Login
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
Microsoft today issued security updates for more than 100 newly-discovered vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and related software, including four flaws that are already being exploited. In addition, Apple recently released emergency updates to quash a pair of zero-day bugs in iOS.
Apple last week shipped emergency updates in iOS 17.0.3 and iPadOS 17.0.3 in response to active attacks. The patch fixes CVE-2023-42724, which attackers have been using in targeted attacks to elevate their access on a local device.
Apple said it also patched CVE-2023-5217, which is not listed as a zero-day bug. However, as Bleeping Computer pointed out, this flaw is caused by a weakness in the open-source “libvpx” video codec library, which was previously patched as a zero-day flaw by Google in the Chrome browser and by Microsoft in Edge, Teams, and Skype products. For anyone keeping count, this is the 17th zero-day flaw that Apple has patched so far this year.
Fortunately, the zero-days affecting Microsoft customers this month are somewhat less severe than usual, with the exception of CVE-2023-44487. This weakness is not specific to Windows but instead exists within the HTTP/2 protocol used by the World Wide Web: Attackers have figured out how to use a feature of HTTP/2 to massively increase the size of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and these monster attacks reportedly have been going on for several weeks now.
Amazon, Cloudflare and Google all released advisories today about how they’re addressing CVE-2023-44487 in their cloud environments. Google’s Damian Menscher wrote on Twitter/X that the exploit — dubbed a “rapid reset attack” — works by sending a request and then immediately cancelling it (a feature of HTTP/2). “This lets attackers skip waiting for responses, resulting in a more efficient attack,” Menscher explained.
Natalie Silva, lead security engineer at Immersive Labs, said this flaw’s impact to enterprise customers could be significant, and lead to prolonged downtime.
“It is crucial for organizations to apply the latest patches and updates from their web server vendors to mitigate this vulnerability and protect against such attacks,” Silva said. In this month’s Patch Tuesday release by Microsoft, they have released both an update to this vulnerability, as well as a temporary workaround should you not be able to patch immediately.”
Microsoft also patched zero-day bugs in Skype for Business (CVE-2023-41763) and Wordpad (CVE-2023-36563). The latter vulnerability could expose NTLM hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.
“It may or may not be a coincidence that Microsoft announced last month that WordPad is no longer being updated, and will be removed in a future version of Windows, although no specific timeline has yet been given,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7. “Unsurprisingly, Microsoft recommends Word as a replacement for WordPad.”
Other notable bugs addressed by Microsoft include CVE-2023-35349, a remote code execution weakness in the Message Queuing (MSMQ) service, a technology that allows applications across multiple servers or hosts to communicate with each other. This vulnerability has earned a CVSS severity score of 9.8 (10 is the worst possible). Happily, the MSMQ service is not enabled by default in Windows, although Immersive Labs notes that Microsoft Exchange Server can enable this service during installation.
Speaking of Exchange, Microsoft also patched CVE-2023-36778, a vulnerability in all current versions of Exchange Server that could allow attackers to run code of their choosing. Rapid7’s Barnett said successful exploitation requires that the attacker be on the same network as the Exchange Server host, and use valid credentials for an Exchange user in a PowerShell session.
For a more detailed breakdown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any difficulties as a result of these patches.
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
A story of how an analysis of a supposed game cheat turned into the discovery of a powerful UEFI threat
The post ESET Research Podcast: Finding the mythical BlackLotus bootkit appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
A view of the H1 2023 threat landscape as seen by ESET telemetry and from the perspective of ESET threat detection and research experts
The post ESET Threat Report H1 2023 appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
A brief summary of what happened with Emotet since its comeback in November 2021
The post What’s up with Emotet? appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers analyzed an updated version of Android GravityRAT spyware that steals WhatsApp backup files and can receive commands to delete files
The post Android GravityRAT goes after WhatsApp backups appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
A curious case of a threat actor at the border between crimeware and cyberespionage
The post Asylum Ambuscade: crimeware or cyberespionage? appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers reveal details about a prevalent cryptor, operating as a cryptor-as-a-service used by tens of malware families
The post Shedding light on AceCryptor and its operation appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers discover AhRat – a new Android RAT based on AhMyth – that exfiltrates files and records audio
The post Android app breaking bad: From legitimate screen recording to file exfiltration within a year appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET Research uncovers a campaign by the APT group known as Evasive Panda targeting an international NGO in China with malware delivered through updates of popular Chinese software
The post Evasive Panda APT group delivers malware via updates for popular Chinese software appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Similarities with newly discovered Linux malware used in Operation DreamJob corroborate the theory that the infamous North Korea-aligned group is behind the 3CX supply-chain attack
The post Linux malware strengthens links between Lazarus and the 3CX supply‑chain attack appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
We learned some remarkable new details this week about the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP software provider 3CX. The lengthy, complex intrusion has all the makings of a cyberpunk spy novel: North Korean hackers using legions of fake executive accounts on LinkedIn to lure people into opening malware disguised as a job offer; malware targeting Mac and Linux users working at defense and cryptocurrency firms; and software supply-chain attacks nested within earlier supply chain attacks.
Researchers at ESET say this job offer from a phony HSBC recruiter on LinkedIn was North Korean malware masquerading as a PDF file.
In late March 2023, 3CX disclosed that its desktop applications for both Windows and macOS were compromised with malicious code that gave attackers the ability to download and run code on all machines where the app was installed. 3CX says it has more than 600,000 customers and 12 million users in a broad range of industries, including aerospace, healthcare and hospitality.
3CX hired incident response firm Mandiant, which released a report on Wednesday that said the compromise began in 2022 when a 3CX employee installed a malware-laced software package distributed via an earlier software supply chain compromise that began with a tampered installer for X_TRADER, a software package provided by Trading Technologies.
“This is the first time Mandiant has seen a software supply chain attack lead to another software supply chain attack,” reads the April 20 Mandiant report.
Mandiant found the earliest evidence of compromise uncovered within 3CX’s network was through the VPN using the employee’s corporate credentials, two days after the employee’s personal computer was compromised.
“Eventually, the threat actor was able to compromise both the Windows and macOS build environments,” 3CX said in an April 20 update on their blog.
Mandiant concluded that the 3CX attack was orchestrated by the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as Lazarus, a determination that was independently reached earlier by researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Elastic Security.
Mandiant found the compromised 3CX software would download malware that sought out new instructions by consulting encrypted icon files hosted on GitHub. The decrypted icon files revealed the location of the malware’s control server, which was then queried for a third stage of the malware compromise — a password stealing program dubbed ICONICSTEALER.
The double supply chain compromise that led to malware being pushed out to some 3CX customers. Image: Mandiant.
Meanwhile, the security firm ESET today published research showing remarkable similarities between the malware used in the 3CX supply chain attack and Linux-based malware that was recently deployed via fake job offers from phony executive profiles on LinkedIn. The researchers said this was the first time Lazarus had been spotted deploying malware aimed at Linux users.
As reported in a series last summer here, LinkedIn has been inundated this past year by fake executive profiles for people supposedly employed at a range of technology, defense, energy and financial companies. In many cases, the phony profiles spoofed chief information security officers at major corporations, and some attracted quite a few connections before their accounts were terminated.
Mandiant, Proofpoint and other experts say Lazarus has long used these bogus LinkedIn profiles to lure targets into opening a malware-laced document that is often disguised as a job offer. This ongoing North Korean espionage campaign using LinkedIn was first documented in August 2020 by ClearSky Security, which said the Lazarus group operates dozens of researchers and intelligence personnel to maintain the campaign globally.
Microsoft Corp., which owns LinkedIn, said in September 2022 that it had detected a wide range of social engineering campaigns using a proliferation of phony LinkedIn accounts. Microsoft said the accounts were used to impersonate recruiters at technology, defense and media companies, and to entice people into opening a malicious file. Microsoft found the attackers often disguised their malware as legitimate open-source software like Sumatra PDF and the SSH client Putty.
Microsoft attributed those attacks to North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group, although they’ve traditionally referred to this group as “ZINC“. That is, until earlier this month, when Redmond completely revamped the way it names threat groups; Microsoft now references ZINC as “Diamond Sleet.”
The ESET researchers said they found a new fake job lure tied to an ongoing Lazarus campaign on LinkedIn designed to compromise Linux operating systems. The malware was found inside of a document that offered an employment contract at the multinational bank HSBC.
“A few weeks ago, a native Linux payload was found on VirusTotal with an HSBC-themed PDF lure,” wrote ESET researchers Peter Kalnai and Marc-Etienne M.Leveille. “This completes Lazarus’s ability to target all major desktop operating systems. In this case, we were able to reconstruct the full chain, from the ZIP file that delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy, up until the final payload.”
ESET said the malicious PDF file used in the scheme appeared to have a file extension of “.pdf,” but that this was a ruse. ESET discovered that the dot in the filename wasn’t a normal period but instead a Unicode character (U+2024) representing a “leader dot,” which is often used in tables of contents to connect section headings with the page numbers on which those sections begin.
“The use of the leader dot in the filename was probably an attempt to trick the file manager into treating the file as an executable instead of a PDF,” the researchers continued. “This could cause the file to run when double-clicked instead of opening it with a PDF viewer.”
ESET said anyone who opened the file would see a decoy PDF with a job offer from HSBC, but in the background the executable file would download additional malware payloads. The ESET team also found the malware was able to manipulate the program icon displayed by the malicious PDF, possibly because fiddling with the file extension could cause the user’s system to display a blank icon for the malware lure.
Kim Zetter, a veteran Wired.com reporter and now independent security journalist, interviewed Mandiant researchers who said they expect “many more victims” will be discovered among the customers of Trading Technologies and 3CX now that news of the compromised software programs is public.
“Mandiant informed Trading Technologies on April 11 that its X_Trader software had been compromised, but the software maker says it has not had time to investigate and verify Mandiant’s assertions,” Zetter wrote in her Zero Day newsletter on Substack. For now, it remains unclear whether the compromised X_Trader software was downloaded by people at other software firms.
If there’s a silver lining here, the X_Trader software had been decommissioned in April 2020 — two years before the hackers allegedly embedded malware in it.
“The company hadn’t released new versions of the software since that time and had stopped providing support for the product, making it a less-than-ideal vector for the North Korean hackers to infect customers,” Zetter wrote.
When decommissioning their old hardware, many companies 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'
The post Discarded, not destroyed: Old routers reveal corporate secrets appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET experts share their insights on the cyber-elements of the first year of the war in Ukraine and how a growing number of destructive malware variants tried to rip through critical Ukrainian systems
The post ESET Research Podcast: A year of fighting rockets, soldiers, and wipers in Ukraine appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers analyzed Android and Windows clippers that can tamper with instant messages and use OCR to steal cryptocurrency funds
The post Not‑so‑private messaging: Trojanized WhatsApp and Telegram apps go after cryptocurrency wallets appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET Research uncovered a campaign by APT group Tick against a data-loss prevention company in East Asia and found a previously unreported tool used by the group
The post The slow Tick‑ing time bomb: Tick APT group compromise of a DLP software developer in East Asia appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers analyze a cyberespionage campaign that distributes CapraRAT backdoors through trojanized and supposedly secure Android messaging apps – but also exfiltrates sensitive information
The post Love scam or espionage? Transparent Tribe lures Indian and Pakistani officials appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers tease apart MQsTTang, a new backdoor used by Mustang Panda, which communicates via the MQTT protocol
The post MQsTTang: Mustang Panda’s latest backdoor treads new ground with Qt and MQTT appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
The first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit bypassing UEFI Secure Boot on fully updated UEFI systems is now a reality
The post BlackLotus UEFI bootkit: Myth confirmed appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the trends that defined the cyberthreat landscape in the final four months of 2022.
The post ESET Research Podcast: Ransomware trashed data, Android threats soared in T3 2022 appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
The targeted region, and overlap in behavior and code, suggest the tool is used by the infamous North Korea-aligned APT group
The post WinorDLL64: A backdoor from the vast Lazarus arsenal? appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Millions of Americans receiving food assistance benefits just earned a new right that they can’t yet enforce: The right to be reimbursed if funds on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards are stolen by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes.
On December 29, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which — for the first time ever — includes provisions for the replacement of stolen EBT benefits. This is a big deal because in 2022, organized crime groups began massively targeting EBT accounts — often emptying affected accounts at ATMs immediately after the states disperse funds each month.
EBT cards can be used along with a personal identification number (PIN) to pay for goods at participating stores, and to withdraw cash from an ATM. However, EBT cards differ from debit cards issued to most Americans in two important ways. First, most states do not equip EBT cards with smart chip technology, which can make the cards more difficult and expensive for skimming thieves to clone.
More critically, EBT participants traditionally have had little hope of recovering food assistance funds when their cards were copied by card-skimming devices and used for fraud. That’s because while the EBT programs are operated by individually by the states, those programs are funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which until late last year was barred from reimbursing states for stolen EBT funds.
The protections passed in the 2023 Appropriations Act allow states to use federal funds to replace stolen EBT benefits, and they permit states to seek reimbursement for any skimmed EBT funds they may have replaced from their own coffers (dating back to Oct. 1, 2022).
But first, all 50 states must each submit a plan for how they are going to protect and replace food benefits stolen via card skimming. Guidance for the states in drafting those plans was issued by the USDA on Jan. 31 (PDF), and states that don’t get them done before Feb. 27, 2023 risk losing the ability to be reimbursed for EBT fraud losses.
Deborah Harris is a staff attorney at The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI), a nonprofit legal assistance organization that has closely tracked the EBT skimming epidemic. In November 2022, the MLRI filed a class-action lawsuit against Massachusetts on behalf of thousands of low-income families who were collectively robbed of more than $1 million in food assistance benefits by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes across the state.
Harris said she’s pleased that the USDA guidelines were issued so promptly, and that the guidance for states was not overly prescriptive. For example, some security experts have suggested that adding contactless capability to EBT cards could help participants avoid skimming devices altogether. But Harris said contactless cards do not require a PIN, which is the only thing that stops EBT cards from being drained at the ATM when a participant’s card is lost or stolen.
Then again, nothing in the guidance even mentions chip-based cards, or any other advice for improving the physical security of EBT cards. Rather, it suggests states should seek to develop the capability to perform basic fraud detection and alerting on suspicious transactions, such as when an EBT card that is normally used only in one geographic area suddenly is used to withdraw cash at an ATM halfway across the country.
“Besides having the states move fast to approve their plans, we’d also like to see a focused effort to move states from magstripe-only cards to chip, and also assisting states to develop the algorithms that will enable them to identify likely incidents of stolen benefits,” Harris said.
Harris said Massachusetts has begun using algorithms to look for these suspicious transaction patterns throughout its EBT network, and now has the ability to alert households and verify transactions. But she said most states do not have this capability.
“We have heard that other states aren’t currently able to do that,” Harris said. “But encouraging states to more affirmatively identify instances of likely theft and assisting with the claims and verification process is critical. Most households can’t do that on their own, and in Massachusetts it’s very hard for a person to get a copy of their transaction history. Some states can do that through third-party apps, but something so basic should not be on the burden of EBT households.”
Some states aren’t waiting for direction from the federal government to beef up EBT card security. Like Maryland, which identified more than 1,400 households hit by EBT skimming attacks last year — a tenfold increase over 2021.
Advocates for EBT beneficiaries in Maryland are backing Senate Bill 401 (PDF), which would require the use of chip technology and ongoing monitoring for suspicious activity (a hearing on SB401 is scheduled in the Maryland Senate Finance Commission for Thursday, Feb. 23, at 1 p.m.).
Michelle Salomon Madaio is a director at the Homeless Persons Representation Project, a legal assistance organization based in Silver Spring, Md. Madaio said the bill would require the state Department of Human Services to replace skimmed benefits, not only after the bill goes into effect but also retroactively from January 2020 to the present.
Madaio said the bill also would require the state to monitor for patterns of suspicious activity on EBT cards, and to develop a mechanism to contact potentially affected households.
“For most of the skimming victims we’ve worked with, the fraudulent transactions would be pretty easy to spot because they mostly happened in the middle of the night or out of state, or both,” Madaio said. “To make matters worse, a lot of families whose benefits were scammed then incurred late fees on many other things as a result.”
It is not difficult to see why organized crime groups have pounced on EBT cards as easy money. In most traditional payment card transactions, there are usually several parties that have a financial interest in minimizing fraud and fraud losses, including the bank that issued the card, the card network (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc.), and the merchant.
But that infrastructure simply does not exist within state EBT programs, and it certainly isn’t a thing at the inter-state level. What that means is that the vast majority of EBT cards have zero fraud controls, which is exactly what continues to make them so appealing to thieves.
For now, the only fraud controls available to most EBT cardholders include being especially paranoid about where they use their cards, and frequently changing their PINs.
According to USDA guidance issued prior to the passage of the appropriations act, EBT cardholders should consider changing their card PIN at least once a month.
“By changing PINs frequently, at least monthly, and doing so before benefit issuance dates, households can minimize their risk of stolen benefits from a previously skimmed EBT card,” the USDA advised.
ESET researchers have identified a campaign using trojanized installers to deliver the FatalRAT malware, distributed via malicious websites linked in ads that appear in Google search results
The post These aren’t the apps you’re looking for: fake installers targeting Southeast and East Asia appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET Research announces IPyIDA 2.0, a Python plugin integrating IPython and Jupyter Notebook into IDA
The post Introducing IPyIDA: A Python plugin for your reverse‑engineering toolkit appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers identified an active StrongPity campaign distributing a trojanized version of the Android Telegram app, presented as the Shagle app – a video-chat service that has no app version
The post StrongPity espionage campaign targeting Android users appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Millions of people likely just received an email or snail mail notice saying they’re eligible to claim a class action payment in connection with the 2017 megabreach at consumer credit bureau Equifax. Given the high volume of reader inquiries about this, it seemed worth pointing out that while this particular offer is legit (if paltry), scammers are likely to soon capitalize on public attention to the settlement money.
One reader’s copy of their Equifax Breach Settlement letter. They received a check for $6.97.
In 2017, Equifax disclosed a massive, extended data breach that led to the theft of Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150 million people. Following a public breach response perhaps best described as a giant dumpster fire, the big-three consumer credit reporting bureau was quickly hit with nearly two dozen class-action lawsuits.
In exchange for resolving all outstanding class action claims against it, Equifax in 2019 agreed to a settlement that includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the breach.
Affected consumers were eligible to apply for at least three years of credit monitoring via all three major bureaus simultaneously, including Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Or, if you didn’t want to take advantage of the credit monitoring offers, you could opt for a cash payment of up to $125.
The settlement also offered reimbursement for the time you may have spent remedying identity theft or misuse of your personal information caused by the breach, or purchasing credit monitoring or credit reports. This was capped at 20 total hours at $25 per hour ($500), with total cash reimbursement payments not to exceed $20,000 per consumer.
Those who did file a claim probably started receiving emails or other communications earlier this year from the Equifax Breach Settlement Fund, which has been messaging class participants about methods of collecting their payments.
How much each recipient receives appears to vary quite a bit, but probably most people will have earned a payment on the smaller end of that $125 scale — like less than $10. Those who received higher amounts likely spent more time documenting actual losses and/or explaining how the breach affected them personally.
So far this week, KrebsOnSecurity has received at least 20 messages from readers seeking more information about these notices. Some readers shared copies of letters they got in the mail along with a paper check from the Equifax Breach Settlement Fund (see screenshot above).
Others said they got emails from the Equifax Breach Settlement domain that looked like an animated greeting card offering instructions on how to redeem a virtual prepaid card.
If you received one of these settlement emails and are wary about clicking the included links (good for you, by the way), copy the redemption code and paste it into the search box at myprepaidcenter.com/redeem. Successfully completing the card application requires accepting a prepaid MasterCard agreement (PDF).
The website for the settlement — equifaxbreachsettlement.com — also includes a lookup tool that lets visitors check whether they were affected by the breach; it requires your last name and the last six digits of your Social Security Number.
But be aware that phishers and other scammers are likely to take advantage of increased public awareness of the payouts to snooker people. Tim Helming, security evangelist at DomainTools.com, today flagged several new domains that mimic the name of the real Equifax Breach Settlement website and do not appear to be defensively registered by Equifax, including equifaxbreechsettlement[.]com, equifaxbreachsettlementbreach[.]com, and equifaxsettlements[.]co.
In February 2020, the U.S. Justice Department indicted four Chinese officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for perpetrating the 2017 Equifax hack. DOJ officials said the four men were responsible for carrying out the largest theft of sensitive personal information by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded.
Equifax surpassed Wall Street’s expectations in its most recent quarterly earnings: The company reported revenues of $1.24 billion for the quarter ending September 2022.
Of course, most of those earnings come from Equifax’s continued legal ability to buy and sell eye-popping amounts of financial and personal data on U.S. consumers. As one of the three major credit bureaus, Equifax collects and packages information about your credit, salary, and employment history. It tracks how many credit cards you have, how much money you owe, and how you pay your bills. Each company creates a credit report about you, and then sells this report to businesses who are deciding whether to give you credit.
Americans currently have no legal right to opt out of this data collection and trade. But you can and also should freeze your credit, which by the way can make your credit profile less profitable for companies like Equifax — because they make money every time some potential creditor wants a peek inside your financial life. Also, it’s probably a good idea to freeze the credit of your children and/or dependents as well. It’s free on both counts.
ESET researchers discovered a spearphishing campaign targeting Japanese political entities a few weeks before the House of Councillors elections, and in the process uncovered a previously undescribed MirrorFace credential stealer
The post Unmasking MirrorFace: Operation LiberalFace targeting Japanese political entities appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers analyzed a supply-chain attack abusing an Israeli software developer to deploy Fantasy, Agrius’s new wiper, with victims including the diamond industry
The post Fantasy – a new Agrius wiper deployed through a supply‑chain attack appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers uncover Dolphin, a sophisticated backdoor extending the arsenal of the ScarCruft APT group
The post Who’s swimming in South Korean waters? Meet ScarCruft’s Dolphin appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
FreshRSS