How to Have a Unique Selling Point as a New MSP
In this video, I share how to have a unique selling point for your new managed service business, even if you don't have a unique tech offering.
Source: How to Have a Unique Selling Point as a New MSP - Technibble.com
Meet Bluetana, the Scourge of Pump Skimmers
“Bluetana,” a new mobile app that looks for Bluetooth-based payment card skimmers hidden inside gas pumps, is helping police and state employees more rapidly and accurately locate compromised fuel stations across the nation, a study released this week suggests. Data collected in the course of the investigation also reveals some fascinating details that may help explain why these pump skimmers are so lucrative and ubiquitous.
The new app, now being used by agencies in several states, is the brainchild of computer scientists from the University of California San Diego and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who say they developed the software in tandem with technical input from the U.S. Secret Service (the federal agency most commonly called in to investigate pump skimming rings).
The Bluetooth pump skimmer scanner app ‘Bluetana’ in action.
Gas pumps are a perennial target of skimmer thieves for several reasons. They are usually unattended, and in too many cases a handful of master keys will open a great many pumps at a variety of filling stations.
The skimming devices can then be attached to electronics inside the pumps in a matter of seconds, and because they’re also wired to the pump’s internal power supply the skimmers can operate indefinitely without the need of short-lived batteries.
And increasingly, these pump skimmers are fashioned to relay stolen card data and PINs via Bluetooth wireless technology, meaning the thieves who install them can periodically download stolen card data just by pulling up to a compromised pump and remotely connecting to it from a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device or laptop.
According to the study, some 44 volunteers — mostly law enforcement officials and state employees — were equipped with Bluetana over a year-long experiment to test the effectiveness of the scanning app.
The researchers said their volunteers collected Bluetooth scans at 1,185 gas stations across six states, and that Bluetana detected a total of 64 skimmers across four of those states. All of the skimmers were later collected by law enforcement, including two that were reportedly missed in manual safety inspections of the pumps six months earlier.
While several other Android-based apps designed to find pump skimmers are already available, the researchers said Bluetana was developed with an eye toward eliminating false-positives that some of these other apps can fail to distinguish.
“Bluetooth technology used in these skimmers are also used for legitimate products commonly seen at and near gas stations such as speed-limit signs, weather sensors and fleet tracking systems,” said Nishant Bhaskar, UC San Diego Ph.D. student and principal author of the study. “These products can be mistaken for skimmers by existing detection apps.”
BLACK MARKET VALUEThe fuel skimmer study also helps explain how quickly these hidden devices can generate huge profits for the organized gangs that typically deploy them. The researchers found the skimmers their app found collected data from roughly 20 -25 payment cards each day — evenly distributed between debit and credit cards (although they note estimates from payment fraud prevention companies and the Secret Service that put the average figure closer to 50-100 cards daily per compromised machine).
The academics also studied court documents which revealed that skimmer scammers often are only able to “cashout” stolen cards — either through selling them on the black market or using them for fraudulent purchases — a little less than half of the time. This can result from the skimmers sometimes incorrectly reading card data, daily withdrawal limits, or fraud alerts at the issuing bank.
“Based on the prior figures, we estimate the range of per-day revenue from a skimmer is $4,253 (25 cards per day, cashout of $362 per card, and 47% cashout success rate), and our high end estimate is $63,638 (100 cards per day per day, $1,354 cashout per card, and cashout success rate of 47%),” the study notes.
Not a bad haul either way, considering these skimmers typically cost about $25 to produce.
Those earnings estimates assume an even distribution of credit and debit card use among customers of a compromised pump: The more customers pay with a debit card, the more profitable the whole criminal scheme may become. Armed with your PIN and debit card data, skimmer thieves or those who purchase stolen cards can clone your card and pull money out of your account at an ATM.
“Availability of a PIN code with a stolen debit card in particular, can increase its value five-fold on the black market,” the researchers wrote.
This highlights a warning that KrebsOnSecurity has relayed to readers in many previous stories on pump skimming attacks: Using a debit card at the pump can be way riskier than paying with cash or a credit card.
The black market value, impact to consumers and banks, and liability associated with different types of card fraud.
And as the above graphic from the report illustrates, there are different legal protections for fraudulent transactions on debit vs. credit cards. With a credit card, your maximum loss on any transactions you report as fraud is $50; with a debit card, that protection only extends for within two days of the unauthorized transaction. After that, the maximum consumer liability can increase to $500 within 60 days, and to an unlimited amount after 60 days.
In practice, your bank or debit card issuer may still waive additional liabilities, and many do. But even then, having your checking account emptied of cash while your bank sorts out the situation can still be a huge hassle and create secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance).
Interestingly, this advice against using debit cards at the pump often runs counter to the messaging pushed by fuel station owners themselves, many of whom offer lower prices for cash or debit card transactions. That’s because credit card transactions typically are more expensive to process.
For all its skimmer-skewering prowess, Bluetana will not be released to the public. The researchers said they the primary reason for this is highlighted in the core findings of the study.
“There are many legitimate devices near gas stations that look exactly like skimmers do in Bluetooth scans,” said UCSD Assistant Professor Aaron Schulman, in an email to KrebsOnSecurity. “Flagging suspicious devices in Bluetana is a only a way of notifying inspectors that they need to gather more data around the gas station to determine if the Bluetooth transmissions appear to be emanating from a device inside of of the pumps. If it does, they can then open the pump door and confirm that the signal strength rises, and begin their visual inspection for the skimmer.”
One of the best tips for avoiding fuel card skimmers is to favor filling stations that have updated security features, such as custom keys for each pump, better compartmentalization of individual components within the machine, and tamper protections that physically shut down a pump if the machine is improperly accessed.
How can you spot a gas station with these updated features, you ask? As noted in last summer’s story, How to Avoid Card Skimmers at the Pumps, these newer-model machines typically feature a horizontal card acceptance slot along with a raised metallic keypad. In contrast, older, less secure pumps usually have a vertical card reader a flat, membrane-based keypad.
Newer, more tamper-resistant fuel pumps include pump-specific key locks, raised metallic keypads, and horizontal card readers.
The researchers will present their work on Bluetana later today at the USENIX Security 2019 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. A copy of their paper is available here (PDF).
If you enjoyed this story, check out my series on all things skimmer-related: All About Skimmers. Looking for more information on fuel pump skimming? Have a look at some of these stories.
SN 727: BlackHat & DefCon
This Week's Stories
• BlackHat and Def Con 2019
• Microsoft dangles $300,000 for Azure hacks at BlackHat...
• Hotel chaos from Germany's Chaos Computer Club
• 40 dangerous drivers
• Google's battle to allow its Incognito users' Incognitoness to be Incognito
• Microsoft ranks the industry's top bug hunters
• Apple bumps its bounties
We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-727-Notes.pdf
Hosts: Steve Gibson and Jason Howell
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.
You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page.
For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.
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Patch Tuesday, August 2019 Edition
Most Microsoft Windows (ab)users probably welcome the monthly ritual of applying security updates about as much as they look forward to going to the dentist: It always seems like you were there just yesterday, and you never quite know how it’s all going to turn out. Fortunately, this month’s patch batch from Redmond is mercifully light, at least compared to last month.
Okay, maybe a trip to the dentist’s office is still preferable. In any case, today is the second Tuesday of the month, which means it’s once again Patch Tuesday (or — depending on your setup and when you’re reading this post — Reboot Wednesday). Microsoft today released patches to fix some 93 vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, 35 of which affect various Server versions of Windows, and another 70 that apply to the Windows 10 operating system.
Although there don’t appear to be any zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this month — i.e. those that get exploited by cybercriminals before an official patch is available — there are several issues that merit attention.
Chief among those are patches to address four moderately terrifying flaws in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Service, a feature which allows users to remotely access and administer a Windows computer as if they were actually seated in front of the remote computer. Security vendor Qualys says two of these weaknesses can be exploited remotely without any authentication or user interaction.
“According to Microsoft, at least two of these vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182) can be considered ‘wormable’ and [can be equated] to BlueKeep,” referring to a dangerous bug patched earlier this year that Microsoft warned could be used to spread another WannaCry-like ransomware outbreak. “It is highly likely that at least one of these vulnerabilities will be quickly weaponized, and patching should be prioritized for all Windows systems.”
Fortunately, Remote Desktop is disabled by default in Windows 10, and as such these flaws are more likely to be a threat for enterprises that have enabled the application for various purposes. For those keeping score, this is the fourth time in 2019 Microsoft has had to fix critical security issues with its Remote Desktop service.
For all you Microsoft Edge and Internet Exploiter Explorer users, Microsoft has issued the usual panoply of updates for flaws that could be exploited to install malware after a user merely visits a hacked or booby-trapped Web site. Other equally serious flaws patched in Windows this month could be used to compromise the operating system just by convincing the user to open a malicious file (regardless of which browser the user is running).
As crazy as it may seem, this is the second month in a row that Adobe hasn’t issued a security update for its Flash Player browser plugin, which is bundled in IE/Edge and Chrome (although now hobbled by default in Chrome). However, Adobe did release important updates for its Acrobat and free PDF reader products.
If the tone of this post sounds a wee bit cantankerous, it might be because at least one of the updates I installed last month totally hosed my Windows 10 machine. I consider myself an equal OS abuser, and maintain multiple computers powered by a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Nevertheless, it is frustrating when being diligent about applying patches introduces so many unfixable problems that you’re forced to completely reinstall the OS and all of the programs that ride on top of it. On the bright side, my newly-refreshed Windows computer is a bit more responsive than it was before crash hell.
So, three words of advice. First off, don’t let Microsoft decide when to apply patches and reboot your computer. On the one hand, it’s nice Microsoft gives us a predictable schedule when it’s going to release patches. On the other, Windows 10 will by default download and install patches whenever it pleases, and then reboot the computer.
Unless you change that setting. Here’s a tutorial on how to do that. For all other Windows OS users, if you’d rather be alerted to new updates when they’re available so you can choose when to install them, there’s a setting for that in Windows Update.
Secondly, it doesn’t hurt to wait a few days to apply updates. Very often fixes released on Patch Tuesday have glitches that cause problems for an indeterminate number of Windows systems. When this happens, Microsoft then patches their patches to minimize the same problems for users who haven’t yet applied the updates, but it sometimes takes a few days for Redmond to iron out the kinks.
Finally, please have some kind of system for backing up your files before applying any updates. You can use third-party software for this, or just the options built into Windows 10. At some level, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you’re backing up your files, preferably following the 3-2-1 backup rule. Thankfully, I’m vigilant about backing up my files.
And, as ever, if you experience any problems installing any of these patches this month, please feel free to leave a comment about it below; there’s a good chance other readers have experienced the same and may even chime in here with some helpful tips.
SEC Investigating Data Leak at First American Financial Corp.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating a security failure on the Web site of real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. that exposed more than 885 million personal and financial records tied to mortgage deals going back to 2003, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
First American Financial Corp.
In May, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the Web site for Santa Ana, Calif.-based First American [NYSE:FAF] exposed some 885 million documents related to real estate closings over the past 16 years, including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts and drivers license images. No authentication was required to view the documents.
The initial tip on that story came from Ben Shoval, a real estate developer based in Seattle. Shoval said he recently received a letter from the SEC’s enforcement division which stated the agency was investigating the data exposure to determine if First American had violated federal securities laws.
In its letter, the SEC asked Shoval to preserve and share any documents or evidence he had related to the data exposure.
“This investigation is a non-public, fact-finding inquiry,” the letter explained. “The investigation does not mean that we have concluded that anyone has violated the law.”
The SEC did not respond to requests for comment.
Word of the SEC investigation comes weeks after regulators in New York said they were investigating the company in what could turn out to be the first test of the state’s strict new cybersecurity regulation, which requires financial companies to periodically audit and report on how they protect sensitive data, and provides for fines in cases where violations were reckless or willful. First American also is now the target of a class action lawsuit that alleges it “failed to implement even rudimentary security measures.”
First American has issued a series of statements over the past few months that seem to downplay the severity of the data exposure, which the company said was the result of a “design defect” in its Web site.
On June 18, First American said a review of system logs by an outside forensic firm, “based on guidance from the company, identified 484 files that likely were accessed by individuals without authorization. The company has reviewed 211 of these files to date and determined that only 14 (or 6.6%) of those files contain non-public personal information. The company is in the process of notifying the affected consumers and will offer them complimentary credit monitoring services.”
In a statement on July 16, First American said its now-completed investigation identified just 32 consumers whose non-public personal information likely was accessed without authorization.
“These 32 consumers have been notified and offered complimentary credit monitoring services,” the company said.
First American has not responded to questions about how long this “design defect” persisted on its site, how far back it maintained access logs, or how far back in those access logs the company’s review extended.
TWiT 731: An Electric Cannonball
This Week's Stories
- Video games don't cause mass shootings, but toxic gamer culture doesn't help
- White House proposes social media censorship
- Apple wants as many people as possible to get the Apple Card
- Are Teslas reliable?
- Chase forgives Canadian customers' debt
- Apple locks out DIY battery repairs
- FedEx splits with Amazon
- Amazon's PillPack fighting with CVS and Walgreens
- Woz wants you off Facebook
- Teenagers work overnight to make Amazon Echo
- Samsung Note 10 kills headphone jack and Bixby button, embraces Microsoft
- FBI, NSA want hackers, even if they used to smoke pot
- Defcon takes on voting machine security
- Elizabeth Warren's plan for rural broadband
- US Navy ditching touchscreen controllers
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Brianna Wu, Ben Johnson, and Sam Abuelsamid
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech
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iNSYNQ Ransom Attack Began With Phishing Email
A ransomware outbreak that hit QuickBooks cloud hosting firm iNSYNQ in mid-July appears to have started with an email phishing attack that snared an employee working in sales for the company, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. It also looks like the intruders spent roughly ten days rooting around iNSYNQ’s internal network to properly stage things before unleashing the ransomware. iNSYNQ ultimately declined to pay the ransom demand, and it is still working to completely restore customer access to files.
Some of this detail came in a virtual “town hall” meeting held August 8, in which iNSYNQ chief executive Elliot Luchansky briefed customers on how it all went down, and what the company is doing to prevent such outages in the future.
A great many iNSYNQ’s customers are accountants, and when the company took its network offline on July 16 in response to the ransomware outbreak, some of those customers took to social media to complain that iNSYNQ was stonewalling them.
“We could definitely have been better prepared, and it’s totally unacceptable,” Luchansky told customers. “I take full responsibility for this. People waiting ridiculous amounts of time for a response is unacceptable.”
By way of explaining iNSYNQ’s initial reluctance to share information about the particulars of the attack early on, Luchansky told customers the company had to assume the intruders were watching and listening to everything iNSYNQ was doing to recover operations and data in the wake of the ransomware outbreak.
“That was done strategically for a good reason,” he said. “There were human beings involved with [carrying out] this attack in real time, and we had to assume they were monitoring everything we could say. And that posed risks based on what we did say publicly while the ransom negotiations were going on. It could have been used in a way that would have exposed customers even more. That put us in a really tough bind, because transparency is something we take very seriously. But we decided it was in our customers’ best interests to not do that.”
A paid ad that comes up prominently when one searches for “insynq” in Google.
Luchansky did not say how much the intruders were demanding, but he mentioned two key factors that informed the company’s decision not to pay up.
“It was a very substantial amount, but we had the money wired and were ready to pay it in cryptocurrency in the case that it made sense to do so,” he told customers. “But we also understood [that paying] would put a target on our heads in the future, and even if we actually received the decryption key, that wasn’t really the main issue here. Because of the quick reaction we had, we were able to contain the encryption part” to roughly 50 percent of customer systems, he said.
Luchansky said the intruders seeded its internal network with MegaCortex, a potent new ransomware strain first spotted just a couple of months ago that is being used in targeted attacks on enterprises. He said the attack appears to have been carefully planned out in advance and executed “with human intervention all the way through.”
“They decided they were coming after us,” he said. “It’s one thing to prepare for these sorts of events but it’s an entirely different experience to deal with first hand.”
According to an analysis of MegaCortex published this week by Accenture iDefense, the crooks behind this ransomware strain are targeting businesses — not home users — and demanding ransom payments in the range of two to 600 bitcoins, which is roughly $20,000 to $5.8 million.
“We are working for profit,” reads the ransom note left behind by the latest version of MegaCortex. “The core of this criminal business is to give back your valuable data in the original form (for ransom of course).”
A portion of the ransom note left behind by the latest version of MegaCortex. Image: Accenture iDefense.
Luchansky did not mention in the town hall meeting exactly when the initial phishing attack was thought to have occurred, noting that iNSYNQ is still working with California-based CrowdStrike to gain a more complete picture of the attack.
But Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, showed KrebsOnSecurity information obtained from monitoring dark web communications which suggested the problem started on July 6, after an employee in iNSYNQ’s sales division fell for a targeted phishing email.
“This shows that even after the initial infection, if companies act promptly they can still detect and stop the ransomware,” Holden said. “For these infections hackers take sometimes days, weeks, or even months to encrypt your data.”
iNSYNQ did not respond to requests for comment on Hold Security’s findings.
Asked whether the company had backups of customer data and — if so — why iNSYNQ decided not to restore from those, Luchansky said there were backups but that some of those were also infected.
“The backup system is backing up the primary system, and that by definition entails some level of integration,” Luchansky explained. “The way our system was architected, the malware had spread into the backups as well, at least a little bit. So [by] just turning the backups back on, there was a good chance the the virus would then start to spread through the backup system more. So we had to treat the backups similarly to how we were treating the primary systems.”
Luchansky said their backup system has since been overhauled, and that if a similar attack happened in the future it would take days instead of weeks to recover. However, he declined to get into specifics about exactly what had changed, which is too bad because in every ransomware attack story I’ve written this seems to be the detail most readers are interested in and arguing about.
The CEO added that iNSYNQ also will be partnering with a company that helps firms detect and block targeted phishing attacks, and that it envisioned being able to offer this to its customers at a discounted rate. It wasn’t clear from Luchansky’s responses to questions whether the cloud hosting firm was also considering any kind of employee anti-phishing education and/or testing service.
Luchansky said iNSYNQ was about to restore access to more than 90 percent of customer files by Aug. 2 — roughly two weeks after the ransomware outbreak — and that the company would be offering customers a two month credit as a result of the outage.
Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do.
Incessantly annoying and fraudulent robocalls. Corrupt wireless company employees taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to unlock and hijack mobile phone service. Wireless providers selling real-time customer location data, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A noticeable uptick in SIM-swapping attacks that lead to multi-million dollar cyberheists.
If you are somehow under the impression that you — the customer — are in control over the security, privacy and integrity of your mobile phone service, think again. And you’d be forgiven if you assumed the major wireless carriers or federal regulators had their hands firmly on the wheel.
No, a series of recent court cases and unfortunate developments highlight the sad reality that the wireless industry today has all but ceded control over this vital national resource to cybercriminals, scammers, corrupt employees and plain old corporate greed.
On Tuesday, Google announced that an unceasing deluge of automated robocalls had doomed a feature of its Google Voice service that sends transcripts of voicemails via text message.
Google said “certain carriers” are blocking the delivery of these messages because all too often the transcripts resulted from unsolicited robocalls, and that as a result the feature would be discontinued by Aug. 9. This is especially rich given that one big reason people use Google Voice in the first place is to screen unwanted communications from robocalls, mainly because the major wireless carriers have shown themselves incapable or else unwilling to do much to stem the tide of robocalls targeting their customers.
AT&T in particular has had a rough month. In July, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of AT&T customers in California to stop the telecom giant and two data location aggregators from allowing numerous entities — including bounty hunters, car dealerships, landlords and stalkers — to access wireless customers’ real-time locations without authorization.
And on Monday, the U.S. Justice Department revealed that a Pakistani man was arrested and extradited to the United States to face charges of bribing numerous AT&T call-center employees to install malicious software and unauthorized hardware as part of a scheme to fraudulently unlock cell phones.
Ars Technica reports the scam resulted in millions of phones being removed from AT&T service and/or payment plans, and that the accused allegedly paid insiders hundreds of thousands of dollars to assist in the process.
We should all probably be thankful that the defendant in this case wasn’t using his considerable access to aid criminals who specialize in conducting unauthorized SIM swaps, an extraordinarily invasive form of fraud in which scammers bribe or trick employees at mobile phone stores into seizing control of the target’s phone number and diverting all texts and phone calls to the attacker’s mobile device.
Late last month, a federal judge in New York rejected a request by AT&T to dismiss a $224 million lawsuit over a SIM-swapping incident that led to $24 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
The defendant in that case, 21-year-old Manhattan resident Nicholas Truglia, is alleged to have stolen more than $80 million from victims of SIM swapping, but he is only one of many individuals involved in this incredibly easy, increasingly common and lucrative scheme. The plaintiff in that case alleges that he was SIM-swapped on two different occasions, both allegedly involving crooked or else clueless employees at AT&T wireless stores.
And let’s not forget about all the times various hackers figured out ways to remotely use a carrier’s own internal systems for looking up personal and account information on wireless subscribers.
So what the fresh hell is going on here? And is there any hope that lawmakers or regulators will do anything about these persistent problems? Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy, said the answer — at least in this administration — is probably a big “no.”
“The takeaway here is the complete and total abdication of any oversight of the mobile wireless industry,” Sohn told KrebsOnSecurity. “Our enforcement agencies aren’t doing anything on these topics right now, and we have a complete and total breakdown of oversight of these incredibly powerful and important companies.”
Aaron Mackey, a staff attorney at the EFF, said that on the location data-sharing issue, federal law already bars the wireless carriers from sharing this with third parties without the expressed consent of consumers.
“What we’ve seen is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is well aware of this ongoing behavior about location data sales,” Mackey said. “The FCC has said it’s under investigation, but there has been no public action taken yet and this has been going on for more than a year. The major wireless carriers are not only violating federal law, but they’re also putting people in harm’s way. There are countless stories of folks being able to pretend to be law enforcement and gaining access to information they can use to assault and harass people based on the carriers making location data available to a host of third parties.”
On the issue of illegal SIM swaps, Wired recently ran a column pointing to a solution that many carriers in Africa have implemented which makes it much more difficult for SIM swap thieves to ply their craft.
“The carrier would set up a system to let the bank query phone records for any recent SIM swaps associated with a bank account before they carried out a money transfer,” wrote Wired’s Andy Greenberg in April. “If a SIM swap had occurred in, say, the last two or three days, the transfer would be blocked. Because SIM swap victims can typically see within minutes that their phone has been disabled, that window of time let them report the crime before fraudsters could take advantage.”
So far, there is zero indication that the U.S.-based mobile carriers are paying any attention.
In terms of combating the deluge of robocalls, Sohn says we already have a workable approach to arresting these nuisance calls: It’s an authentication procedure known as “SHAKEN/STIR,” and it is premised on the idea that every phone has a certificate of authenticity attached to it that can be used to validate if the call is indeed originating from the number it appears to be calling from.
Under a SHAKEN/STIR regime, anyone who is spoofing their number (and most of these robocalls are spoofed to appear as though they come from a number that is in the same prefix as yours) gets automatically blocked.
Unfortunately, Sohn said, the FCC has allowed the wireless carriers to adopt this approach voluntarily. And — shocker — most of them haven’t, or else they are charging a premium for it.
“The FCC could make the carriers provide robocall apps for free to customers, but they’re not,” Sohn said. “The carriers instead are turning around and charging customers extra for this service. There was a fairly strong anti-robocalls bill that passed the House, but it’s now stuck in the legislative graveyard that is the Senate.”
What about the prospects of any kind of major overhaul to the privacy laws in this country that might give consumers more say over who can access their private data and what recourse they may have when companies entrusted with that information screw up?
Sohn said there are few signs that anyone in Congress is seriously championing consumer privacy as a major legislative issue. Most of the nascent efforts to bring privacy laws in the United States into the 21st Century she said are interminably bogged down on two sticky issues: Federal preemption of stronger state laws, and the ability of consumers to bring a private right of civil action in the courts against companies that violate those provisions.
“It’s way past time we had a federal privacy bill,” Sohn said. “Companies like Facebook and others are practically begging for some type of regulatory framework on consumer privacy, yet this congress can’t manage to put something together. To me it’s incredible we don’t even have a discussion draft yet. There’s not even a bill that’s being discussed and debated. That is really pitiful, and the closer we get to elections, the less likely it becomes because nobody wants to do anything that upsets their corporate contributions. And, frankly, that’s shameful.”
Five Marketing Opportunities You’re Probably Missing
Here are five marketing opportunities you're probably missing out on that could potentially help grow your computer repair business.
Source: Five Marketing Opportunities You’re Probably Missing - Technibble.com
SN 726: Steve's File Sync Journey
This week's stories
• A widespread false alarm about Facebook's planned subversion of end-to-end encryption
• Still more municipality Ransomware attacks
• Anti-encryption saber rattling among the Five Eyes nations
• Microsoft's discovery of Russian-backed IoT compromise
• Chrome 76's changes
• Black Hat and Def Con preview
• The challenge of synchronizing a working set of files between two locations
We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-726-Notes.pdf
Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.
You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page.
For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.
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The Risk of Weak Online Banking Passwords
If you bank online and choose weak or re-used passwords, there’s a decent chance your account could be pilfered by cyberthieves — even if your bank offers multi-factor authentication as part of its login process. This story is about how crooks increasingly are abusing third-party financial aggregation services like Mint, Plaid, Yodlee, YNAB and others to surveil and drain consumer accounts online.
Crooks are constantly probing bank Web sites for customer accounts protected by weak or recycled passwords. Most often, the attacker will use lists of email addresses and passwords stolen en masse from hacked sites and then try those same credentials to see if they permit online access to accounts at a range of banks.
A screenshot of a password-checking tool being used to target Chase Bank customers who re-use passwords from other sites. Image: Hold Security.
From there, thieves can take the list of successful logins and feed them into apps that rely on application programming interfaces (API)s from one of several personal financial data aggregators which help users track their balances, budgets and spending across multiple banks.
A number of banks that do offer customers multi-factor authentication — such as a one-time code sent via text message or an app — have chosen to allow these aggregators the ability to view balances and recent transactions without requiring that the aggregator service supply that second factor. That’s according to Brian Costello, vice president of data strategy at Yodlee, one of the largest financial aggregator platforms.
Costello said while some banks have implemented processes which pass through multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompts when consumers wish to link aggregation services, many have not.
“Because we have become something of a known quantity with the banks, we’ve set up turning off MFA with many of them,” Costello said. “Many of them are substituting coming from a Yodlee IP or agent as a factor because banks have historically been relying on our security posture to help them out.”
Such reconnaissance helps lay the groundwork for further attacks: If the thieves are able to access a bank account via an aggregator service or API, they can view the customer’s balance(s) and decide which customers are worthy of further targeting.
This targeting can occur in at least one of two ways. The first involves spear phishing attacks to gain access to that second authentication factor, which can be made much more convincing once the attackers have access to specific details about the customer’s account — such as recent transactions or account numbers (even partial account numbers).
The second is through an unauthorized SIM swap, a form of fraud in which scammers bribe or trick employees at mobile phone stores into seizing control of the target’s phone number and diverting all texts and phone calls to the attacker’s mobile device.
But beyond targeting customers for outright account takeovers, the data available via financial aggregators enables a far more insidious type of fraud: The ability to link the target’s bank account(s) to other accounts that the attackers control.
That’s because PayPal, Zelle, and a number of other pure-play online financial institutions allow customers to link accounts by verifying the value of microdeposits. For example, if you wish to be able to transfer funds between PayPal and a bank account, the company will first send a couple of tiny deposits — a few cents, usually — to the account you wish to link. Only after verifying those exact amounts will the account-linking request be granted.
Alex Holden is founder and chief technology officer of Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based security consultancy. Holden and his team closely monitor the cybercrime forums, and he said the company has seen a number of cybercriminals discussing how the financial aggregators are useful for targeting potential victims.
Holden said it’s not uncommon for thieves in these communities to resell access to bank account balance and transaction information to other crooks who specialize in cashing out such information.
“The price for these details is often very cheap, just a fraction of the monetary value in the account, because they’re not selling ‘final’ access to the account,” Holden said. “If the account is active, hackers then can go to the next stage for 2FA phishing or social engineering, or linking the accounts with another.”
Currently, the major aggregators and/or applications that use those platforms store bank logins and interactively log in to consumer accounts to periodically sync transaction data. But most of the financial aggregator platforms are slowly shifting toward using the OAuth standard for logins, which can give banks a greater ability to enforce their own fraud detection and transaction scoring systems when aggregator systems and apps are initially linked to a bank account.
That’s according to Don Cardinal, managing director of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX), which is seeking to unite the financial industry around a common, interoperable, and royalty-free standard for secure consumer and business access to their financial data.
“This is where we’re going,” Cardinal said. “The way it works today, you the aggregator or app stores the credentials encrypted and presents them to the bank. What we’re moving to is [an account linking process] that interactively loads the bank’s Web site, you login there, and the site gives the aggregator an OAuth token. In that token granting process, all the bank’s fraud controls are then direct to the consumer.”
Alissa Knight, a senior analyst with the Aite Group, a financial and technology analyst firm, said such attacks highlight the need to get rid of passwords altogether. But until such time, she said, more consumers should take full advantage of the strongest multi-factor authentication option offered by their bank(s), and consider using a password manager, which helps users pick and remember strong and unique passwords for each Web site.
“This is just more empirical data around the fact that passwords just need to go away,” Knight said. “For now, all the standard precautions we’ve been giving consumers for years still stand: Pick strong passwords, avoid re-using passwords, and get a password manager.”
Some of the most popular password managers include 1Password, Dashlane, LastPass and Keepass. Wired.com recently published a worthwhile writeup which breaks down each of these based on price, features and usability.
TWiT 730: Moonlighting as Marshmello
This Week's Stories
- Apple Earnings: services up, iPhone down
- Phone season starts this week
- Apple gearing up on R&D
- Amazon takes over
- RIP Amazon Dash button
- Your Assistant is listening
- Apple Card won't let you bet on the ponies
- Capital One hack
- Apple Bluetooth security hack
- Facial recognition for drunks
- Chinese smile to pay
- Elon Musk is boring holes in Las Vegas
- AI customer service hell
- Amazon partnering with police
- Turkey cracks down on internet
- Instagram from Facebook
- Livestreaming Funerals
- Spotify takes off
- US Govt Vs social media addiction
- Locast gets sued
- Ninja moves to Mixer
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Mikah Sargent, Ant Pruitt, and Mike Elgan
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech
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What We Can Learn from the Capital One Hack
On Monday, a former Amazon employee was arrested and charged with stealing more than 100 million consumer applications for credit from Capital One. Since then, many have speculated the breach was perhaps the result of a previously unknown “zero-day” flaw, or an “insider” attack in which the accused took advantage of access surreptitiously obtained from her former employer. But new information indicates the methods she deployed have been well understood for years.
What follows is based on interviews with almost a dozen security experts, including one who is privy to details about the ongoing breach investigation. Because this incident deals with somewhat jargon-laced and esoteric concepts, much of what is described below has been dramatically simplified. Anyone seeking a more technical explanation of the basic concepts referenced here should explore some of the many links included in this story.
According to a source with direct knowledge of the breach investigation, the problem stemmed in part from a misconfigured open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF) that Capital One was using as part of its operations hosted in the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Known as “ModSecurity,” this WAF is deployed along with the open-source Apache Web server to provide protections against several classes of vulnerabilities that attackers most commonly use to compromise the security of Web-based applications.
The misconfiguration of the WAF allowed the intruder to trick the firewall into relaying requests to a key back-end resource on the AWS platform. This resource, known as the “metadata” service, is responsible for handing out temporary information to a cloud server, including current credentials sent from a security service to access any resource in the cloud to which that server has access.
In AWS, exactly what those credentials can be used for hinges on the permissions assigned to the resource that is requesting them. In Capital One’s case, the misconfigured WAF for whatever reason was assigned too many permissions, i.e. it was allowed to list all of the files in any buckets of data, and to read the contents of each of those files.
The type of vulnerability exploited by the intruder in the Capital One hack is a well-known method called a “Server Side Request Forgery” (SSRF) attack, in which a server (in this case, CapOne’s WAF) can be tricked into running commands that it should never have been permitted to run, including those that allow it to talk to the metadata service.
Evan Johnson, manager of the product security team at Cloudflare, recently penned an easily digestible column on the Capital One hack and the challenges of detecting and blocking SSRF attacks targeting cloud services. Johnson said it’s worth noting that SSRF attacks are not among the dozen or so attack methods for which detection rules are shipped by default in the WAF exploited as part of the Capital One intrusion.
“SSRF has become the most serious vulnerability facing organizations that use public clouds,” Johnson wrote. “The impact of SSRF is being worsened by the offering of public clouds, and the major players like AWS are not doing anything to fix it. The problem is common and well-known, but hard to prevent and does not have any mitigations built into the AWS platform.”
Johnson said AWS could address this shortcoming by including extra identifying information in any request sent to the metadata service, as Google has already done with its cloud hosting platform. He also acknowledged that doing so could break a lot of backwards compatibility within AWS.
“There’s a lot of specialized knowledge that comes with operating a service within AWS, and to someone without specialized knowledge of AWS, [SSRF attacks are] not something that would show up on any critical configuration guide,” Johnson said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity.
“You have to learn how EC2 works, understand Amazon’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) system, and how to authenticate with other AWS services,” he continued. “A lot of people using AWS will interface with dozens of AWS services and write software that orchestrates and automates new services, but in the end people really lean into AWS a ton, and with that comes a lot of specialized knowledge that is hard to learn and hard to get right.”
In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Amazon said it is inaccurate to argue that the Capital One breach was caused by AWS IAM, the instance metadata service, or the AWS WAF in any way.
“The intrusion was caused by a misconfiguration of a web application firewall and not the underlying infrastructure or the location of the infrastructure,” the statement reads. “AWS is constantly delivering services and functionality to anticipate new threats at scale, offering more security capabilities and layers than customers can find anywhere else including within their own datacenters, and when broadly used, properly configured and monitored, offer unmatched security—and the track record for customers over 13+ years in securely using AWS provides unambiguous proof that these layers work.”
Amazon pointed to several (mostly a la carte) services it offers AWS customers to help mitigate many of the threats that were key factors in this breach, including:
–Access Advisor, which helps identify and scope down AWS roles that may have more permissions than they need;
–GuardDuty, designed to raise alarms when someone is scanning for potentially vulnerable systems or moving unusually large amounts of data to or from unexpected places;
–The AWS WAF, which Amazon says can detect common exploitation techniques, including SSRF attacks;
–Amazon Macie, designed to automatically discover, classify and protect sensitive data stored in AWS.
William Bengston, formerly a senior security engineer at Netflix, wrote a series of blog posts last year on how Netflix built its own systems for detecting and preventing credential compromises in AWS. Interestingly, Bengston was hired roughly two months ago to be director of cloud security for Capital One. My guess is Capital One now wishes they had somehow managed to lure him away sooner.
Rich Mogull is founder and chief technology officer with DisruptOPS, a firm that helps companies secure their cloud infrastructure. Mogull said one major challenge for companies moving their operations from sprawling, expensive physical data centers to the cloud is that very often the employees responsible for handling that transition are application and software developers who may not be as steeped as they should in security.
“There is a basic skills and knowledge gap that everyone in the industry is fighting to deal with right now,” Mogull said. “For these big companies making that move, they have to learn all this new stuff while maintaining their old stuff. I can get you more secure in the cloud more easily than on-premise at a physical data center, but there’s going to be a transition period as you’re acquiring that new knowledge.”
Image: Capital One
Since news of the Capital One breach broke on Monday, KrebsOnSecurity has received numerous emails and phone calls from security executives who are desperate for more information about how they can avoid falling prey to the missteps that led to this colossal breach (indeed, those requests were part of the impetus behind this story).
Some of those people included executives at big competing banks that haven’t yet taken the plunge into the cloud quite as deeply as Capital One has. But it’s probably not much of a stretch to say they’re all lining up in front of the diving board.
It’s been interesting to watch over the past couple of years how various cloud providers have responded to major outages on their platforms — very often soon after publishing detailed post-mortems on the underlying causes of the outage and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. In the same vein, it would be wonderful if this kind of public accounting extended to other big companies in the wake of a massive breach.
I’m not holding out much hope that we will get such detail officially from Capital One, which declined to comment on the record and referred me to their statement on the breach and to the Justice Department’s complaint against the hacker. That’s probably to be expected, seeing as the company is already facing a class action lawsuit over the breach and is likely to be targeted by more lawsuits going forward.
But as long as the public and private response to data breaches remains orchestrated primarily by attorneys (which is certainly the case now at most major corporations), everyone else will continue to lack the benefit of being able to learn from and avoid those same mistakes.
Why MSPs Should Do Content Marketing?
In this video, I share with you how you can get more managed service clients with content marketing.
Source: Why MSPs Should Do Content Marketing? - Technibble.com
The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 819
SN 725: Urgent/11
This Week's Stories
- Marcus Hutchins ... is Free!
- U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr on "warrant proof data encryption"
- What malware is the most popular underground?
- This Week in Ransomware
- Your NAS is Grass!
- 11 vulnerabilities in VxWorks' TCP/IP stack
We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-725-Notes.pdf
Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.
You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page.
For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.
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Capital One Data Theft Impacts 106M People
Federal prosecutors this week charged a Seattle woman with stealing data from more than 100 million credit applications made with Capital One Financial Corp. Incredibly, much of this breached played out publicly over several months on social media and other open online platforms. What follows is a closer look at the accused, and what this incident may mean for consumers and businesses.
Paige “erratic” Thompson, in an undated photo posted to her Slack channel.
On July 29, FBI agents arrested Paige A. Thompson on suspicion of downloading nearly 30 GB of Capital One credit application data from a rented cloud data server. Capital One said the incident affected approximately 100 million people in the United States and six million in Canada.
That data included approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers and approximately 80,000 bank account numbers on U.S. consumers, and roughly 1 million Social Insurance Numbers (SINs) for Canadian credit card customers.
“Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and over 99 percent of Social Security numbers were not compromised,” Capital One said in a statement posted to its site.
“The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of our credit card products from 2005 through early 2019,” the statement continues. “This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.”
The FBI says Capital One learned about the theft from a tip sent via email on July 17, which alerted the company that some of its leaked data was being stored out in the open on the software development platform Github. That Github account was for a user named “Netcrave,” which includes the resume and name of one Paige A. Thompson.
The tip that alerted Capital One to its data breach.
The complaint doesn’t explicitly name the cloud hosting provider from which the Capital One credit data was taken, but it does say the accused’s resume states that she worked as a systems engineer at the provider between 2015 and 2016. That resume, available on Gitlab here, reveals Thompson’s most recent employer was Amazon Inc.
Further investigation revealed that Thompson used the nickname “erratic” on Twitter, where she spoke openly over several months about finding huge stores of data intended to be secured on various Amazon instances.
The Twitter user “erratic” posting about tools and processes used to access various Amazon cloud instances.
According to the FBI, Thompson also used a public Meetup group under the same alias, where she invited others to join a Slack channel named “Netcrave Communications.”
KrebsOnSecurity was able to join this open Slack channel Monday evening and review many months of postings apparently made by Erratic about her personal life, interests and online explorations. One of the more interesting posts by Erratic on the Slack channel is a June 27 comment listing various databases she found by hacking into improperly secured Amazon cloud instances.
That posting suggests Erratic may also have located tens of gigabytes of data belonging to other major corporations:
According to Erratic’s posts on Slack, the two items in the list above beginning with “ISRM-WAF” belong to Capital One.
Erratic also posted frequently to Slack about her struggles with gender identity, lack of employment, and persistent suicidal thoughts. In several conversations, Erratic makes references to running a botnet of sorts, although it is unclear how serious those claims were. Specifically, Erratic mentions one botnet involved in cryptojacking, which uses snippets of code installed on Web sites — often surreptitiously — designed to mine cryptocurrencies.
None of Erratic’s postings suggest Thompson sought to profit from selling the data taken from various Amazon cloud instances she was able to access. But it seems likely that at least some of that data could have been obtained by others who may have followed her activities on different social media platforms.
Ray Watson, a cybersecurity researcher at cloud security firm Masergy, said the Capital One incident contains the hallmarks of many other modern data data breaches.
“The attacker was a former employee of the web hosting company involved, which is what is often referred to as insider threats,” Watson said. “She allegedly used web application firewall credentials to obtain privilege escalation. Also the use of Tor and an offshore VPN for obfuscation are commonly seen in similar data breaches.”
“The good news, however, is that Capital One Incidence Response was able to move quickly once they were informed of a possible breach via their Responsible Disclosure program, which is something a lot of other companies struggle with,” he continued.
In Capital One’s statement about the breach, company chairman and CEO Richard D. Fairbank said the financial institution fixed the configuration vulnerability that led to the data theft and promptly began working with federal law enforcement.
“Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual,” Fairbank said. “While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened. I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”
Capital One says it will notify affected individuals via a variety of channels, and make free credit monitoring and identity protection available to everyone affected.
Bloomberg reports that in court on Monday, Thompson broke down and laid her head on the defense table during the hearing. She is charged with a single count of computer fraud and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Thompson will be held in custody until her bail hearing, which is set for August 1.
A copy of the complaint against Thompson is available here.
No Jail Time for “WannaCry Hero”
Marcus Hutchins, the “accidental hero” who helped arrest the spread of the global WannaCry ransomware outbreak in 2017, will receive no jail time for his admitted role in authoring and selling malware that helped cyberthieves steal online bank account credentials from victims, a federal judge ruled Friday.
Marcus Hutchins, just after he was revealed as the security expert who stopped the WannaCry worm. Image: twitter.com/malwaretechblog
The British security enthusiast enjoyed instant fame after the U.K. media revealed he’d registered and sinkholed a domain name that researchers later understood served as a hidden “kill switch” inside WannaCry, a fast-spreading, highly destructive strain of ransomware which propagated through a Microsoft Windows exploit developed by and subsequently stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency.
In August 2017, FBI agents arrested then 23-year-old Hutchins on suspicion of authoring and spreading the “Kronos” banking trojan and a related malware tool called UPAS Kit. Hutchins was released shortly after his arrest, but ordered to remain in the United States pending trial.
Many in the security community leaped to his defense at the time, noting that the FBI’s case appeared flimsy and that Hutchins had worked tirelessly through his blog to expose cybercriminals and their malicious tools. Hundreds of people donated to his legal defense fund.
In September 2017, KrebsOnSecurity published research which strongly suggested Hutchins’ dozens of alter egos online had a fairly lengthy history of developing and selling various malware tools and services. In April 2019, Hutchins pleaded guilty to criminal charges of conspiracy and to making, selling or advertising illegal wiretapping devices.
At his sentencing hearing July 26, U.S. District Judge Joseph Peter Stadtmueller said Hutchins’ action in halting the spread of WannaCry was far more consequential than the two malware strains he admitted authoring, and sentenced him to time served plus one year of supervised release.
Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who live-tweeted and blogged about the sentencing hearing last week, observed that prosecutors failed to show convincing evidence of specific financial losses tied to any banking trojan victims, virtually all of whom were overseas — particularly in Hutchins’ home in the U.K.
“When it comes to matter of loss or gain,” Wheeler wrote, quoting Judge Stadtmeuller. “the most striking is comparison between you passing Kronos and WannaCry, if one looks at loss & numbers of infections, over 8B throughout world w/WannaCry, and >120M in UK.”
“This case should never have been prosecuted in the first place,” Wheeler wrote. “And when Hutchins tried to challenge the details of the case — most notably the one largely ceded today, that the government really doesn’t have evidence that 10 computers were damaged by anything Hutchins did — the government doubled down and issued a superseding indictment that, because of the false statements charge, posed a real risk of conviction.”
Hutchins’ conviction means he will no longer be allowed to stay in or visit the United States, although Judge Stadtmeuller reportedly suggested Hutchins should seek a presidential pardon, which would enable him to return and work here.
“Incredibly thankful for the understanding and leniency of the judge, the wonderful character letter you all sent, and everyone who helped me through the past two years, both financially and emotionally,” Hutchins tweeted immediately after the sentencing. “Once t[h]ings settle down I plan to focus on educational blog posts and livestreams again.”
TWiT 729: My Baby Filled Her Rings
- Apple buys Intel's modem business
- House passes anti-robocall bill
- Samsung Galaxy Fold finally coming in September
- As T-Mobile/Sprint merger approved by DoJ, Dish launches a new mobile carrier
- iPadOS is the Future of Apple
- iPhone 11 is all about the camera
- Note 10 - no headphone jack, no buttons
- How Apple fights factory thefts
- Apple Card coming in August
- Google will buy your face for $5
- Facebook founder wants to break up Facebook
- Google bans repair business search ads
- Big government vs big tech
- Do not install PremierOpinion software from VoiceFive
- Pampers develops "smart" diapers
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, Lisa Schmeiser, and Lexy Savvides
Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech
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The Unsexy Threat to Election Security
Much has been written about the need to further secure our elections, from ensuring the integrity of voting machines to combating fake news. But according to a report quietly issued by a California grand jury this week, more attention needs to be paid to securing social media and email accounts used by election officials at the state and local level.
California has a civil grand jury system designed to serve as an independent oversight of local government functions, and each county impanels jurors to perform this service annually. On Wednesday, a grand jury from San Mateo County in northern California released a report which envisions the havoc that might be wrought on the election process if malicious hackers were able to hijack social media and/or email accounts and disseminate false voting instructions or phony election results.
“Imagine that a hacker hijacks one of the County’s official social media accounts and uses it to report false results on election night and that local news outlets then redistribute those fraudulent election results to the public,” the report reads.
“Such a scenario could cause great confusion and erode public confidence in our elections, even if the vote itself is actually secure,” the report continues. “Alternatively, imagine that a hacker hijacks the County’s elections website before an election and circulates false voting instructions designed to frustrate the efforts of some voters to participate in the election. In that case, the interference could affect the election outcome, or at least call the results into question.”
In San Mateo County, the office of the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder and Elections (ACRE) is responsible for carrying out elections and announcing local results. The ACRE sends election information to some 43,000 registered voters who’ve subscribed to receive sample ballots and voter information, and its Web site publishes voter eligibility information along with instructions on how and where to cast ballots.
The report notes that concerns about the security of these channels is hardly theoretical: In 2010, intruders hijacked ACRE’s election results Web page, and in 2016, cyber thieves successfully breached several county employee email accounts in a spear-phishing attack.
In the wake of the 2016 attack, San Mateo County instituted two-factor authentication for its email accounts — requiring each user to log in with a password and a one-time code sent via text message to their mobile device. However, the ACRE uses its own Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts to share election information, and these accounts are not currently secured by two-factor authentication, the report found.
“The Grand Jury finds that the security protections against hijacking of ACRE’s website, email, and social media accounts are not adequate to protect against the current cyber threats. These vulnerabilities expose the public to potential disinformation by hackers who could hijack an ACRE online communication platform to mislead voters before an election or sow confusion afterward. Public confidence is at stake, even if the vote itself is secure.”
The jury recommended the county take full advantage of the most secure two-factor authentication now offered by all of these social media platforms: The use of a FIDO physical security key, a small hardware device which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button. The key works without the need for any special software drivers [full disclosure: Yubico, a major manufacturer of security keys, is currently an advertiser on this site.]
Additionally, the report urges election officials to migrate away from one-time codes sent via text message, as these can be intercepted via man-in-the-middle (MitM) and SIM-swapping attacks. MitM attacks use counterfeit login pages to steal credentials and one-time codes.
An unauthorized SIM swap is an increasingly rampant form of fraud in which scammers bribe or trick employees at mobile phone stores into seizing control of the target’s phone number and diverting all texts and phone calls to the attacker’s mobile device.
Samy Tarazi is a sergeant with the sheriff’s office in nearby Santa Clara County and a supervisor with the REACT Task Force, a team of law enforcement officers that has been tracking down individuals perpetrating SIM swapping attacks. Tarazi said he fully expects SIM swapping to emerge as a real threat to state and local election workers, as well as to staff and volunteers working for candidates.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if some major candidate or their staff has an email or social media account with tons of important stuff on there [whose password] can be reset with just a text message,” Tarazi told KrebsOnSecurity. “I hope that doesn’t happen, but politicians are regular people who use the same tools we use.”
A copy of the San Mateo County grand jury report is available here (PDF).
