Once installed, the malware hijacks your default web browsers and redirects you to random advertisements.
In a typical case of malvertising, or malicious advertising, fraudsters submit infected graphic or text ads to legitimate advertisement networks, which often can’t distinguish harmful ads from trustworthy ones. Under the guise of everyday pop-ups, these malicious ads push fake browser updates, free utilities, or antivirus programs in the hope that unsuspecting users will click. Depending on what kind of programs the malicious ads succeed in downloading, hackers might steal your data, encrypt or delete your information, or hijack your computer functions – as is the case with the Barcode Scanner’s malware.
While Google has taken down the Barcode Scanner from its store, it has not been deleted from infected devices. So, if you have the app on your phone, it’s time to uninstall it from your device manually…ASAP.
We all need to reflect on the state of our digital health, especially as hackers continue to target us through the device we use most – our phones. To help protect your data, family, and friends, check out these security tactics to keep sneaky mobile threats out:
While some malicious apps do make it through the app store screening process, most attack downloads appear to stem from social media, fake ads, and other unofficial app sources. Before downloading an app to your device, do some quick research about the origin and developer.
Reviews and rankings are still a suitable method of determining whether an app is legitimate. However, watch out for assessments that reuse repetitive or straightforward phrases, as this could be a sign of a fraudulent review.
Developers are actively working to identify and address security issues. Frequently update your operating systems and apps so that they have the latest fixes and security protections.
Holistic security solutions across all devices continues to be a strong defensive measure to protect your data and privacy from online threats like malware.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our email, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post Millions Affected by Malware Attributed to Android Barcode-Scanning App appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
