Would You Use This ATM?

One basic tenet of computer security is this: If you can’t vouch for a networked thing’s physical security, you cannot also vouch for its cybersecurity. That’s because in most cases, networked things really aren’t designed to foil a skilled and determined attacker who can physically connect his own devices. So you can imagine my shock and horror seeing a Cisco switch and wireless antenna sitting exposed atop of an ATM out in front of a bustling grocery store in my hometown of Northern Virginia.

I’ve long warned readers to avoid stand-alone ATMs in favor of wall-mounted and/or bank-operated ATMs. In many cases, thieves who can access the networking cables of an ATM are hooking up their own sniffing devices to grab cash machine card data flowing across the ATM network in plain text.

But I’ve never before seen a setup quite this braindead. Take a look:

An ATM in front of a grocery store in Northern Virginia.

Now let’s have a closer look at the back of this machine to see what we’re dealing with:

Need to get online in a jiffy? No problem, this ATM has plenty of network jacks for you to plug into. What could go wrong?

Daniel Battisto, the longtime KrebsOnSecurity reader who alerted me to this disaster waiting to happen, summed up my thoughts on it pretty well in an email.

“I’d like to assume, for the sake of sanity, that the admin who created this setup knows that Cisco security is broken relatively simple once physical access is gained,” said Battisto, a physical and IT security professional. “I’d also like to assume that all unused interfaces are shutdown, and port-security has been configured on the interfaces in use. I’d also like to assume that the admin established a good console login.”

While it’s impossible to test the security of this setup without tampering with the devices, “considering that this was left like this in the front vestibule of a grocery store with no cameras around AND the console cable still attached, my above assumptions are likely invalid,” Battisto observed.

“In my experience, IT departments often overlook basic security practices, and double down on the oversight by not implementing proper physical security controls (you’d be surprised, maybe, at the number of sensitive server rooms that I’ve been in that had the keys to all of the racks taped to the outside of the doors),” he said.

If something doesn’t look right about an ATM, don’t use it and move on to the next one. It’s not worth the hassle and risk associated with having your checking account emptied of cash. Also, it’s best to favor ATMs that are installed inside of a building or wall as opposed to free-standing machines, which may be more vulnerable to tampering.

If you liked this piece, check out my entire series on skimming devices, All About Skimmers.

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Kimpton Hotels Probes Card Breach Claims

Kimpton Hotels, a boutique hotel brand that includes 62 properties across the United States, said today it is investigating reports of a credit card breach at multiple locations.

On July 22, KrebsOnSecurity reached out to San Francisco-based Kimpton after hearing from three different sources in the financial industry about a pattern of card fraud that suggested a card breach at close to two-dozen Kimpton hotels across the country.

Today, Kimpton responded by issuing and posting the following statement:

“Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants takes the protection of payment card data very seriously. Kimpton was recently made aware of a report of unauthorized charges occurring on cards that were previously used legitimately at Kimpton properties. As soon as we learned of this, we immediately launched an investigation and engaged a leading security firm to provide us with support.”

“We are committed to swiftly resolving this matter. In the meantime, and in line with best practice, we recommend that individuals closely monitor their payment card account statements. If there are unauthorized charges, individuals should immediately notify their bank. Payment card network rules generally state that cardholders are not responsible for such charges.”

Assuming a breach at Kimpton is confirmed, the company would join a long list of hotel brands that have acknowledged card breaches over the last year after prompting by KrebsOnSecurity, including Trump Hotels (twice), Hilton, Mandarin Oriental, and White Lodging (twice). Breaches also have hit hospitality chains Starwood Hotels and Hyatt.

In many of those incidents, thieves had planted malicious software on the point-of-sale devices at restaurants and bars inside of the hotel chains. However, the source and extent of the apparent breach at Kimpton properties is still unknown.

Point-of-sale based malware has driven most of the credit card breaches over the past two years, including intrusions at Target and Home Depot, as well as breaches at a slew of point-of-sale vendors. The malware usually is installed via hacked remote administration tools. Once the attackers have their malware loaded onto the point-of-sale devices, they can remotely capture data from each card swiped at that cash register.

Thieves can then sell the data to crooks who specialize in encoding the stolen data onto any card with a magnetic stripe, and using the cards to buy gift cards and high-priced goods from big-box stores like Target and Best Buy.

Readers should remember that they’re not liable for fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards, but they still have to report the unauthorized transactions. There is no substitute for keeping a close eye on your card statements. Also, consider using credit cards instead of debit cards; having your checking account emptied of cash while your bank sorts out the situation can be a hassle and lead to secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance).

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Trump, DNC, RNC Flunk Email Security Test

Donald J. Trump has repeatedly bashed Sen. Hillary Clinton for handling classified documents on her private email server, suggesting that anyone who is so lax with email security isn’t fit to become president. But a closer look at the Web sites for each candidate shows that in contrast to hillaryclinton.com, donaldjtrump.com has failed to take full advantage of a free and open email security technology designed to stymie email spoofing and phishing attacks.

At issue is a fairly technical proposed standard called DMARC. Short for “domain-based messaging authentication reporting and conformance,” DMARC tries to solve a problem that has plagued email since its inception: It’s surprisingly difficult to for email providers and end users alike to tell whether a given email is real – i.e. that it really was sent by the person or organization identified in the “from:” portion of the missive.

DMARC may not yet be widely deployed beyond the major email providers, but that’s about to change. Google announced late last year that it will soon move gmail.com to a policy of rejecting any messages that don’t pass the authentication checks spelled out in the DMARC specification. And other are already moving in the same direction.

Probably the easiest way to understand DMARC is to walk through a single site’s records. According to the DMARC compliance lookup tool at dmarcian.com — a DMARC awareness, training and support site — hillaryclinton.com has fully implemented DMARC. This means that the campaign has posted a public policy that enables email providers like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to quickly determine whether a message claiming to have been sent from hillaryclinton.com was actually sent from that domain.

Specifically, (and this is where things can quickly descend into a Geek Factor 5 realm of nerdiness) DMARC sits on top of two existing technologies that try to make email easy to identify: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).

SPF is basically a list of Internet addresses and domains which are authorized to send email on behalf of hillaryclinton.com (in case anyone’s interested, here’s a copy of the SPF record for hillaryclinton.com. DKIM allows email receivers to verify that a piece of email originated from an Internet domain through the use of public key cryptography. Deploying both technologies gives email receivers two ways to figure out if a piece of email is legitimate.

The DMARC record for Clinton’s site includes the text string “p=quarantine.” The “p” bit stands for policy, and “quarantine” means the Web site’s administrators have instructed email providers to quarantine all messages sent from addresses or domains not on that list and not signed with DKIM – effectively consigning them to the intended recipient’s “spam” or “junk” folder. Another blocking option available is “p=reject,” which tells email providers to outright drop or reject any mail sent from domains or addresses not specified in the organization’s SPF records and lacking any appropriate DKIM signatures.

Turning Dmarcian.com’s tool against donaldjtrump.com, we can see that although the site is thinking about turning on DMARC, it hasn’t actually done so yet. The site’s DMARC records are set to the third option — “p=none” — which means the site administrators haven’t yet asked email providers to block or quarantine any messages that fail to match site’s SPF records. Rather, the site merely asks email providers to report to “postmaster@donaldjtrump.com” about the source of any email messages claiming to have been sent by that domain.

Dmarcian founder Tim Draegen said this “p=none” setting of DMARC is a data collection feature designed to give organizations a better idea of their total email footprint before setting strict DMARC “reject” or “quarantine” rules.

Why on earth would any organization not know where its email was coming from? As this video at Dmarcian notes, one reason is that anti-spam and anti-malware filters at major email providers have essentially spawned an entire email deliverability industry that exists solely to help organizations keep their emails flowing into inboxes worldwide. As a result, many companies rely on an array of third-party providers to send messages on their behalf, yet those business relationships may not be immediately evident to the geeks in charge of setting up DMARC rules for the organization.

“DMARC was designed so that it says, ‘All you email providers….give me feedback on how you’re seeing email from us being received,'” Draegen said. “Based on that feedback, the organization can then can go back and identify and specify their legitimate sources of email, and then tell the email providers, ‘Hey, if you get a piece of email not covered by these sources, reject or quarantine it.”

As for why more organizations haven’t deployed DMARC already, Draegen said larger entities often have multiple divisions (think marketing and sales teams) that may develop their own methods of getting their email messages out. Trouble is, those divisions don’t always do a great job at informing the tech folks of what they’re up to.

The “p=none” option thus gives organizations an easy and free way to tell email providers to report any and all mail claiming to be sent by the domain in question. Armed with that information, the organization can then set strict, global policies about which emails to reject or quarantine going forward.

“It really depends on the size of the infrastructure or complexity of the company,” Draegen said. “The tech part of DMARC is pretty easy, but what we tend to see in large companies is that there’s a domain that has traditionally been shared by everyone at the organization, and it often involves a lot of hard work to find all the legitimate sources of email for the organization.”

Alexander Garcia-Tobar, CEO and co-founder of email security firm Valimail, agreed.

“The answer is that it’s extremely tricky to get right,” he said, of identifying all of a company’s legitimate email sending activity. “Most organizations are lot more concerned about blocking good stuff going out, until they get phished.”

So how long does it take for organizations to gather enough information with DMARC’s “p=none” option in order to build an effective (yet not overly restrictive) “quarantine” or “reject” policy? For larger organizations, this can often amount to a long, laborious process, Draegen said. For smaller outfits — such as presidential campaigns — it shouldn’t take long to gather enough data with DMARC’s “p=none” option to fashion targeted rules that block phishing and spoofing attacks without endangering legitimate outgoing emails.

I asked Draegen whether he thought the Trump Campaign was somehow derelict in not fully adopting DMARC, given the candidate’s statements about how anyone who’s lax with email security doesn’t deserve to be the next Command-in-Chief of the United States. Draegen admitted he “can’t stomach” Trump, and that he found Clinton’s email scandal likewise nauseating given a lifetime of experience as an email administrator and the challenges involved in protecting a private email server from determined cyber adversaries.

But Draegen said DMARC compliance is one of the easiest and cheapest ways that any organization can use to better protect itself and its customers from email-based phishing and malware attacks.

“If you’re going to invest in click-tracking technologies or enterprise security products of any flavor and you haven’t yet done DMARC, you’re wasting your time,” Draegen said, noting that enabling DMARC can often help organizations increase delivery rates by as much as five or ten percent. And for campaigns that aren’t adopting DMARC, that may mean lots of email appeals to voters (and, more importantly, potential donors) go undelivered.

“Get the easy, free tech stuff done first because you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck by deploying DMARC,” he said. “And if you’re a presidential candidate, someone at your campaign should recognize that the first thing you do is enable DMARC.”

Incidentally, given the breaking news today about Russian hackers reportedly hacking into networks at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — allegedly to make Mr. Trump a more sympathetic candidate — it’s worth noting that while hillaryclinton.com takes full advantage of DMARC, the same cannot be said of the Web sites for the DNC (dnc.org/democrats.org) or the Republican National Committee (gop.com/rnc.org).

Further reading: dmarc.org.

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Canadian Man Behind Popular ‘Orcus RAT’

Far too many otherwise intelligent and talented software developers these days apparently think they can get away with writing, selling and supporting malicious software and then couching their commerce as a purely legitimate enterprise. Here’s the story of how I learned the real-life identity of Canadian man who’s laboring under that same illusion as proprietor of one of the most popular and affordable tools for hacking into someone else’s computer.

Earlier this week I heard from Daniel Gallagher, a security professional who occasionally enjoys analyzing new malicious software samples found in the wild. Gallagher said he and members of @malwrhunterteam and @MalwareTechBlog recently got into a Twitter fight with the author of Orcus RAT, a tool they say was explicitly designed to help users remotely compromise and control computers that don’t belong to them.

A still frame from a Youtube video demonstrating Orcus RAT’s keylogging ability to steal passwords from Facebook and other sites.

The author of Orcus — a person going by the nickname “Ciriis Mcgraw” a.k.a. “Armada” on Twitter and other social networks — claimed that his RAT was in fact a benign “remote administration tool” designed for use by network administrators and not a “remote access Trojan” as critics charged. Gallagher and others took issue with that claim, pointing out that they were increasingly encountering computers that had been infected with Orcus unbeknownst to the legitimate owners of those machines.

The malware researchers noted another reason that Mcgraw couldn’t so easily distance himself from how his clients used the software: He and his team are providing ongoing technical support and help to customers who have purchased Orcus and are having trouble figuring out how to infect new machines or hide their activities online.

What’s more, the range of features and plugins supported by Armada, they argued, go well beyond what a system administrator would look for in a legitimate remote administration client like Teamviewer, including the ability to launch a keylogger that records the victim’s every computer keystroke, as well as a feature that lets the user peek through a victim’s Web cam and disable the light on the camera that alerts users when the camera is switched on.

A new feature of Orcus announced July 7 lets users configure the RAT so that it evades digital forensics tools used by malware researchers, including an anti-debugger and an option that prevents the RAT from running inside of a virtual machine.

Other plugins offered directly from Orcus’s tech support page (PDF) and authored by the RAT’s support team include a “survey bot” designed to “make all of your clients do surveys for cash;” a “USB/.zip/.doc spreader,” intended to help users “spread a file of your choice to all clients via USB/.zip/.doc macros;” a “Virustotal.com checker” made to “check a file of your choice to see if it had been scanned on VirusTotal;” and an “Adsense Injector,” which will “hijack ads on pages and replace them with your Adsense ads and disable adblocker on Chrome.”

WHO IS ARMADA?

Gallagher said he was so struck by the guy’s “smugness” and sheer chutzpah that he decided to look closer at any clues that Ciriis Mcgraw might have left behind as to his real-world identity and location. Sure enough, he found that Ciriis Mcgraw also has a Youtube account under the same name, and that a video Mcgraw posted in July 2013 pointed to a 33-year-old security guard from Toronto, Canada.

Gallagher noticed that the video — a bystander recording on the scene of a police shooting of a Toronto man — included a link to the domain policereview[dot]info. A search of the registration records attached to that Web site name show that the domain was registered to a John Revesz in Toronto and to the email address john.revesz@gmail.com.

A reverse WHOIS lookup ordered from Domaintools.com shows the same john.revesz@gmail.com address was used to register at least 20 other domains, including “thereveszfamily.com,” “johnrevesz.com, revesztechnologies[dot]com,” and — perhaps most tellingly —  “lordarmada.info“.

Johnrevesz[dot]com is no longer online, but this cached copy of the site from the indispensable archive.org includes his personal résumé, which states that John Revesz is a network security administrator whose most recent job in that capacity was as an IT systems administrator for TD Bank. Revesz’s LinkedIn profile indicates that for the past year at least he has served as a security guard for GardaWorld International Protective Services, a private security firm based in Montreal.

Revesz’s CV also says he’s the owner of the aforementioned Revesz Technologies, but it’s unclear whether that business actually exists; the company’s Web site currently redirects visitors to a series of sites promoting spammy and scammy surveys, come-ons and giveaways.

IT’S IN THE EULA, STUPID!

Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, Revesz seemed surprised that I’d connected the dots, but beyond that did not try to disavow ownership of the Orcus RAT.

“Profit was never the intentional goal, however with the years of professional IT networking experience I have myself, knew that proper correct development and structure to the environment is no free venture either,” Revesz wrote in reply to questions about his software. “Utilizing my 15+ years of IT experience I have helped manage Orcus through its development.”

Revesz continued:

“As for your legalities question.  Orcus Remote Administrator in no ways violates Canadian laws for software development or sale.  We neither endorse, allow or authorize any form of misuse of our software.  Our EULA [end user license agreement] and TOS [terms of service] is very clear in this matter. Further we openly and candidly work with those prudent to malware removal to remove Orcus from unwanted use, and lock out offending users which may misuse our software, just as any other company would.”

Revesz said none of the aforementioned plugins were supported by Orcus, and were all developed by third-party developers, and that “Orcus will never allow implementation of such features, and or plugins would be outright blocked on our part.”

In an apparent contradiction to that claim, plugins that allow Orcus users to disable the Webcam light on a computer running the software and one that enables the RAT to be used as a “stresser” to knock sites and individuals users offline are available directly from Orcus Technologies’ Github page.

Revesz’s also offers a service to help people cover their tracks online. Using his alter ego “Armada” on the hacker forum Hackforums[dot]net, Revesz also sells a “bulletproof dynamic DNS service” that promises not to keep records of customer activity.

Dynamic DNS services allow users to have Web sites hosted on servers that frequently change their Internet addresses. This type of service is useful for people who want to host a Web site on a home-based Internet address that may change from time to time, because dynamic DNS services can be used to easily map the domain name to the user’s new Internet address whenever it happens to change.

Unfortunately, these dynamic DNS providers are extremely popular in the attacker community, because they allow bad guys to keep their malware and scam sites up even when researchers manage to track the attacking IP address and convince the ISP responsible for that address to disconnect the malefactor. In such cases, dynamic DNS allows the owner of the attacking domain to simply re-route the attack site to another Internet address that he controls.

Free dynamic DNS providers tend to report or block suspicious or outright malicious activity on their networks, and may well share evidence about the activity with law enforcement investigators. In contrast, Armada’s dynamic DNS service is managed solely by him, and he promises in his ad on Hackforums that the service — to which he sells subscriptions of various tiers for between $30-$150 per year — will not log customer usage or report anything to law enforcement.

According to writeups by Kaspersky Lab and Heimdal Security, Revesz’s dynamic DNS service has been seen used in connection with malicious botnet activity by another RAT known as Adwind.  Indeed, Revesz’s service appears to involve the domain “nullroute[dot]pw”, which is one of 21 domains registered to a “Ciriis Mcgraw,” (as well as orcus[dot]pw and orcusrat[dot]pw).

I asked Gallagher (the researcher who originally tipped me off about Revesz’s activities) whether he was persuaded at all by Revesz’s arguments that Orcus was just a tool and that Revesz wasn’t responsible for how it was used.

Gallagher said he and his malware researcher friends had private conversations with Revesz in which he seemed to acknowledge that some aspects of the RAT went too far, and promised to release software updates to remove certain objectionable functionalities. But Gallagher said those promises felt more like the actions of someone trying to cover himself.

“I constantly try to question my assumptions and make sure I’m playing devil’s advocate and not jumping the gun,” Gallagher said. “But I think he’s well aware that what he’s doing is hurting people, it’s just now he knows he’s under the microscope and trying to do and say enough to cover himself if it ever comes down to him being questioned by law enforcement.”

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Cici’s Pizza: Card Breach at 130+ Locations

Cici’s Pizza, a Coppell, Texas-based fast-casual restaurant chain, today acknowledged a credit card breach at more than 135 locations. The disclosure comes more than a month after KrebsOnSecurity first broke the news of the intrusion, offering readers a sneak peak inside the sprawling cybercrime machine that thieves used siphon card data from Cici’s customers in real-time.

In a statement released Tuesday evening, Cici’s said that in early March 2016, the company received reports from several of its restaurant locations that point-of-sale systems were not working properly.

“The point-of-sale vendor immediately began an investigation to assess the problem and initiated heightened security measures,” the company said in a press release. “After malware was found on some point-of-sale systems, the company began a restaurant-by-restaurant review and remediation, and retained a third-party cybersecurity firm, 403 Labs, to perform a forensic analysis.”

According to Cici’s, “the vast majority of the intrusions began in March of 2016,” but the company acknowledges that the breach started as early as 2015 at some locations. Cici’s said it was confident the malware has been removed from all stores. A list of affected locations is here (PDF).

On July 3, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity reported that sources at multiple financial institutions suspected a card breach at Cici’s. That story featured a quote from Stephen P. Warne, vice president of service and support for Datapoint POS, a point-of-sale provider that services a large number of Cici’s locations. Warne told this author that the fraudsters responsible for the intrusions had tricked employees into installing the card-stealing malicious software.

On July 8, 2016, this author published Slicing Into a Point-of-Sale Botnet, which brought readers inside of the very crime machine the perpetrators were using to steal credit card data in real-time from Cici’s customers. Along with card data, the malware had intercepted private notes that Cici’s Pizza employees left to one another about important developments between job shifts.

Point-of-sale based malware has driven most of the credit card breaches over the past two years, including intrusions at Target and Home Depot, as well as breaches at a slew of point-of-sale vendors. The malware usually is installed via hacked remote administration tools. Once the attackers have their malware loaded onto the point-of-sale devices, they can remotely capture data from each card swiped at that cash register.

Thieves can then sell the data to crooks who specialize in encoding the stolen data onto any card with a magnetic stripe, and using the cards to buy gift cards and high-priced goods from big-box stores like Target and Best Buy.

Readers should remember that they’re not liable for fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards, but they still have to report the phony transactions. There is no substitute for keeping a close eye on your card statements. Also, consider using credit cards instead of debit cards; having your checking account emptied of cash while your bank sorts out the situation can be a hassle and lead to secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance).

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Carbanak Gang Tied to Russian Security Firm?

Among the more plunderous cybercrime gangs is a group known as “Carbanak,” Eastern European hackers blamed for stealing more than a billion dollars from banks. Today we’ll examine some compelling clues that point to a connection between the Carbanak gang’s staging grounds and a Russian security firm that claims to work with some of the world’s largest brands in cybersecurity.

The Carbanak gang derives its name from the banking malware used in countless high-dollar cyberheists. The gang is perhaps best known for hacking directly into bank networks using poisoned Microsoft Office files, and then using that access to force bank ATMs into dispensing cash. Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab estimates that the Carbanak Gang has likely stolen upwards of USD $1 billion — but mostly from Russian banks.

Image: Kaspersky

I recently heard from security researcher Ron Guilmette, an anti-spam crusader whose sleuthing has been featured on several occasions on this site and in the blog I wrote for The Washington Post. Guilmette said he’d found some interesting commonalities in the original Web site registration records for a slew of sites that all have been previously responsible for pushing malware known to be used by the Carbanak gang.

For example, the domains “weekend-service[dot]com” “coral-travel[dot]com” and “freemsk-dns[dot]com” all were documented by multiple security firms as distribution hubs for Carbanak crimeware. Historic registration or “WHOIS” records maintained by Domaintools.com for all three domains contain the same phone and fax numbers for what appears to be a Xicheng Co. in China — 1066569215 and 1066549216, each preceded by either a +86 (China’s country code) or +01 (USA). Each domain record also includes the the same contact address: “williamdanielsen@yahoo.com“.

According to data gathered by ThreatConnect, a threat intelligence provider [full disclosure: ThreatConnect is an advertiser on this blog], at least 484 domains were registered by to the williamdanielsen@yahoo.com address or to one of 26 other email addresses that listed the same phone numbers and Chinese company.  “At least 304 of these domains have been associated with a malware plugin [that] has previously been attributed to Carbanak activity,” ThreatConnect told KrebsOnSecurity.

Going back to those two phone numbers, 1066569215 and 1066549216; at first glance they appear to be sequential, but closer inspection reveals they differ slightly in the middle. Among the very few domains registered to those Chinese phone numbers that hasn’t been seen launching malware is a Web site called “cubehost[dot]biz,” which according to records was registered in Sept. 2013 to a 28-year-old Artem Tveritinov of Perm, Russia.

Cubehost[dot]biz is a dormant site, but it appears to be the sister property to a Russian security firm called Infocube (also spelled “Infokube”). The InfoKube web site — infokube.ru — is also registered to Mr. Tveritinov of Perm, Russia; there are dozens of records in the WHOIS history for infokube.ru, but only the oldest, original record from 2011 contains the email address atveritinov@gmail.com. 

That same email address was used to register a four-year-old profile account at the popular Russian social networking site Vkontakte for Artyom “LioN” Tveritinov from Perm, Russia. The “LioN” bit is an apparent reference to an Infokube anti-virus product by the same name.

Mr. Tveritinov is quoted as “the CEO of InfoKub” in a press release from FalconGaze, a Moscow-based data security firm that partnered with the InfoKube to implement “data protection and employee monitoring” at a Russian commercial research institute. InfoKube’s own press releases say the company also has been hired to develop “a system to protect information from unauthorized access” undertaken for the City of Perm, Russia, and for consulting projects relating to “information security” undertaken for and with the State Ministry of Interior of Russia.

The company’s Web site claims that InfoKube partners with a variety of established security firms — including Symantec and Kaspersky. The latter confirmed InfoKube was “a very minor partner” of Kaspersky’s, mostly involved in systems integration. Zyxel, another partner listed on InfoKube’s partners page, said it had no partners named InfoKube. Slovakia-based security firm ESET said “Infokube is not and has never been a partner of ESET in Russia.”

Presented with Guilmette’s findings, I was keen to ask Mr. Tveritinov how the phone and fax numbers for a Chinese entity whose phone number has become synonymous with cybercrime came to be copied verbatim into Cubehost’s Web site registration records. I sent requests for comment to Mr. Tveritinov via email and through his Vkontakte page.

Initially, I received a friendly reply from Mr. Tveritinov via email expressing curiosity about my inquiry, and asking how I’d discovered his email address. In the midst of composing a more detailed follow-up reply, I noticed that the Vkontakte social networking profile that Tveritinov had maintained regularly since April 2012 was being permanently deleted before my eyes. Tveritinov’s profile page and photos actually disappeared from the screen I had up on one monitor as I was in the process of composing an email to him in the other.

Not long after Tveritinov’s Vkontakte page was deleted, I heard from him via email. Ignoring my question about the sudden disappearance of his social media account, Tveritinov said he never registered cubehost.biz and that his personal information was stolen and used in the registration records for cubehost.biz.

“Our company never did anything illegal, and conducts all activities according to the laws of Russian Federation,” Tveritinov said in an email. “Also, it’s quite stupid to use our own personal data to register domains to be used for crimes, as [we are] specialists in the information security field.”

Turns out, InfoKube/Cubehost also runs an entire swath of Internet addresses managed by Petersburg Internet Network (PIN) Ltd., an ISP in Saint Petersburg, Russia that has a less-than-stellar reputation for online badness.

For example, many of the aforementioned domain names that security firms have conclusively tied to Carbanak distribution (e.g., freemsk-dns[dot].com) are hosted in Internet address space assigned to Cubehost. A search of the RIPE registration records for the block of addresses at 146.185.239.0/24 turns up a physical address in Ras al Khaimah, an emirate of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that has sought to build a reputation as a tax shelter and a place where it is easy to create completely anonymous offshore companies. The same listing says abuse complaints about Internet addresses in that address block should be sent to “info@cubehost.biz.”

This PIN hosting provider in St. Petersburg has achieved a degree of notoriety in its own right and is probably worthy of additional scrutiny given its reputation as a haven for all kinds of online ne’er-do-wells. In fact, Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Internet performance management firm Dyn, has referred to the company as “…perhaps the leading contender for being named the Mos Eisley of the Internet” (a clever reference to the spaceport full of alien outlaws in the 1977 movie Star Wars).

Madory explained that PIN’s hard-won bad reputation stems from the ISP’s documented propensity for absconding with huge chunks of Internet address blocks that don’t actually belong to it, and then re-leasing that purloined Internet address space to spammers and other Internet miscreants.

For his part, Guilmette points to a decade’s worth of other nefarious activity going on at the Internet address space apparently assigned to Tveritinov and his company. For example, in 2013 Microsoft seized a bunch of domains parked there that were used as controllers for Citadel online banking malware, and all of those domains had the same “Xicheng Co.” data in their WHOIS records.  A Sept. 2011 report on the security blog dynamoo.com notes several domains with that Xicheng Co. WHOIS information showing up in online banking heists powered by the Sinowal banking Trojan way back in 2006.

“If Mr. Tveritinov, has either knowledge of, or direct involvement in even a fraction of the criminal goings-on within his address block, then the possibility that he may perhaps also have a role in other and additional criminal enterprises… including perhaps even the Carbanak cyber banking heists… becomes all the more plausible and probable,” Guilmette said.

It remains unclear to what extent the Carbanak gang is still active. Last month, authorities in Russia arrested 50 people allegedlyl tied to the organized cybercrime group, whose members reportedly hail from Russia, China, Ukraine and other parts of Europe. The action was billed as the biggest ever crackdown on financial hackers in Russia.

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Cybercrime Overtakes Traditional Crime in UK

In a notable sign of the times, cybercrime has now surpassed all other forms of crime in the United Kingdom, the nation’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warned in a new report. It remains unclear how closely the rest of the world tracks the U.K.’s experience, but the report reminds readers that the problem is likely far worse than the numbers suggest, noting that cybercrime is vastly under-reported by victims.

The NCA’s Cyber Crime Assessment 2016, released July 7, 2016, highlights the need for stronger law enforcement and business partnership to fight cybercrime. According to the NCA, cybercrime emerged as the largest proportion of total crime in the U.K., with “cyber enabled fraud” making up 36 percent of all crime reported, and “computer misuse” accounting for 17 percent.

One explanation for the growth of cybercrime reports in the U.K. may be that the Brits are getting better at tracking it. The report notes that the U.K. Office of National Statistics only began including cybercrime for the first time last year in its annual Crime Survey for England and Wales.

“The ONS estimated that there were 2.46 million cyber incidents and 2.11 million victims of cyber crime in the U.K. in 2015,” the report’s authors wrote. “These figures highlight the clear shortfall in established reporting, with only 16,349 cyber dependent and approximately 700,000 cyber-enabled incidents reported to Action Fraud over the same period.”

The report also focuses on the increasing sophistication of organized cybercrime gangs that develop and deploy targeted, complex malicious software — such as Dridex and Dyre, which are aimed at emptying consumer and business bank accounts in the U.K. and elsewhere.

Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., said cyber fraudsters in the U.K. bring their best game when targeting U.K. banks, which generally require far more stringent customer-facing security measures than U.S. banks — including smart cards and one-time tokens.

“I’m definitely hearing more about advanced attacks on U.K. banks than in the U.S.,” Litan said, adding that the anti-fraud measures put in place by U.K. banks have forced cybercriminals to focus more on social engineering U.K. retail and commercial banking customers.

Litan said if organized cybercrime gangs prefer to pick on U.K. banks, businesses and consumers, it may have more to do with convenience for the fraudsters than anything else. After all, she said, London is just two time zones behind Moscow, whereas the closest time zone in the U.S. is 7 hours behind.

“In most cases, the U.K. banks are pretty close to the fraudster’s own time zone, it’s a language the criminals can speak, and they’ve studied the banks’ systems up close and know how to get around security controls,” Litan said. “Just because you have more fraud controls doesn’t mean the fraudsters can’t beat them, it just forces the [crooks] to stay on top of their game. Why would you want to stay up all night doing online fraud against banks in the U.S. when you’d rather be out drinking with your buddies?”

The report observes that “despite the growth in scale and complexity of cyber crime and intensifying attacks, visible damage and losses have not (yet) been large enough to impact long term on shareholder value. The UK has yet to experience a cyber attack on business as damaging and publicly visible as the attack on the Target US retail chain.”

Although it would likely be difficult for a large, multinational European company to hide a breach similar in scope to that of the 2013 breach at Target, European nations generally have not had to adhere to the same data breach disclosure laws that are currently on the books in nearly every U.S. state — laws which prompt multiple U.S. companies each week to publicly acknowledge when they’ve suffered data breaches.

However, under the new European Union General Data Protection Regulation, companies that do business in Europe or with European customers will need to disclose “a breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed.”

It may be some time yet before U.K. and European businesses start coming forward about data breaches: For better or worse, the GDPR requirements don’t go into full effect for two more years.

Hat tip to Trend Micro’s blog as the inspiration for this post.

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The Value of a Hacked Company

Most organizations only grow in security maturity the hard way — that is, from the intense learning that takes place in the wake of a costly data breach. That may be because so few company leaders really grasp the centrality of computer and network security to the organization’s overall goals and productivity, and fewer still have taken an honest inventory of what may be at stake in the event that these assets are compromised.

If you’re unsure how much of your organization’s strategic assets may be intimately tied up with all this technology stuff, ask yourself what would be of special worth to a network intruder. Here’s a look at some of the key corporate assets that may be of interest and value to modern bad guys.

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list; I’m sure we can all think of other examples, and perhaps if I receive enough suggestions from readers I’ll update this graphic. But the point is that whatever paltry monetary value the cybercrime underground may assign to these stolen assets individually, they’re each likely worth far more to the victimized company — if indeed a price can be placed on them at all.

In years past, most traditional, financially-oriented cybercrime was opportunistic: That is, the bad guys tended to focus on getting in quickly, grabbing all the data that they knew how to easily monetize, and then perhaps leaving behind malware on the hacked systems that abused them for spam distribution.

These days, an opportunistic, mass-mailed malware infection can quickly and easily morph into a much more serious and sustained problem for the victim organization (just ask Target). This is partly because many of the criminals who run large spam crime machines responsible for pumping out the latest malware threats have grown more adept at mining and harvesting stolen data.

That data mining process involves harvesting and stealthily testing interesting and potentially useful usernames and passwords stolen from victim systems. Today’s more clueful cybercrooks understand that if they can identify compromised systems inside organizations that may be sought-after targets of organized cybercrime groups, those groups might be willing to pay handsomely for such ready-made access.

It’s also never been easier for disgruntled employees to sell access to their employer’s systems or data, thanks to the proliferation of open and anonymous cybercrime forums on the Dark Web that serve as a bustling marketplace for such commerce. In addition, the past few years have seen the emergence of several very secretive crime forums wherein members routinely solicited bids regarding names of people at targeted corporations that could serve as insiders, as well as lists of people who might be susceptible to being recruited or extorted.

The sad truth is that far too many organizations spend only what they have to on security, which is often to meet some kind of compliance obligation such as HIPAA to protect healthcare records, or PCI certification to be able to handle credit card data, for example. However, real and effective security is about going beyond compliance — by focusing on rapidly detecting and responding to intrusions, and constantly doing that gap analysis to identify and shore up your organization’s weak spots before the bad guys can exploit them.

How to fashion a cybersecurity focus beyond mere compliance. Source: PWC on NIST framework.

Those weak spots very well may be your users, by the way. A number of security professionals I know and respect claim that security awareness training for employees doesn’t move the needle much. These naysayers note that there will always be employees who will click on suspicious links and open email attachments no matter how much training they receive. While this is generally true, at least such security training and evaluation offers the employer a better sense of which employees may need more heavy monitoring on the job and perhaps even additional computer and network restrictions.

If you help run an organization, consider whether the leadership is investing enough to secure everything that’s riding on top of all that technology powering your mission: Chances are there’s a great deal more at stake than than you realize.

Organizational leaders in search of a clue about how to increase both their security maturity and the resiliency of all their precious technology stuff could do far worse than to start with the Cybersecurity Framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal agency that works with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards. This primer (PDF) from PWC does a good job of explaining why the NIST Framework may be worth a closer look.

Image: PWC.

If you liked this post, you may enjoy the other two posts in this series — The Scrap Value of a Hacked PC and The Value of a Hacked Email Account.

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Adobe, Microsoft Patch Critical Security Bugs

Adobe has pushed out a critical update to plug at least 52 security holes in its widely-used Flash Player browser plugin, and another update to patch holes in Adobe Reader. Separately, Microsoft released 11 security updates to fix vulnerabilities more than 40 flaws in Windows and related software.

First off, if you have Adobe Flash Player Installed and haven’t yet hobbled this insecure program so that it runs only when you want it to, you are playing with fire. It’s bad enough that hackers are constantly finding and exploiting zero-day flaws in Flash Player before Adobe even knows about the bugs.

The bigger issue is that Flash is an extremely powerful program that runs inside the browser, which means users can compromise their computer just by browsing to a hacked or malicious site that targets unpatched Flash flaws.

The smartest option is probably to ditch this insecure program once and for all and significantly increase the security of your system in the process. I’ve got more on that approach — as well as slightly less radical solutions — in A Month Without Adobe Flash Player.

If you choose to update, please do it today. The most recent versions of Flash should be available from this Flash distribution page or the Flash home page. Windows users who browse the Web with anything other than Internet Explorer may need to apply this patch twice, once with IE and again using the alternative browser (Firefox, Opera, e.g.). Chrome and IE should auto-install the latest Flash version on browser restart.

Happily, Adobe has delayed plans to stop distributing direct download links to its Flash Player program. The company had said it would decommission the direct download page on June 30, 2016, but the latest, patched Flash version 22.0.0.209 for Windows and Mac systems is still available there. The wording on the site has been changed to indicate the download links will be decommissioned “soon.”

Adobe’s advisory on the Flash flaws is here. The company also released a security update that addresses at least 30 security holes in Adobe Reader. The latest version of Reader for most Windows and Mac users is v. 15.017.20050.

Six of the 11 patches Microsoft issued this month earned its most dire “critical” rating, which Microsoft assigns to software bugs that can be exploited to remotely commandeer vulnerable machines with little to no help from users, save from perhaps browsing to a hacked or malicious site.

In fact, most of the vulnerabilities Microsoft fixed this Patch Tuesday are in the company’s Web browsers — i.e., Internet Explorer (15 vulnerabilities and its newer Edge browser (13 flaws). Both patches address numerous browse-and-get-owned issues.

Another critical patch from Redmond tackles problems in Microsoft Office that could be exploited through poisoned Office documents.

For further breakdown on the patches this month from Adobe and Microsoft, check out these blog posts from security vendors Qualys and Shavlik. And as ever, if you encounter any problems downloading or installing any of the updates mentioned above please leave a note about your experience in the comments below.

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Serial Swatter, Stalker and Doxer Mir Islam Gets Just 1 Year in Jail

Mir Islam, a 21-year-old Brooklyn man who pleaded guilty to an impressive array of cybercrimes including cyberstalking, “doxing” and “swatting” celebrities and public officials (as well as this author), was sentenced in federal court today to two years in prison. Unfortunately, thanks to time served in this and other cases, Islam will only see a year of jail time in connection with some fairly heinous assaults that are becoming all too common.

While Islam’s sentence fell well short of the government’s request for punishment, the case raises novel legal issues as to how federal investigators intend to prosecute ongoing cases involving swatting — an extremely dangerous prank in which police are tricked into responding with deadly force to a phony hostage crisis or bomb scare at a residence or business.

Mir Islam, at his sentencing hearing today. Sketches copyright by Hennessy / CourtroomArt.com. Yours Truly is pictured in the blue shirt behind Islam.

On March 14, 2014, Islam and a group of as-yet-unnamed co-conspirators used a text-to-speech (TTY) service for the deaf to relay a message to our local police department stating that there was an active hostage situation going on at our modest town home in Annandale, Va. Nearly a dozen heavily-armed officers responded to the call, forcing me out of my home at gunpoint and putting me in handcuffs before the officer in charge realized it was all a hoax.

At the time, Islam and his pals were operating a Web site called Exposed[dot]su, which sought to “dox” public officials and celebrities by listing the name, birthday, address, previous address, phone number and Social Security number of at least 50 public figures and celebrities, including First Lady Michelle Obama, then-FBI director Robert Mueller, and then Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan.

Exposed.su also documented which of these celebrities and public figures had been swatted, including a raft of California celebrities and public figures, such as former California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, actor Ashton Kutcher, and performer Jay Z.

Exposed[dot]su was built with the help of identity information obtained and/or stolen from ssndob[dot]ru.

At the time, most media outlets covering the sheer amount of celebrity exposure at Exposed[dot]su focused on the apparently starling revelation that “if they can get this sensitive information on these people, they can get it on anyone.” But for my part, I was more interested in how they were obtaining this data in the first place.

On March 13, 2013 KrebsOnSecurity featured a story — Credit Reports Sold for Cheap in the Underweb –which sought to explain how the proprietors of Exposed[dot]su had obtained the records for the public officials and celebrities from a Russian online identity theft service called sssndob[dot]ru.

I noted in that story that sources close to the investigation said the assailants were using data gleaned from the ssndob[dot]ru ID theft service to gather enough information so that they could pull credit reports on targets directly from annualcreditreport.com, a site mandated by Congress to provide consumers a free copy of their credit report annually from each of the three major credit bureaus.

Peeved that I’d outed his methods for doxing public officials, Islam helped orchestrate my swatting the very next day. Within the span of 45 minutes, KrebsOnSecurity.com came under a sustained denial-of-service attack which briefly knocked my site offline.

At the same time, my hosting provider received a phony letter from the FBI stating my site was hosting illegal content and needed to be taken offline. And, then there was the swatting which occurred minutes after that phony communique was sent.

All told, the government alleges that Islam swatted at least 19 other people, although only seven of the victims (or their representatives) showed up in court today to tell similarly harrowing stories (I was asked to but did not testify).

Security camera footage of Fairfax County police officers responding to my 2013 swatting incident.

Going into today’s sentencing hearing, the court advised that under the government’s sentencing guidelines Islam was facing between 37 and 46 months in prison for the crimes to which he’d pleaded guilty. But U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss seemed especially curious about the government’s rationale for charging Islam with conspiracy to transmit a threat to kidnap or harm using a deadly weapon.

Judge Moss said the claim raises a somewhat novel legal question: Can the government allege the use of deadly force when the perpetrator of a swatting incident did not actually possess a weapon?

Corbin Weiss, an assistant US attorney and a cybercrime coordinator with the U.S. Department of Justice, argued that in most of the swatting attacks Islam perpetrated he expressed to emergency responders that any responding offers would be shot or blown up. Thus, the government argued, Islam was using police officers a proxy for assault with a deadly weapon by ensuring that responding officers would be primed to expect a suspect who was armed and openly hostile to police.

Islam’s lawyer argued that his client suffered from multiple psychological disorders, and that he and his co-conspirators orchestrated the swattings and the creation of exposed[dot]su out of a sense of “anarchic libertarianism,” bent on exposing government overreach on consumer privacy and use of force issues.

As if to illustrate his point, a swatting victim identified by the court only as Victim #4 was represented by Fairfax, Va. lawyer Mark Dycio. That particular victim did not wish to be named or show up in court, but follow-up interviews confirmed that Dycio was representing Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

According to Dycio, police responded to reports of a hostage situation at the NRA boss’s home just days after my swatting in March 2013. Impersonating LaPierre, Islam told police he had killed his wife and that he would shoot any officers responding to the scene. Dycio said police initially had difficulty identifying the object in LaPierre’s hand when he answered the door. It turned out to be a cell phone, but Dycio said police assumed it was a weapon and stripped the cell phone from his hands when entering his residence. The police could have easily mistaken the mobile phone for a weapon, Dycio said.

Another victim that spoke at today’s hearing was Stephen P. Heymann, an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. Heymann was swatted because he helped prosecute the much-maligned case against the late Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer who committed suicide after the government by most estimations overstepped its bounds by charging him with hacking for figuring out an automated way to download academic journals from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Heymann, whose disability requires him to walk with a cane, recounted the harrowing, early morning hours of April 1, 2013, when police officers surrounded his home in response to a swatting attack launched by Islam on his residence. Heymann recalled worrying that officers responding to the phony claim might confuse his cane with a deadly weapon.

One of the victims represented by a proxy witness in today’s hearings was the husband of a SWAT team member in Arizona who recounted several harrowing hours hunkered down at the University of Arizona, while her husband joined a group of heavily-armed police officers who were responding to a phony threat about a shooter on the campus.

Not everyone had nightmare swatting stories that aligned neatly with Islam’s claims. A woman representing an anonymous “Victim #3” of Islam’s was appearing in lieu of a cheerleader at the University of Arizona that Islam admitted to cyberstalking for several months. When the victim stopped responding to Islam’s overtures, he phoned in an active shooter threat to the local police there that a crazed gunman was on the loose at the University of Arizona campus.

According to Robert Sommerfeld, police commander for the University of Arizona, that 2013 swatting incident involved 54 responding officers, all of whom were prevented from responding to a real emergency as they moved from building to building and room to room at the university, searching for a fictitious assailant. Sommerfeld estimates that Islam’s stunt cost local responders almost $40,000, and virtually brought the business district surrounding the university to a standstill for the better part of the day.

Toward the end of today’s sentencing hearing, Islam — bearded, dressed in a blue jumpsuit and admittedly 75 pounds lighter than at the time of his arrest — addressed the court. Those in attendance who were hoping for an apology or some show of remorse from the accused were left wanting as the defendant proceeded to blame his crimes on multiple psychological disorders which he claimed were not being adequately addressed by the U.S. prison system. Not once did Islam offer an apology to his victims, nor did he express remorse for his actions.

“I didn’t expect to go as far as I did, but because of these disorders I felt I was invincible,” Islam told the court. “The mistakes I made before, I have to pay for that. I understand that.”

Sentences that noticeably depart from the government’s sentencing guidelines are grounds for appeal by the defendant, and Judge Moss today seemed reluctant to imprison Islam for the maximum 46 months allowed under the criminals statutes to which Islam had admitted to violating. Judge Moss also seemed to ignore the fact that Islam expressed exactly zero remorse for his crimes.

Central to the judge’s reluctance to sentence Islam to the statutory maximum penalty was Islam’s 2012 arrest in connection with a separate cybercrime sting orchestrated by the FBI called Operation Card Shop, in which federal agents created a fake cybercrime forum dedicated to credit card fraud called CarderProfit[dot]biz.

U.S. law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C. involved in prosecuting Islam for his swatting, doxing and stalking crimes were confident that Islam would be sentenced to at least two years in prison for trying to sell and buy stolen credit cards from federal agents in the New York case, thanks to a law that imposes a mandatory two-year sentence for crimes involving what the government terms as “aggravated identity theft.”

Much to the government’s chagrin, however, the New York judge in that case sentenced Islam to just one day in jail. But by his own admission, even while Islam was cooperating with federal prosecutors in New York he was busy orchestrating his swatting attacks and administering the Exposed[dot]su Web site.

Islam was re-arrested in September 2013 for violating the terms of his parole, and for the swatting and doxing attacks to which he pleaded guilty. But the government didn’t detain Islam in connection with those crimes until July 2015. Since Islam has been in federal detention since then, and Judge Moss seemed eager to ensure that this would count as time served against Islam’s sentence, meaning that Islam will serve just 12 months of his 24-month sentence before being released.

There is absolutely no question that we need to have a serious, national conversation about excessive use of force by police officers, as well as the over-militarization of local police forces nationwide.

However, no one should be excused for perpetrating these potentially deadly swatting hoaxes, regardless of the rationale. Judge Moss, in explaining his brief deliberation on arriving at Islam’s two-year (attenuated) sentence, said he hoped to send a message to others who would endeavor to engage in swatting attacks. In my estimation, today’s sentence sent the wrong message, and missed that mark by a mile.

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1,025 Wendy’s Locations Hit in Card Breach

At least 1,025 Wendy’s locations were hit by a malware-driven credit card breach that began in the fall of 2015, the nationwide fast-food chain said Thursday. The announcement marks a significant expansion in a data breach that is costing banks and credit unions plenty: Previously, Wendy’s had said the breach impacted fewer than 300 locations.

An ad for Wendy’s (in Russian).

On January 27, 2016, this publication was the first to report that Wendy’s was investigating a card breach. In mid-May, the company announced in its first quarter financial statement that the fraud impacted just five percent of stores. But in a statement last month, Wendy’s warned that its estimates about the size and scope of the breach were about to get much meatier.

Wendy’s has published a page that breaks down the breached restaurant locations by state.

Wendy’s is placing blame for the breach on an unnamed third-party that serves franchised Wendy’s locations, saying that a “service provider” that had remote access to the compromised cash registers got hacked.

For better or worse, countless restaurant franchises outsource the management and upkeep of their point-of-sale systems to third party providers, most of whom use remote administration tools to access and manage the systems remotely over the Internet.

Unsurprisingly, the attackers have focused on hacking the third-party providers and have had much success with this tactic. Very often, the hackers just guess at the usernames and passwords needed to remotely access point-of-sale devices. But as more POS vendors start to tighten up on that front, the criminals are shifting their focus to social engineering attacks — that is, manipulating employees at the targeted organization into opening the backdoor for the attackers.

As detailed in Slicing Into a Point-of-Sale Botnet, hackers responsible for stealing millions of customer credit card numbers from pizza chain Cici’s Pizza used social engineering attacks to trick employees at third party point-of-sale providers into installing malicious software.

Perhaps predictably, Wendy’s has been hit with at least one class action lawsuit over the breach. First Choice Federal Credit Union reportedly alleged that the data breach could have been prevented or at least lessened had the company acted faster. That’s difficult to argue against: The company first learned about the breach in January 2016, and stores were still being milked of customer card data six months later.

More lawsuits are likely to come. As noted in Credit Unions Feeling Pinch in Wendy’s Breach, the CEO of the National Association of Federal Credit Unions believes the losses their members have suffered from cards compromised at Wendy’s locations so far eclipse those that came in the wake of the huge card breaches at Target and Home Depot.

People who are in the habit of regularly eating at or patronizing a company that is in the midst of responding to a data breach pose a frustrating challenge for smaller banks and credit unions that fight card fraud mainly by issuing customers a new card. Not long after a new card is shipped, these customers turn around and unwittingly re-compromise their cards, prompting institutions to weigh the costs of continuously re-issuing versus the chances that the cards will be sold in the underground and used for fraud.

A number of readers have written in this past week apparently concerned about my whereabouts and well-being. It’s nice to be missed; I took a few days off for a much-needed staycation and to visit with friends and family. I’m writing this post because some stories you just have to see through to the bitter end. But fear not: KrebsOnSecurity will be back in full swing next week!

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