Will the Real Joker’s Stash Come Forward?

For as long as scam artists have been around so too have opportunistic thieves who specialize in ripping off other scam artists. This is the story about a group of Pakistani Web site designers who apparently have made an impressive living impersonating some of the most popular and well known “carding” markets, or online stores that sell stolen credit cards.

An ad for new stolen cards on Joker’s Stash.

One wildly popular carding site that has been featured in-depth at KrebsOnSecurity — Joker’s Stash — brags that the millions of credit and debit card accounts for sale via their service were stolen from merchants firsthand.

That is, the people running Joker’s Stash say they are hacking merchants and directly selling card data stolen from those merchants. Joker’s Stash has been tied to several recent retail breaches, including those at Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Bebe Stores, Hilton Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle and Sonic. Indeed, with most of these breaches, the first signs that any of the companies were hacked was when their customers’ credit cards started showing up for sale on Joker’s Stash.

Joker’s Stash maintains a presence on several cybercrime forums, and its owners use those forum accounts to remind prospective customers that its Web site — jokerstash[dot]bazar — is the only way in to the marketplace.

The administrators constantly warn buyers to be aware there are many look-alike shops set up to steal logins to the real Joker’s Stash or to make off with any funds deposited with the impostor carding shop as a prerequisite to shopping there.

But that didn’t stop a prominent security researcher (not this author) from recently plunking down $100 in bitcoin at a site he thought was run by Joker’s Stash (jokersstash[dot]su). Instead, the proprietors of the impostor site said the minimum deposit for viewing stolen card data on the marketplace had increased to $200 in bitcoin.

The researcher, who asked not to be named, said he obliged with an additional $100 bitcoin deposit, only to find that his username and password to the card shop no longer worked. He’d been conned by scammers scamming scammers.

As it happens, prior to hearing from this researcher I’d received a mountain of research from Jett Chapman, another security researcher who swore he’d unmasked the real-world identity of the people behind the Joker’s Stash carding empire.

Chapman’s research, detailed in a 57-page report shared with KrebsOnSecurity, pivoted off of public information leading from the same jokersstash[dot]su that ripped off my researcher friend.

“I’ve gone to a few cybercrime forums where people who have used jokersstash[dot]su that were confused about who they really were,” Chapman said. “Many of them left feedback saying they’re scammers who will just ask for money to deposit on the site, and then you’ll never hear from them again.”

But the conclusion of Chapman’s report — that somehow jokersstash[dot]su was related to the real criminals running Joker’s Stash — didn’t ring completely accurate, although it was expertly documented and thoroughly researched. So with Chapman’s blessing, I shared his report with both the researcher who’d been scammed and a law enforcement source who’d been tracking Joker’s Stash.

Both confirmed my suspicions: Chapman had unearthed a vast network of sites registered and set up over several years to impersonate some of the biggest and longest-running criminal credit card theft syndicates on the Internet.

THE REAL JOKER’S STASH

The real Joker’s Stash can only be reached after installing a browser extension known as “blockchain DNS.” This component is needed to access any sites ending in the top-level domain names of .bazar,.bit (Namecoin), .coin, .lib and .emc (Emercoin).

Most Web sites use the global Domain Name System (DNS), which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly Web site names (example.com) into numeric Internet address that are easier for computers to manage.

Regular DNS maps Internet addresses to domains by relying on a series of distributed, hierarchical lookups. If one server does not know how to find a domain, that server simply asks another server for the information.

Blockchain-based DNS systems also disseminate that mapping information in a distributed fashion, although via a peer-to-peer method. The entities that operate blockchain-based top level domains (e.g., .bazar) don’t answer to any one central authority — such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the global DNS and domain name space. This potentially makes these domains much more difficult for law enforcement agencies to take down.

This batch of some five million cards put up for sale Sept. 26, 2017 on the (real) carding site Joker’s Stash has been tied to a breach at Sonic Drive-In

Dark Reading explains further: “When an individual registers a .bit — or another blockchain-based domain — they are able to do so in just a few steps online, and the process costs mere pennies. Domain registration is not associated with an individual’s name or address but with a unique encrypted hash of each user. This essentially creates the same anonymous system as Bitcoin for Internet infrastructure, in which users are only known through their cryptographic identity.”

And cybercriminals have taken notice. According to security firm FireEye, over the last year there’s been a surge in the number of threat actors that have started incorporating support for blockchain domains in their malware tools.

THE FAKE JOKER’S STASH

In contrast, the fake version of Joker’s Stash — jokersstash[dot]su — exists on the clear Web and displays a list of “trusted” Joker’s Stash domains that can be used to get on the impostor marketplace.  These lists are common on the login pages of carding and other cybercrime sites that tend to lose their domains frequently when Internet do-gooders report them to authorities. The daily reminder helps credit card thieves easily find the new domain should the primary domain get seized by law enforcement or the site’s domain registrar.

Jokersstash[dot]su lists mirror sites in case the generic domain becomes inaccessible.

Most of the domains in the image above are hosted on the same Internet address: 190.14.38.6 (Offshore Racks S.A. in Panama). But Chapman found that many of these domains map back to just a handful of email addresses, including domain@paysafehost.com, fkaboot@gmail.com, and zanebilly30@gmail.com.

Chapman found that adding credit cards to his shopping cart in the fake Joker’s Stash site caused those same cards to show up in his cart when he accessed his account at one of the alternative domains listed in the screenshot above, suggesting that the sites were all connected to the same back-end database.

The email address fkaboot@gmail.com is tied to the name or alias “John Kelly,” as well as 35 domains, according to DomainTools (the full list is here). Most of the sites at those domains borrow names and logos from established credit card fraud sites, including VaultMarket, T12Shop, BriansClub (which uses the head of yours truly on a moving crab to advertise its stolen cards); and the now defunct cybercrime forum Infraud.

Domaintools says the address domain@paysafehost.com also maps to 35 domains, including look-alike domains for major carding sites Bulba, GoldenDumps, ValidShop, McDucks, Mr. Bin, Popeye, and the cybercrime forum Omerta.

The address zanebilly30@gmail.com is connected to 36 domains that feature many of the same impersonated criminal brands as the first two lists.

The domain “paysafehost.com” is not responding at the moment, but until very recently it redirected to a site that tried to scam or phish customers seeking to buy stolen credit card data from VaultMarket. It looks more or less the same as the real VaultMarket’s login page, but Chapman noticed that in the bottom right corner of the screen was a Zendesk chat service soliciting customer questions.

Signing up for an account at paysafehost.com (the fake VaultMarket site) revealed a site that looked like VaultMarket but otherwise massively displayed ads for another carding service — isellz[dot]cc (one of the domains registered to domain@paysafehost.com).

This same Zendesk chat service also was embedded in the homepage of jokersstash[dot]su.

And on isellz[dot]cc:

Notice the same Zendesk chat client in the bottom right corner of the Isellz home page.

According to Farsight Security, a company that maps historical connections between Internet addresses and domain names, several other interesting domains used paysafehost[dot]com as their DNS servers, including cvv[dot]kz (CVV stands for the card verification value and it refers to stolen credit card numbers, names and cardholder address that can be used to conduct e-commerce fraud).

All three domains — cvv[dot]kz, and isellz[dot]cc and paysafehost[dot]com list in their Web site registration records the email address xperiasolution@gmail.com, the site xperiasol.com, and the name “Bashir Ahmad.”

XPERIA SOLUTIONS

Searching online for the address xperiasolution@gmail.com turns up a help wanted ad on the Qatar Living Jobs site from October 2017 for a freelance system administrator. The ad was placed by the user “junaidky“, and gives the xperiasolution@gmail.com email address for interested applicants to contact.

Chapman says at this point in his research he noticed that xperiasolution@gmail.com was also used to register the domain xperiasol.info, which for several years was hosted on the same server as a handful of other sites, such as xperiasol.com — the official Web site Xperia Solution (this site also features a Zen desk chat client in the lower right portion of the homepage).

Xperiasol.com’s Web site says the company is a Web site development firm and domain registrar in Islamabad, Pakistan. The site’s “Meet our Team” page states the founder and CEO of the company is a guy named Muhammad Junaid. Another man pictured as Yasir Ali is the company’s project manager.

The top dogs at Xperia Sol.

We’ll come back to both of these two individuals in a moment. Xperiasol.info also is no longer responding, but not long ago the home page showed several open file directories:

Clicking in the projects directory and drilling down into a project dated Feb. 8, 2018 turns up some kind of chatroom application in development. Recall that dozens of the fake carding domains mentioned above were registered to a “John Kelly” at fkaboot@gmail.com. Have a look at the name next to the chatroom application Web site that was archived at xperiasol.info:

Could Yasir Ali, the project manager of Xperiasol, be the same person who registered so many fake carding domains? What else do we know about Mr. Ali? It appears he runs another business called Agile: Institute of Information Technology. Agile’s domain — aiit.com.pk — was registered to Xperia Sol Technologies in 2016 and hosted on the same server.

Who else that we know besides Mr. Ali is listed on Agile’s “Meet the Team” page? Why Mr. Muhammad Junaid, of course, the CEO and founder of Xperia Sol.

Notice the placeholder “lorem ipsum” content. This can be seen throughout the Web sites for Xperia Sol’s “customers.”

Chapman shared pages of documentation showing that most of the “customers testimonials” supposedly from Xperia Sol’s Web design clients appear to be half-finished sites with plenty of broken links and “lorem ipsum” placeholder content (as is the case with the aiit.com.pk Web site pictured above).

Another “valuable client” listed on Xperia Sol’s home page is Softlottery[dot]com (previously softlogin[dot]com). This site appears to be a business that sells Web site design templates, but it lists its address as Sailor suite room V124, DB 91, Someplace 71745 Earth.

Softlottery/Softlogin features a “corporate business” Web site template that includes a slogan from a major carding forum.

Among the “awesome” corporate design templates that Softlottery has for sale is one loosely based on a motto that has shown up on several carding sites: “We are those, who we are: Verified forum, verified people, serious deals.” Probably the most well-known cybercrime forum using that motto is Omerta (recall from above that the Omerta forum is another brand impersonated by this group).

Flower Land, with the Web address flowerlandllc.com is also listed as a happy Xperia Sol customer and is hosted by Xperia Sol. But most of the links on that site are dead. More importantly, the site’s content appears to have been lifted from the Web site of an actual flower care business in Michigan called myflowerland.com.

Zalmi-TV (zalmi.tv) is supposedly a news media partner of Xperia Sol, but again the Xperia-hosted site is half-finished and full of “lorem ipsum” placeholder content.

THE MASTER MIND?

But what about Xperia Sol’s founder, Muhammad Junaid, you ask? Mr. Junaid is known by several aliases, including his stage name, “Masoom Parinda,” a.k.a. “Master Mind). As Chapman unearthed in his research, Junaid has starred in some B-movie action films in Pakistan, and Masoom Parinda is his character’s name.

The fan page for Masoon Parinda, the character played by Muhammad Junaid Ahmed.

Mr. Junaid also goes by the names Junaid Ahmad Khan, and Muhammad Junaid Ahmed. The latter is the one included in a flight itinerary that Junaid posted to his Facebook page in 2014.

There are also some interesting photos of his various cars — all of which have the Masoom Parinda nickname “Master Mind” written on the back window. There is also something else on each car’s rear window: A picture of a black and red scorpion.

Recall the logo that was used at the top of isellz[dot]cc, the main credit card fraud site tied to xperiasolutions@gmail.com. It features a giant black and red scorpion:

The isellz Web site features a scorpion as a logo.

I reached out to Mr. Junaid/Khan via his Facebook page. Soon after that, his Facebook profile disappeared. But not before KrebsOnSecurity managed to get a copy of the page going back several years. Mr. Junaid/Khan is apparently friends with a local man named Bashar Ahmad. Recall that a “Bashar Ahmad” was the name tied to the domain registrations — cvv[dot]kz, and isellz[dot]cc and paysafehost[dot]com — and to the email address xperiasolution@gmail.com.

Mr. Ahmed also has a Facebook page going back more than seven years. In one of those posts, he publishes a picture of a scorpion very similar to the one on isellz[dot]cc and on Mr. Khan’s automobiles.

A screen shot from Bashir Ahmad’s Facebook postings.

At the conclusion of his research, Chapman said he discovered one final and jarring connection between Xperia Sol and the carding site isellz[dot]cc: When isellz customers have trouble using the site, they can submit a support ticket. Where does that support ticket go? Would you believe to xperiasol@gmail.com? Click the image below to enlarge.

The support page of the carding site isellz[dot]cc points to Xperia Sol. Click to enlarge.

It could be that all of this evidence pointing back to Xperia Sol is just a coincidence, or an elaborate character assassination scheme cooked up by one of the company’s competitors. Or perhaps Mr. Junaind/Khan is simply researching a new role as a hacker in an upcoming Pakistani cinematic thriller:

Mr. Junaid/Khan, in an online promotion for a movie he stars in about crime.

In many ways, creating a network of fake carding sites is the perfect cybercrime. After all, nobody is going to call the cops on people who make a living ripping off cybercriminals. Nor will anyone help the poor sucker who gets snookered by one of these fake carding sites. Caveat Emptor!

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/will-the-real-jokers-stash-come-forward/

FBI: Kindly Reboot Your Router Now, Please

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that a new malware threat has rapidly infected more than a half-million consumer devices. To help arrest the spread of the malware, the FBI and security firms are urging home Internet users to reboot routers and network-attached storage devices made by a range of technology manufacturers.

The growing menace — dubbed VPNFilter — targets Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR and TP-Link networking equipment in the small and home office space, as well as QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) devices, according to researchers at Cisco.

Experts are still trying to learn all that VPNFilter is built to do, but for now they know it can do two things well: Steal Web site credentials; and issue a self-destruct command, effectively rendering infected devices inoperable for most consumers.

Cisco researchers said they’re not yet sure how these 500,000 devices were infected with VPNFilter, but that most of the targeted devices have known public exploits or default credentials that make compromising them relatively straightforward.

“All of this has contributed to the quiet growth of this threat since at least 2016,” the company wrote on its Talos Intelligence blog.

The Justice Department said last week that VPNFilter is the handiwork of “APT28,” the security industry code name for a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers also known as “Fancy Bear” and the “Sofacy Group.” This is the same group accused of conducting election meddling attacks during the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

“Foreign cyber actors have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and other networked devices worldwide,” the FBI said in a warning posted to the Web site of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). “The actors used VPNFilter malware to target small office and home office routers. The malware is able to perform multiple functions, including possible information collection, device exploitation, and blocking network traffic.”

According to Cisco, here’s a list of the known affected devices:

LINKSYS DEVICES:

E1200
E2500
WRVS4400N

MIKROTIK ROUTEROS VERSIONS FOR CLOUD CORE ROUTERS:

1016
1036
1072

NETGEAR DEVICES:

DGN2200
R6400
R7000
R8000
WNR1000
WNR2000

QNAP DEVICES:

TS251
TS439 Pro

Other QNAP NAS devices running QTS software

TP-LINK DEVICES:

R600VPN

Image: Cisco

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell if your device is infected. If you own one of these devices and it is connected to the Internet, you should reboot (or unplug, wait a few seconds, replug) the device now. This should wipe part of the infection, if there is one. But you’re not out of the woods yet.

Cisco said part of the code used by VPNFilter can still persist until the affected device is reset to its factory-default settings. Most modems and DVRs will have a tiny, recessed button that can only be pressed with something small and pointy, such as a paper clip. Hold this button down for at least 10 seconds (some devices require longer) with the device powered on, and that should be enough to reset the device back to its factory-default settings. In some cases, you may need to hold the tiny button down and keep it down while you plug in the power cord, and then hold it for 30 seconds.

After resetting the device, you’ll need to log in to its administrative page using a Web browser. The administrative page of most commercial routers can be accessed by typing 192.168.1.1, or 192.168.0.1 into a Web browser address bar. If neither of those work, try looking up the documentation at the router maker’s site, or checking to see if the address is listed here. If you still can’t find it, open the command prompt (Start > Run/or Search for “cmd”) and then enter ipconfig. The address you need should be next to Default Gateway under your Local Area Connection.

Once you’re there, make sure you’ve changed the factory-default password that allows you to log in to the device (pick something strong that you can remember).

You’ll also want to make sure your device has the latest firmware updates. Most router Web interfaces have a link or button you click to check for newer device firmware. If there are any updates available, install those before doing anything else.

If you’ve reset the router’s settings, you’ll also want to encrypt your connection if you’re using a wireless router (one that broadcasts your modem’s Internet connection so that it can be accessed via wireless devices, like tablets and smart phones). WPA2 is the strongest encryption technology available in most modern routers, followed by WPA and WEP (the latter is fairly trivial to crack with open source tools, so don’t use it unless it’s your only option).

But even users who have a strong router password and have protected their wireless Internet connection with a strong WPA2 passphrase may have the security of their routers undermined by security flaws built into these routers. At issue is a technology called “Wi-Fi Protected Setup” (WPS) that ships with many routers marketed to consumers and small businesses. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group, WPS is “designed to ease the task of setting up and configuring security on wireless local area networks. WPS enables typical users who possess little understanding of traditional Wi-Fi configuration and security settings to automatically configure new wireless networks, add new devices and enable security.”

However, WPS also may expose routers to easy compromise. Read more about this vulnerability here. If your router is among those listed as using WPS, see if you can disable WPS from the router’s administration page. If you’re not sure whether it can be, or if you’d like to see whether your router maker has shipped an update to fix the WPS problem on their hardware, check this spreadsheet.

Turning off any remote administration features that may be turned on by default is always a good idea, as is disabling Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which can easily poke holes in your firewall without you knowing it). However, Cisco researchers say there is no indication that VPNFilter uses UPnP.

For more tips on how to live with your various Internet of Things (IoT) devices without becoming a nuisance to yourself or the Internet at large, please see Some Basic Rules for Securing Your IoT Stuff.

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/fbi-kindly-reboot-your-router-now-please/

Why Is Your Location Data No Longer Private?

3 Charged In Fatal Kansas ‘Swatting’ Attack

Federal prosecutors have charged three men with carrying out a deadly hoax known as “swatting,” in which perpetrators call or message a target’s local 911 operators claiming a fake hostage situation or a bomb threat in progress at the target’s address — with the expectation that local police may respond to the scene with deadly force. While only one of the three men is accused of making the phony call to police that got an innocent man shot and killed, investigators say the other two men’s efforts to taunt and deceive one another ultimately helped point the gun.

Tyler “SWAuTistic” Barriss. Photo: AP

According to prosecutors, the tragic hoax started with a dispute over a match in the online game “Call of Duty.” The indictment says Shane M. Gaskill, a 19-year-old Wichita, Kansas resident, and Casey S. Viner, 18, had a falling out over a $1.50 game wager.

Viner allegedly wanted to get back at Gaskill, and so enlisted the help of another man — Tyler R. Barriss — a serial swatter known by the alias “SWAuTistic” who’d bragged of “swatting” hundreds of schools and dozens of private residences.

The federal indictment references transcripts of alleged online chats among the three men. In an exchange on Dec. 28, 2017, Gaskill taunts Barriss on Twitter after noticing that Barriss’s Twitter account (@swattingaccount) had suddenly started following him.

Viner and Barriss both allegedly say if Gaskill isn’t scared of getting swatted, he should give up his home address. But the address that Gaskill gave Viner to pass on to Barriss no longer belonged to him and was occupied by a new tenant.

Barriss allegedly then called the emergency 911 operators in Wichita and said he was at the address provided by Viner, that he’d just shot his father in the head, was holding his mom and sister at gunpoint, and was thinking about burning down the home with everyone inside.

Wichita police quickly responded to the fake hostage report and surrounded the address given by Gaskill. Seconds later, 28-year-old Andrew Finch exited his mom’s home and was killed by a single shot from a Wichita police officer. Finch, a father of two, had no party to the gamers’ dispute and was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Just minutes after the fatal shooting, Barriss — who is in Los Angeles  — is allegedly anxious to learn if his Kansas swat attempt was successful. Someone has just sent Barriss a screenshot of a conversation between Viner and Gaskill mentioning police at Gaskill’s home and someone getting killed. So Barriss allegedly then starts needling Gaskill via instant message:

Defendant BARRISS: Yo answer me this
Defendant BARRISS: Did police show up to your house yes or no
Defendant GASKILL: No dumb fuck
Defendant BARRISS: Lmao here’s how I know you’re lying

Prosecutors say Barriss then posted a screen shot showing the following conversation between Viner and Gaskill:

Defendant VINER: Oi
Defendant GASKILL: Hi
Defendant VINER: Did anyone show @ your house?
Defendant VINER: Be honest
Defendant GASKILL: Nope
Defendant GASKILL: The cops are at my house because someone ik just killed his dad

Barriss and Gaskill then allegedly continued their conversation:

Defendant GASKILL: They showed up to my old house retard
Defendant BARRISS: That was the call script
Defendant BARRISS: Lol
Defendant GASKILL: Your literally retarded
Defendant GASKILL: Ik dumb ass
Defendant BARRISS: So you just got caught in a lie
Defendant GASKILL: No I played along with you
Defendant GASKILL: They showed up to my old house that we own and rented out
Defendant GASKILL: We don’t live there anymore bahahaha
Defendant GASKILL: ik you just wasted your time and now your pissed
Defendant BARRISS: Not really
Defendant BARRISS: Once you said “killed his dad” I knew it worked lol
Defendant BARRISS: That was the call lol
Defendant GASKILL: Yes it did buy they never showed up to my house
Defendant GASKILL: You guys got trolled
Defendant GASKILL: Look up who live there we moved out almost a year ago
Defendant GASKILL: I give you props though you’re the 1% that can actually swat babahaha
Defendant BARRISS: Dude MY point is You gave an address that you dont live at but you were acting tough lol
Defendant BARRISS: So you’re a bitch

Later on the evening of Dec. 28, after news of the fatal swatting started blanketing the local television coverage in Kansas, Gaskill allegedly told Barriss to delete their previous messages. “Bape” in this conversation refers to a nickname allegedly used by Casey Viner:

Defendant GASKILL: Dm asap
Defendant GASKILL: Please it’s very fucking impi
Defendant GASKILL: Hello
Defendant BARRISS: ?
Defendant BARRISS: What you want
Defendant GASKILL: Dude
Defendant GASKILL: Me you and bape
Defendant GASKILL: Need to delete everything
Defendant GASKILL: This is a murder case now
Defendant GASKILL: Casey deleted everything
Defendant GASKILL: You need 2 as well
Defendant GASKILL: This isn’t a joke K troll anymore
Defendant GASKILL: If you don’t you’re literally retarded I’m trying to help you both out
Defendant GASKILL: They know it was swat call

The indictment also features chat records between Viner and others in which he admits to his role in the deadly swatting attack. In the follow chat excerpt, Viner was allegedly talking with someone identified only as “J.D.”

Defendant VINER: I literally said you’re gonna be swatted, and the guy who swatted him can easily say I convinced him or something when I said hey can you swat this guy and then gave him the address and he said yes and then said he’d do it for free because I said he doesn’t think anything will happen
Defendant VINER: How can I not worry when I googled what happens when you’re involved and it said a eu [sic] kid and a US person got 20 years in prison min
Defendant VINER: And he didn’t even give his address he gave a false address apparently
J.D.: You didn’t call the hoax in…
Defendant VINER: Does t [sic] even matter ?????? I was involved I asked him to do it in the first place
Defendant VINER: I gave him the address to do it, but then again so did the other guy he gave him the address to do it as well and said do it pull up etc

Barriss is charged with multiple counts of making false information and hoaxes; cyberstalking; threatening to kill another or damage property by fire; interstate threats, conspiracy; and wire fraud. Viner and Gaskill were both charged with wire fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. A copy of the indictment is available here.

The Associated Press reports that the most serious charge of making a hoax call carries a potential life sentence because it resulted in a death, and that some of the other charges carry sentences of up to 20 years.

The moment that police in Kansas fired a single shot that killed Andrew Finch.

As I told the AP, swatting has been a problem for years, but it seems to have intensified around the time that top online gamers started being able to make serious money playing games online and streaming those games live to thousands or even tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Indeed, Barriss himself had earned a reputation as someone who delighted in watching police kick in doors behind celebrity gamers who were live-streaming.

This case is not the first time federal prosecutors have charged multiple people in the same swatting attacks even if only one person was involved in actually making the phony hoax calls to police. In 2013, my home was the target of a swatting attack that thankfully ended without incident. The government ultimately charged four men — several of whom were minors at the time — with conducting that swat attack as well as many others they’d perpetrated against public figures and celebrities.

But despite spending considerable resources investigating those crimes, prosecutors were able to secure only light punishments for those involved in the swatting spree. One of those men, a serial swatter and cyberstalker named Mir Islam, was sentenced to to just one year in jail for his role in multiple swattings.  Another individual who was part of that group — Eric “Cosmo the God” Taylor — got three years of probation.

Something tells me Barriss, Gaskill and Viner aren’t going to be so lucky. Barriss has admitted his role in many swattings, and he admitted to his last, fatal swatting in an interview he gave to KrebsOnSecurity less than 24 hours after Andrew Finch’s murder — saying he was not the person who pulled the trigger.

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/3-charged-in-fatal-kansas-swatting-attack/

Mobile Giants: Please Don’t Share the Where

Your mobile phone is giving away your approximate location all day long. This isn’t exactly a secret: It has to share this data with your mobile provider constantly to provide better call quality and to route any emergency 911 calls straight to your location. But now, the major mobile providers in the United States — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — are selling this location information to third party companies — in real time — without your consent or a court order, and with apparently zero accountability for how this data will be used, stored, shared or protected.

Think about what’s at stake in a world where anyone can track your location at any time and in real-time. Right now, to be free of constant tracking the only thing you can do is remove the SIM card from your mobile device never put it back in unless you want people to know where you are.

It may be tough to put a price on one’s location privacy, but here’s something of which you can be sure: The mobile carriers are selling data about where you are at any time, without your consent, to third-parties for probably far less than you might be willing to pay to secure it.

The problem is that as long as anyone but the phone companies and law enforcement agencies with a valid court order can access this data, it is always going to be at extremely high risk of being hacked, stolen and misused.

Consider just two recent examples. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that a little-known data broker named Securus was selling local police forces around the country the ability to look up the precise location of any cell phone across all of the major U.S. mobile networks. Then it emerged that Securus had been hacked, its database of hundreds of law enforcement officer usernames and passwords plundered. We also found out that Securus’ data was ultimately obtained from a California-based location tracking firm LocationSmart.

On May 17, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news of research by Carnegie Mellon University PhD student Robert Xiao, who discovered that a LocastionSmart try-before-you-buy opt-in demo of the company’s technology was wide open — allowing real-time lookups from anyone on anyone’s mobile device — without any sort of authentication, consent or authorization.

Xiao said it took him all of about 15 minutes to discover that LocationSmart’s lookup tool could be used to track the location of virtually any mobile phone user in the United States.

Securus seems equally clueless about protecting the priceless data to which it was entrusted by LocationSmart. Over the weekend KrebsOnSecurity discovered that someone — almost certainly a security professional employed by Securus — has been uploading dozens of emails, PDFs, password lists and other files to Virustotal.com — a service owned by Google that can be used to scan any submitted file against dozens of commercial antivirus tools.

Antivirus companies willingly participate in Virustotal because it gives them early access to new, potentially malicious files being spewed by cybercriminals online. Virustotal users can submit suspicious files of all kind; in return they’ll see whether any of the 60+ antivirus tools think the file is bad or benign.

One basic rule that all Virustotal users need to understand is that any file submitted to Virustotal is also available to customers who purchase access to the service’s file repository. Nevertheless, for the past two years someone at Securus has been submitting a great deal of information about the company’s operations to Virustotal, including copies of internal emails and PDFs about visitation policies at a number of local and state prisons and jails that made up much of Securus’ business.

Some of the many, many files uploaded to Virustotal.com over the years by someone at Securus Technologies.

One of the files, submitted on April 27, 2018, is titled “38k user pass microsemi.com – joomla_production.mic_users_blockedData.txt”.  This file includes the names and what appear to be hashed/scrambled passwords of some 38,000 accounts — supposedly taken from Microsemi, a company that’s been called the largest U.S. commercial supplier of military and aerospace semiconductor equipment.

Many of the usernames in that file do map back to names of current and former employees at Microsemi. KrebsOnSecurity shared a copy of the database with Microsemi, but has not yet received a reply. Securus also has not responded to requests for comment.

These files that someone at Securus apparently submitted regularly to Virustotal also provide something of an internal roadmap of Securus’ business dealings, revealing the names and login pages for several police departments and jails across the country, such as the Travis County Jail site’s Web page to access Securus’ data.

Check out the screen shot below. Notice that forgot password link there? Clicking that prompts the visitor to enter their username and to select a “security question” to answer. There are but three questions: “What is your pet’s name? What is your favorite color? And what town were you born in?” There don’t appear to be any limits on the number of times one can attempt to answer a secret question.

Choose wisely and you, too, could gain the ability to look up anyone’s precise mobile location.

Given such robust, state-of-the-art security, how long do you think it would take for someone to figure out how to reset the password for any authorized user at Securus’ Travis County Jail portal?

Yes, companies like Securus and Location Smart have been careless with securing our prized location data, but why should they care if their paying customers are happy and the real-time data feeds from the mobile industry keep flowing?

No, the real blame for this sorry state of affairs comes down to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. T-Mobile was the only one of the four major providers that admitted providing Securus and LocationSmart with the ability to perform real-time location lookups on their customers. The other three carriers declined to confirm or deny that they did business with either company.

As noted in my story last Thursday, LocationSmart included the logos of the four carriers on their home page — in addition to those of several other major firms (that information is no longer available on the company’s site, but it can still be viewed by visiting this historic record of it over at the Internet Archive).

Now, don’t think for a second that these two tiny companies are the only ones with permission from the mobile giants to look up such sensitive information on demand. At a minimum, each one of these companies can in theory resell (or leak) this information and access to others. On 15 May, ZDNet reported that Securus was getting its data from the carriers by going through an intermediary: 3Cinteractive, which was getting it from LocationSmart.

However, it is interesting that the first insight we got that the mobile firms were being so promiscuous with our private location data came in the Times story about law enforcement officials seeking the ability to access any mobile device’s location data in real time.

All technologies are double-edged swords, which means that each can be used both for good and malicious ends. As much as police officers may wish to avoid the hassle and time constraints of having to get a warrant to determine the precise location of anyone they please whenever they wish, those same law enforcement officers should remember that this technology works both ways: It also can just as easily be abused by criminals to track the real-time movements of police and their families, informants, jurors, witnesses and even judges.

Consider the damage that organized crime syndicates — human traffickers, drug smugglers and money launderers — could inflict armed with an app that displays the precise location of every uniformed officer from within 300 ft to across the country. All because they just happened to know the cell phone number tied to each law enforcement official.

Maybe you have children or grandchildren who — like many of their peers these days — carry a mobile device at all times for safety and for quick communication with parents or guardians. Now imagine that anyone in the world has the instant capability to track where your kid is at any time of day. All they’d need is your kid’s digits.

Maybe you’re the current or former target of a stalker, jilted ex-spouse, or vengeful co-worker. Perhaps you perform sensitive work for the government. All of the above-mentioned parties and many more are put at heightened personal risk by having their real-time location data exposed to commercial third parties.

Some people might never sell their location data for any price: I suspect most of us would like this information always to be private unless and until we change the defaults (either in a binary “on/off” way or app-specific). On the other end of the spectrum there are probably plenty of people who don’t care one way or another provided that sharing their location information brings them some real or perceived financial or commercial benefit.

The point is, for many of us location privacy is priceless because, without it, almost everything else we’re doing to safeguard our privacy goes out the window.

And this sad reality will persist until the mobile providers state unequivocally that they will no longer sell or share customer location data without having received and validated some kind of legal obligation — such as a court-ordered subpoena.

But even that won’t be enough, because companies can and do change their policies all the time without warning or recourse (witness the current reality). It won’t be enough until lawmakers in this Congress step up and do their jobs — to prevent the mobile providers from selling our last remaining bastion of privacy in the free world to third party companies who simply can’t or won’t keep it secure.

The next post in this series will examine how we got here, and what Congress and federal regulators have done and might do to rectify the situation.

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/mobile-giants-please-dont-share-the-where/

T-Mobile Employee Made Unauthorized ‘SIM Swap’ to Steal Instagram Account

T-Mobile is investigating a retail store employee who allegedly made unauthorized changes to a subscriber’s account in an elaborate scheme to steal the customer’s three-letter Instagram username. The modifications, which could have let the rogue employee empty bank accounts associated with the targeted T-Mobile subscriber, were made even though the victim customer already had taken steps recommended by the mobile carrier to help minimize the risks of account takeover. Here’s what happened, and some tips on how you can protect yourself from a similar fate.

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Paul Rosenzweig, a 27-year-old T-Mobile customer from Boston who had his wireless account briefly hijacked. Rosenzweig had previously adopted T-Mobile’s advice to customers about blocking mobile number port-out scams, an increasingly common scheme in which identity thieves armed with a fake ID in the name of a targeted customer show up at a retail store run by a different wireless provider and ask that the number to be transferred to the competing mobile company’s network.

So-called “port out” scams allow crooks to intercept your calls and messages while your phone goes dark. Porting a number to a new provider shuts off the phone of the original user, and forwards all calls to the new device. Once in control of the mobile number, thieves who have already stolen a target’s password(s) can request any second factor that is sent to the newly activated device, such as a one-time code sent via text message or or an automated call that reads the one-time code aloud.

In this case, however, the perpetrator didn’t try to port Rosenzweig’s phone number: Instead, the attacker called multiple T-Mobile retail stores within an hour’s drive of Rosenzweig’s home address until he succeeded in convincing a store employee to conduct what’s known as a “SIM swap.”

A SIM swap is a legitimate process by which a customer can request that a new SIM card (the tiny, removable chip in a mobile device that allows it to connect to the provider’s network) be added to the account. Customers can request a SIM swap when their existing SIM card has been damaged, or when they are switching to a different phone that requires a SIM card of another size.

However, thieves and other ne’er-do-wells can abuse this process by posing as a targeted mobile customer or technician and tricking employees at the mobile provider into swapping in a new SIM card for that customer on a device that they control. If successful, the SIM swap accomplishes more or less the same result as a number port out (at least in the short term) — effectively giving the attackers access to any text messages or phone calls that are sent to the target’s mobile account.

Rosenzweig said the first inkling he had that something wasn’t right with his phone was on the evening of May 2, 2018, when he spotted an automated email from Instagram. The message said the email address tied to the three-letter account he’d had on the social media platform for seven years — instagram.com/par — had been changed. He quickly logged in to his Instagram account, changed his password and then reverted the email on the account back to his original address.

By this time, the SIM swap conducted by the attacker had already been carried out, although Rosenzweig said he didn’t notice his phone displaying zero bars and no connection to T-Mobile at the time because he was at home and happily surfing the Web on his device using his own wireless network.

The following morning, Rosenzweig received another notice — this one from Snapchat — stating that the password for his account there (“p9r”) had been changed. He subsequently reset the Instagram password and then enabled two factor authentication on his Snapchat account.

“That was when I realized my phone had no bars,” he recalled. “My phone was dead. I couldn’t even call 611,” [the mobile short number that all major wireless providers make available to reach their customer service departments].”

It appears that the perpetrator of the SIM swap abused not only internal knowledge of T-Mobile’s systems, but also a lax password reset process at Instagram. The social network allows users to enable notifications on their mobile phone when password resets or other changes are requested on the account.

But this isn’t exactly two-factor authentication because it also lets users reset their passwords via their mobile account by requesting a password reset link to be sent to their mobile device. Thus, if someone is in control of your mobile phone account, they can reset your Instagram password (and probably a bunch of other types of accounts).

Rosenzweig said even though he was able to reset his Instagram password and restore his old email address tied to the account, the damage was already done: All of his images and other content he’d shared on Instagram over the years was still tied to his account, but the attacker had succeeded in stealing his “par” username, leaving him with a slightly less sexy “par54384321,” (apparently chosen for him at random by either Instagram or the attacker).

As I wrote in November 2015, short usernames are something of a prestige or status symbol for many youngsters, and some are willing to pay surprising sums of money for them. Known as “OG” (short for “original” and also “original gangster”) in certain circles online, these can be usernames for virtually any service, from email accounts at Webmail providers to social media services like Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Youtube.

People who traffic in OG accounts prize them because they can make the account holder appear to have been a savvy, early adopter of the service before it became popular and before all of the short usernames were taken.

Rosenzweig said a friend helped him work with T-Mobile to regain control over his account and deactivate the rogue SIM card. He said he’s grateful the attackers who hijacked his phone for a few hours didn’t try to drain bank accounts that also rely on his mobile device for authentication.

“It definitely could have been a lot worse given the access they had,” he said.

But throughout all of this ordeal, it struck Rosenzweig as odd that he never once received an email from T-Mobile stating that his SIM card had been swapped.

“I’m a software engineer and I thought I had pretty good security habits to begin with,” he said. “I never re-use passwords, and it’s hard to see what I could have done differently here. The flaw here was with T-Mobile mostly, but also with Instagram. It seems like by having the ability to change one’s [Instagram] password by email or by mobile alone negates the second factor and it becomes either/or from the attackers point of view.”

Sources close to the investigation say T-Mobile is investigating a current or former employee as the likely culprit. The mobile company also acknowledged that it does not currently send customers an email to the email address on file when SIM swaps take place. A T-Mobile spokesperson said the company was considering changing the current policy, which sends the customer a text message to alert them about the SIM swap.

“We take our customers privacy and security very seriously and we regret that this happened,” the company said in a written statement. “We notify our customers immediately when SIM changes occur, but currently we do not send those notifications via email. We are actively looking at ways to improve our processes in this area.”

In summary, when a SIM swap happens on a T-Mobile account, T-Mobile will send a text message to the phone equipped with the new SIM card. But obviously that does not help someone who is the target of a SIM swap scam.

As we can see, just taking T-Mobile’s advice to place a personal identification number (PIN) on your account to block number port out scams does nothing to flag one’s account to make it harder to conduct SIM swap scams.

Rather, T-Mobile says customers need to call in to the company’s customer support line and place a separate “SIM lock” on their account, which can only be removed if the customer shows up at a retail store with ID (or, presumably, anyone with a fake ID who also knows the target’s Social Security Number and date of birth).

I checked with the other carriers to see if they support locking the customer’s current SIM to the account on file. I suspect they do, and will update this piece when/if I hear back from them. In the meantime, it might be best just to phone up your carrier and ask.

Please note that a SIM lock on your mobile account is separate from a SIM PIN that you can set via your mobile phone’s operating system. A SIM PIN is essentially an additional layer of physical security that locks the current SIM to your device, requiring you to input a special PIN when the device is powered on in order to call, text or access your data plan on your phone. This feature can help block thieves from using your phone or accessing your data if you lose your phone, but it won’t stop thieves from physically swapping in their own SIM card.

iPhone users can follow these instructions to set or change a device’s SIM PIN. Android users can see this page. You may need to enter a carrier-specific default PIN before being able to change it. By default, the SIM PIN for all Verizon and AT&T phones is “1111;” for T-Mobile and Sprint it should default to “1234.”

Be advised, however, that if you forget your SIM PIN and enter the wrong PIN too many times, you may end up having to contact your wireless carrier to obtain a special “personal unlocking key” (PUK).

At the very least, if you haven’t already done so please take a moment to place a port block PIN on your account. This story explains exactly how to do that.

Also, consider reviewing twofactorauth.org to see whether you are taking full advantage of any multi-factor authentication offerings so that your various accounts can’t be trivially hijacked if an attacker happens to guess, steal, phish or otherwise know your password.

One-time login codes produced by mobile apps such as Authy, Duo or Google Authenticator are more secure than one-time codes sent via automated phone call or text — mainly because crooks can’t steal these codes if they succeed in porting your mobile number to another service or by executing a SIM swap on your mobile account [full disclosure: Duo is an advertiser on this blog].

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/t-mobile-employee-made-unauthorized-sim-swap-to-steal-instagram-account/

Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

LocationSmart, a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site — without the need for any password or other form of authentication or authorization — KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The company took the vulnerable service offline early this afternoon after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, which verified that it could be used to reveal the location of any AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon phone in the United States to an accuracy of within a few hundred yards.

On May 10, The New York Times broke the news that a different cell phone location tracking company called Securus Technologies had been selling or giving away location data on customers of virtually any major mobile network provider to a sheriff’s office in Mississippi County, Mo.

On May 15, ZDnet.com ran a piece saying that Securus was getting its data through an intermediary — Carlsbad, CA-based LocationSmart.

Wednesday afternoon Motherboard published another bombshell: A hacker had broken into the servers of Securus and stolen 2,800 usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and hashed passwords of authorized Securus users. Most of the stolen credentials reportedly belonged to law enforcement officers across the country — stretching from 2011 up to this year.

Several hours before the Motherboard story went live, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Robert Xiao, a security researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who’d read the coverage of Securus and LocationSmart and had been poking around a demo tool that LocationSmart makes available on its Web site for potential customers to try out its mobile location technology.

LocationSmart’s demo is a free service that allows anyone to see the approximate location of their own mobile phone, just by entering their name, email address and phone number into a form on the site. LocationSmart then texts the phone number supplied by the user and requests permission to ping that device’s nearest cellular network tower.

Once that consent is obtained, LocationSmart texts the subscriber their approximate longitude and latitude, plotting the coordinates on a Google Street View map. [It also potentially collects and stores a great deal of technical data about your mobile device. For example, according to their privacy policy that information “may include, but is not limited to, device latitude/longitude, accuracy, heading, speed, and altitude, cell tower, Wi-Fi access point, or IP address information”].

But according to Xiao, a PhD candidate at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, this same service failed to perform basic checks to prevent anonymous and unauthorized queries. Translation: Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how Web sites work could abuse the LocationSmart demo site to figure out how to conduct mobile number location lookups at will, all without ever having to supply a password or other credentials.

“I stumbled upon this almost by accident, and it wasn’t terribly hard to do,” Xiao said. “This is something anyone could discover with minimal effort. And the gist of it is I can track most peoples’ cell phone without their consent.”

Xiao said his tests showed he could reliably query LocationSmart’s service to ping the cell phone tower closest to a subscriber’s mobile device. Xiao said he checked the mobile number of a friend several times over a few minutes while that friend was moving. By pinging the friend’s mobile network multiple times over several minutes, he was then able to plug the coordinates into Google Maps and track the friend’s directional movement.

“This is really creepy stuff,” Xiao said, adding that he’d also successfully tested the vulnerable service against one Telus Mobility mobile customer in Canada who volunteered to be found.

Before LocationSmart’s demo was taken offline today, KrebsOnSecurity pinged five different trusted sources, all of whom gave consent to have Xiao determine the whereabouts of their cell phones. Xiao was able to determine within a few seconds of querying the public LocationSmart service the near-exact location of the mobile phone belonging to all five of my sources.

LocationSmart’s demo page.

One of those sources said the longitude and latitude returned by Xiao’s queries came within 100 yards of their then-current location. Another source said the location found by the researcher was 1.5 miles away from his current location. The remaining three sources said the location returned for their phones was between approximately 1/5 to 1/3 of a mile at the time.

Reached for comment via phone, LocationSmart Founder and CEO Mario Proietti said the company was investigating.

“We don’t give away data,” Proietti said. “We make it available for legitimate and authorized purposes. It’s based on legitimate and authorized use of location data that only takes place on consent. We take privacy seriously and we’ll review all facts and look into them.”

LocationSmart’s home page features the corporate logos of all four the major wireless providers, as well as companies like Google, Neustar, ThreatMetrix, and U.S. Cellular. The company says its technologies help businesses keep track of remote employees and corporate assets, and that it helps mobile advertisers and marketers serve consumers with “geo-relevant promotions.”

LocationSmart’s home page lists many partners.

It’s not clear exactly how long LocationSmart has offered its demo service or for how long the service has been so permissive; this link from archive.org suggests it dates back to at least January 2017.

LocationSmart’s privacy policy says the company has security measures in place…”to protect our site from the loss or misuse of information that we have collected. Our servers are protected by firewalls and are physically located in secure data facilities to further increase security. While no computer is 100% safe from outside attacks, we believe that the steps we have taken to protect your personal information drastically reduce the likelihood of security problems to a level appropriate to the type of information involved.”

But these assurances may ring hollow to anyone with a cell phone who’s concerned about having their physical location revealed at any time. The component of LocationSmart’s Web site that can be abused to look up mobile location data at will is an insecure “application programming interface” or API — an interactive feature designed to display data in response to specific queries by Web site visitors. Although the LocationSmart’s demo page required users to consent to having their phone located by the service, LocationSmart apparently did nothing to prevent or authenticate direct interaction with the API itself.

API authentication weaknesses are not uncommon, but they can lead to the exposure of sensitive data on a great many people in a short period of time. In April 2018, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story of an API at the Web site of fast-casual bakery chain PaneraBread.com that exposed the names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and last four digits of credit cards on file for tens of millions of customers who’d signed up for an account at PaneraBread to order food online.

In a May 9 letter sent to the top four wireless carriers and to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in the wake of revelations about Securus’ alleged practices, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) urged all parties to take “proactive steps to prevent the unrestricted disclosure and potential abuse of private customer data.”

“Securus informed my office that it purchases real-time location information on AT&T’s customers — through a third party location aggregator that has a commercial relationship with the major wireless carriers — and routinely shares that information with its government clients,” Wyden wrote. “This practice skirts wireless carrier’s legal obligation to be the sole conduit by which the government may conduct surveillance of Americans’ phone records, and needlessly exposes millions of Americans to potential abuse and unchecked surveillance by the government.”

Securus, which reportedly gets its cell phone location data from LocationSmart, told The New York Times that it requires customers to upload a legal document — such as a warrant or affidavit — and to certify that the activity was authorized. But in his letter, Wyden said “senior officials from Securus have confirmed to my office that it never checks the legitimacy of those uploaded documents to determine whether they are in fact court orders and has dismissed suggestions that it is obligated to do so.”

Securus did not respond to requests for comment.

THE CARRIERS RESPOND

It remains unclear what, if anything, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon plan to do about any of this. A third-party firm leaking customer location information not only would almost certainly violate each mobile providers own stated privacy policies, but the real-time exposure of this data poses serious privacy and security risks for virtually all U.S. mobile customers (and perhaps beyond, although all my willing subjects were inside the United States).

None of the major carriers would confirm or deny a formal business relationship with LocationSmart, despite LocationSmart listing them each by corporate logo on its Web site.

AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer said AT&T does not permit the sharing of location information without customer consent or a demand from law enforcement.

“If we learn that a vendor does not adhere to our policy we will take appropriate action,” Greer said.

T-Mobile referred me to their privacy policy, which says T-Mobile follows the “best practices” document (PDF) for subscriber location data as laid out by the CTIA, the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry.

A T-Mobile spokesperson said that after receiving Sen. Wyden’s letter, the company quickly shut down any transaction of customer location data to Securus.

“We are continuing to investigate this matter,” a T-Mobile spokesperson wrote via email. T-Mobile has not yet responded to requests specifically about LocationSmart.

Verizon also referred me to their privacy policy.

Sprint officials shared the following statement:

“Protecting our customers’ privacy and security is a top priority, and we are transparent about our Privacy Policy. To be clear, we do not share or sell consumers’ sensitive information to third parties. We share personally identifiable geo-location information only with customer consent or in response to a lawful request such as a validated court order from law enforcement.”

“We will answer the questions raised in Sen. Wyden’s letter directly through appropriate channels. However, it is important to note that Sprint’s relationship with Securus does not include data sharing, and is limited to supporting efforts to curb unlawful use of contraband cellphones in correctional facilities.”

WHAT NOW?

Stephanie Lacambra, a staff attorney with the the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that wireless customers in the United States cannot opt out of location tracking by their own mobile providers. For starters, carriers constantly use this information to provide more reliable service to the customers. Also, by law wireless companies need to be able to ascertain at any time the approximate location of a customer’s phone in order to comply with emergency 911 regulations.

But unless and until Congress and federal regulators make it more clear how and whether customer location information can be shared with third-parties, mobile device customers may continue to have their location information potentially exposed by a host of third-party companies, Lacambra said.

“This is precisely why we have lobbied so hard for robust privacy protections for location information,” she said. “It really should be only that law enforcement is required to get a warrant for this stuff, and that’s the rule we’ve been trying to push for.”

Chris Calabrese is vice president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Calabrese said the current rules about mobile subscriber location information are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law passed in 1986 that hasn’t been substantially updated since.

“The law here is really out of date,” Calabrese said. “But I think any processes that involve going to third parties who don’t verify that it’s a lawful or law enforcement request — and that don’t make sure the evidence behind that request is legitimate — are hugely problematic and they’re major privacy violations.”

“I would be very surprised if any mobile carrier doesn’t think location information should be treated sensitively, and I’m sure none of them want this information to be made public,” Calabrese continued. “My guess is the carriers are going to come down hard on this, because it’s sort of their worst nightmare come true. We all know that cell phones are portable tracking devices. There’s a sort of an implicit deal where we’re okay with it because we get lots of benefits from it, but we all also assume this information should be protected. But when it isn’t, that presents a major problem and I think these examples would be a spur for some sort of legislative intervention if they weren’t fixed very quickly.”

For his part, Xiao says we’re likely to see more leaks from location tracking companies like Securus and LocationSmart as long as the mobile carriers are providing third party companies any access to customer location information.

“We’re going to continue to see breaches like this happen until access to this data can be much more tightly controlled,” he said.

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsmart-leaked-location-data-for-customers-of-all-major-u-s-mobile-carriers-in-real-time-via-its-web-site/

Detecting Cloned Cards at the ATM, Register

Much of the fraud involving counterfeit credit, ATM debit and retail gift cards relies on the ability of thieves to use cheap, widely available hardware to encode stolen data onto any card’s magnetic stripe. But new research suggests retailers and ATM operators could reliably detect counterfeit cards using a simple technology that flags cards which appear to have been altered by such tools.

A gift card purchased at retail with an unmasked PIN hidden behind a paper sleeve. Such PINs can be easily copied by an adversary, who waits until the card is purchased to steal the card’s funds. Image: University of Florida.

Researchers at the University of Florida found that account data encoded on legitimate cards is invariably written using quality-controlled, automated facilities that tend to imprint the information in uniform, consistent patterns.

Cloned cards, however, usually are created by hand with inexpensive encoding machines, and as a result feature far more variance or “jitter” in the placement of digital bits on the card’s stripe.

Gift cards can be extremely profitable and brand-building for retailers, but gift card fraud creates a very negative shopping experience for consumers and a costly conundrum for retailers. The FBI estimates that while gift card fraud makes up a small percentage of overall gift card sales and use, approximately $130 billion worth of gift cards are sold each year.

One of the most common forms of gift card fraud involves thieves tampering with cards inside the retailer’s store — before the cards are purchased by legitimate customers. Using a handheld card reader, crooks will swipe the stripe to record the card’s serial number and other data needed to duplicate the card.

If there is a PIN on the gift card packaging, the thieves record that as well. In many cases, the PIN is obscured by a scratch-off decal, but gift card thieves can easily scratch those off and then replace the material with identical or similar decals that are sold very cheaply by the roll online.

“They can buy big rolls of that online for almost nothing,” said Patrick Traynor, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Florida. “Retailers we’ve worked with have told us they’ve gone to their gift card racks and found tons of this scratch-off stuff on the ground near the racks.”

At this point the cards are still worthless because they haven’t yet been activated. But armed with the card’s serial number in PIN, thieves can simply monitor the gift card account at the retailer’s online portal and wait until the cards are paid for and activated at the checkout register by an unwitting shopper.

Once a card is activated, thieves can encode that card’s data onto any card with a magnetic stripe and use that counterfeit to purchase merchandise at the retailer. The stolen goods typically are then sold online or on the street. Meanwhile, the person who bought the card (or the person who received it as a gift) finds the card is drained of funds when they eventually get around to using it at a retail store.

The top two gift cards show signs that someone previously peeled back the protective sticker covering the redemption code. Image: Flint Gatwell.

Traynor and a team of five other University of Florida researchers partnered with retail giant WalMart to test their technology, which Traynor said can be easily and quite cheaply incorporated into point-of-sale systems at retail store cash registers. They said the WalMart trial demonstrated that researchers’ technology distinguished legitimate gift cards from clones with up to 99.3 percent accuracy.

While impressive, that rate still means the technology could still generate a “false positive” — erroneously flagging a legitimate customer as using a fraudulently obtained gift card — in about one in every XXX times. But Traynor said the retailers they spoke with in testing their equipment all indicated they would welcome any additional tools to curb the incidence of gift card fraud.

“We’ve talked with quite a few retail loss prevention folks,” he said. “Most said even if they can simply flag the transaction and make a note of the person [presenting the cloned card] that this would be a win for them. Often, putting someone on notice that loss prevention is watching is enough to make them stop — at least at that store. From our discussions with a few big-box retailers, this kind of fraud is probably their newest big concern, although they don’t talk much about it publicly. If the attacker does any better than simply cloning the card to a blank white card, they’re pretty much powerless to stop the attack, and that’s a pretty consistent story behind closed doors.”

BEYOND GIFT CARDS

Traynor said the University of Florida team’s method works even more accurately in detecting counterfeit ATM and credit cards, thanks to the dramatic difference in jitter between bank-issued cards and those cloned by thieves.

The magnetic material on most gift cards bears a quality that’s known in the industry as “low coercivity.” The stripe on so-called “LoCo” cards is usually brown in color, and new data can be imprinted on them quite cheaply using a machine that emits a relatively low or weak magnetic field. Hotel room keys also rely on LoCo stripes, which is why they tend to so easily lose their charge (particularly when placed next to something else with a magnetic charge).

In contrast, “high coercivity” (HiCo) stripes like those found on bank-issued debit and credit cards are usually black in color, hold their charge much longer, and are far more durable than LoCo cards. The downside of HiCo cards is that they are more expensive to produce, often relying on complex machinery and sophisticated manufacturing processes that encode the account data in highly uniform patterns.

These graphics illustrate the difference between original and cloned cards. Source: University of Florida.

Traynor said tests indicate their technology can detect cloned bank cards with virtually zero false-positives. In fact, when the University of Florida team first began seeing positive results from their method, they originally pitched the technique as a way for banks to cut losses from ATM skimming and other forms of credit and debit card fraud.

Yet, Traynor said fellow academicians who reviewed their draft paper told them that banks probably wouldn’t invest in the technology because most financial institutions are counting on newer, more sophisticated chip-based (EMV) cards to eventually reduce counterfeit fraud losses.

“The original pitch on the paper was actually focused on credit cards, but academic reviewers were having trouble getting past EMV — as in, “EMV solves this and it’s universally deployed – so why is this necessary?'”, Traynor said. “We just kept getting reviews back from other academics saying that credit and bank card fraud is a solved problem.”

The trouble is that virtually all chip cards still store account data in plain text on the magnetic stripe on the back of the card — mainly so that the cards can be used in ATM and retail locations that are not yet equipped to read chip-based cards. As a result, even European countries whose ATMs all require chip-based cards remain heavily targeted by skimming gangs because the data on the chip card’s magnetic stripe can still be copied by a skimmer and used by thieves in the United States.

The University of Florida researchers recently were featured in an Associated Press story about an anti-skimming technology they developed and dubbed the “Skim Reaper.” The device, which can be made cheaply using a 3D printer, fits into the mouth of ATM’s card acceptance slot and can detect the presence of extra card reading devices that skimmer thieves may have fitted on top of or inside the cash machine.

The AP story quoted a New York Police Department financial crimes detective saying the Skim Reapers worked remarkably well in detecting the presence of ATM skimmers. But Traynor said many ATM operators and owners are simply uninterested in paying to upgrade their machines with their technology — in large part because the losses from ATM card counterfeiting are mostly assumed by consumers and financial institutions.

“We found this when we were talking around with the cops in New York City, that the incentive of an ATM bodega owner to upgrade an ATM is very low,” Traynor said. “Why should they go to that extent? Upgrades required to make these machines [chip-card compliant] are significant in cost, and the motivation is not necessarily there.”

Retailers also could choose to produce gift cards with embedded EMV chips that make the cards more expensive and difficult to counterfeit. But doing so likely would increase the cost of manufacturing by $2 to $3 per card, Traynor said.

“Putting a chip on the card dramatically increases the cost, so a $10 gift card might then have a $3 price added,” he said. “And you can imagine the reaction a customer might have when asked to pay $13 for a gift card that has a $10 face value.”

A copy of the University of Florida’s research paper is available here (PDF).

The FBI has compiled a list of recommendations for reducing the likelihood of being victimized by gift card fraud. For starters, when buying in-store don’t just pick cards right off the rack. Look for ones that are sealed in packaging or stored securely behind the checkout counter. Also check the scratch-off area on the back to look for any evidence of tampering.

Here are some other tips from the FBI:

-If possible, only buy cards online directly from the store or restaurant.
-If buying from a secondary gift card market website, check reviews and only buy from or sell to reputable dealers.
-Check the gift card balance before and after purchasing the card to verify the correct balance on the card.
-The re-seller of a gift card is responsible for ensuring the correct balance is on the gift card, not the merchant whose name is listed. If you are scammed, some merchants in some situations will replace the funds. Ask for, but don’t expect, help.
-When selling a gift card through an online marketplace, do not provide the buyer with the card’s PIN until the transaction is complete.
-When purchasing gift cards online, be leery of auction sites selling gift cards at a steep discount or in bulk.

from
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/detecting-cloned-cards-at-the-atm-register/