March 2018 – SurfWatch Labs, Inc.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: MyFitnessPal Breach, Carbanak Leader Arrested

Under Armor announced this week that approximately 150 million users of the diet and fitness app MyFitnessPal had their personal information acquired by an unauthorized third party sometime in February 2018. As Reuters noted, it is the largest data breach of 2018 in terms of the number of records affected.

The breach was discovered on March 25, and the data compromised includes usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords — the majority of which used bcrypt, the company said.

“The affected data did not include government-issued identifiers (such as Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers) because we don’t collect that information from users,” the company said in a statement. “Payment card data was not affected because it is collected and processed separately.”

MyFitnessPal also said that it would be requiring users to change their passwords and is urging users to do so immediately. The company is also urging users to review their accounts for suspicious activity as well as to change passwords on any other online accounts that used the same or a similar password to their now-breached MyFitnessPal credentials.

It is unclear how the unauthorized third party acquired the data, and the investigation is ongoing. Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal in February 2015 for $475 million.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Employee accounts targeted: The Retirement Advantage is notifying clients that their employees’ personal information may have been compromised due to unauthorized access to an employee email account at its Applied Plan Administrators division. Storemont in Northern Ireland is warning all staff of a cyber-attack targeting email accounts with numerous password attempts, and a number of accounts were compromised due to the attack. Shutterfly is notifying customers that their personal information may have been compromised due to an employee’s credentials being used without authorization to access its Workday test environment.
Payment card breaches: Manduka is notifying customers of a year-long payment card breach after discovering malware on its e-commerce web platform. Mintie Corporation is notifying customers of a ransomware attack that may have compromised customer payment card information. Fred Usinger said its hosting service provider notified the company of a breach involving personal information and stored payment information.
Other data breaches: A report from New York’s Attorney General said that 9.2 million New Yorkers had their data exposed in 2017, quadruple the number from 2016. Motherboard obtained thousands of user account details that are circulating on public image boards, and many of those accounts are related to a bestiality website. Mendes & Haney is notifying customers of unauthorized access to its network. Branton, de Jong and Associates is notifying customers that their tax information may have been compromised due to unauthorized access to its tax program. Researchers discovered a misconfigured database belonging to the New York internal medicine and cardiovascular health practice Cohen Bergman Klepper Romano Mds PC that exposed the patient information of 42,000 individuals.
Other notable events: Baltimore’s 911 dispatch system was temporarily shut down after a hack by an unknown actor led to “limited breach” of the system that supports the city’s 911 and 311 services. Kent NHS Trust is notifying patients that a staff member who had accessed their medical records “without a legitimate business reason” has been dismissed. The Malaysian central bank said it thwarted a cyber-attack that involved falsified wire-transfer requests over the SWIFT bank messaging network. Boeing said that a few machines were infected with the WannaCry malware.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Law enforcement officials in Spain have arrested the alleged leader of the cybercriminal syndicate behind the Carbankak and Cobalt malware attacks, which have targeted more than 100 financial organizations around the world and caused cumulative losses of over €1 billion since 2013.

Europol’s press release did not name the alleged mastermind behind the group; however, Bloomberg reported that Spain’s Interior Ministry named the suspect as Denis K, a Ukrainian national who had accumulated about 15,000 bitcoins (worth approximately $120 million at the time of his arrest). Europol noted that numerous other coders, mule networks, and money launderers connected to the group were also the target of the international law enforcement operation.

The group first used the Anunak malware in 2013 to target financial transfers and ATM networks, and by the following year they had created a more sophisticated version of the malware known as Carbanak, which was used by the group used until 2016. At that point the group carried out an even more sophisticated wave of attacks using custom-made malware based on the Cobalt Strike penetration testing software, Europol said.

“The criminals would send out to bank employees spear phishing emails with a malicious attachment impersonating legitimate companies,” Europol wrote in a press release. “Once downloaded, the malicious software allowed the criminals to remotely control the victims’ infected machines, giving them access to the internal banking network and infecting the servers controlling the ATMs. This provided them with the knowledge they needed to cash out the money.”

Carlos Yuste, a Spanish police chief inspector who helped lead the operation, told Bloomberg that “the head has been cut off” of the high-profile group. Steven Wilson, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, said that the arrest illustrates how law enforcement “is having a major impact on top level cybercriminality.”

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Orbitz Breach, Facebook Privacy Fallout

One of the biggest data breach announcements of the past week belonged to Orbitz, which said on Tuesday that as many as 880,000 customers may have had their payment card and other personal information compromised due to unauthorized access to a legacy Orbitz travel booking platform.

“Orbitz determined on March 1, 2018 that there was evidence suggesting that, between October 1, 2017 and December 22, 2017, an attacker may have accessed certain personal information, stored on this consumer and business partner platform, that was submitted for certain purchases made between January 1, 2016 and June 22, 2016 (for Orbitz platform customers) and between January 1, 2016 and December 22, 2017 (for certain partners’ customers),” the company said in a statement.

Information potentially compromised includes payment card information, names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and gender.

As American Express noted in its statement about the breach, the affected Orbitz platform served as the underlying booking engine for many online travel websites, including Amextravel.com and travel booked through Amex Travel Representatives.

Expedia, which purchased Orbitz in 2015, did not say how many or which partner platforms were affected by the breach, USA Today reported. However, the company did say that the current Orbitz.com site was not affected.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

State data breach notifications: Island Outdoor is notifying customers that payment card information may have been stolen due to the discovery of malware affecting several of its websites. Agemni is notifying customers about unauthorized charges after “a single authorized user of our software system used customer information to make improper charges for his personal benefit.” The Columbia Falls School District is notifying parents of a cyber-extortion threat involving their children’s personal information. Intuit is notifying TurboTax customers that their accounts may have been accessed by an actor leveraging previously leaked credentials. Taylor-Dunn Manufacturing Company is notifying customers that it discovered cryptocurrency mining malware on a server and that a file containing personal information of those registered for the Taylor-Dunn customer care or dealer center may have been accessed. Nampa School District is notifying a “limited number” of employees and Skamania Public Utility District is notifying customers that their personal information may have been compromised due to incidents involving unauthorized access to an employee email account.
Data exposed: A flaw in Telstra Health’s Argus software, which is used by more than 40,000 Australian health specialists, may have exposed the medical information of patients to hackers. Primary Healthcare is notifying patients of unauthorized access to four employee email accounts. More than 300,000 Pennsylvania school teachers may have had their personal information publicly released due to an employee error involving the Teacher Management Information System.
Notable ransomware attacks: The city of Atlanta said a ransomware attack disrupted internal and customer-facing applications, which made it difficult for citizens to pay bills and access court-related information. Atrium Hospitality is notifying 376 hotel guests that their personal information may have been compromised due to a ransomware infection at a workstation at the Holiday Inn Sacramento. Finger Lakes Health said it lost access to its computer system due to ransomware infection.
Other notable events: Frost Bank said that malicious actors comprised a third-party lockbox software program and were able to access images of checks that were stored in the database. National Lottery users are being advised to change their passwords after 150 accounts were affected by a “low-level” hack. A lawsuit against Internet provider CenturyLink and AT&T-owned DirecTV alleges that customer data was available through basic Internet searches.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Facebook has faced a week of criticism, legal actions, and outcry from privacy advocates after it was revealed that the political consulting Cambridge Analytica had accessed the information of 50 million users and leveraged that information while working with the Donald Trump campaign in 2016.

“Cambridge Analytica obtained the data from a professor at the University of Cambridge who had collected the information by creating a personality-quiz app in 2013 that plugged into Facebook’s platform,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Before a policy change in 2015, Facebook gave app creators and academics access to a treasure trove of data, ranging from which pages users liked to details about their friends.”

It isn’t clear how many other developers might have retained information harvested from Facebook before the 2015 policy change, The Journal reported. However, Mark Zuckerberg said the company may spend “many millions of dollars” auditing tens of thousands of data collecting apps in order to get a better handle on the situation.

The privacy breach has already led to regulatory scrutiny and potential lawsuits around the globe. Bloomberg reported that the FTC is probing whether data handling violated terms of a 2011 consent decree. In addition, Facebook said it would conduct staff-level briefings with six congressional committees in the coming week. Some lawmakers have called for Zuckerberg to testify as well, and Zuckerberg told media outlets that he would be willing to do so if asked.

Facebook’s stock price has dropped from $185 to $159 over the past eight days amid the controversy, and several companies have suspended their advertising on Facebook or deleted their Facebook pages altogether due to the public backlash.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Russia Sanctions, Mossack Fonseca Shutdown, Equifax Insider Trading

On Thursday, the U.S. government imposed sanctions against five entities and 19 individuals for their role in “destabilizing activities” ranging from interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to carrying out destructive cyber-attacks such as NotPetya, an event that the Treasury department said is the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history.

“These targeted sanctions are a part of a broader effort to address the ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia,” said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin in a press release. “Treasury intends to impose additional CAATSA [Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act] sanctions, informed by our intelligence community, to hold Russian government officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the U.S. financial system.”

Nine of the 24 entities and individuals named on Thursday had already received previous sanctions from either President Obama or President Trump for unrelated reasons, The New York Times reported.

In addition to the sanctions, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a joint alert warning that the Russian government is targeting government entities as well as organizations in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors.

According to the alert, Russian government cyber actors targeted small commercial facilities’ networks with a multi-stage intrusion campaign that staged malware, conducted spear phishing attacks, and gained remote access into energy sector networks. The actors then used their access to conduct network reconnaissance, move laterally, and collect information pertaining to Industrial Control Systems.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Sensitive data exposed: Researchers discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket belonging to the Chicago-based jewelry company MBM Company Inc. that exposed the personal information of more than 1.3 million people. About 3,000 South Carolina recipients of the Palmetto Fellows scholarship had their personal information exposed online for over a year due to a glitch when switching programs. The Dutch Data Protection Authority accidentally leaked the names of some of its employees due to not removing metadata from more than 800 public documents.
State data breach notifications: ABM Industries is notifying clients of a phishing incident that may have compromised their personal information. Chopra Enterprises is notifying customers that payment cards used on its ecommerce site may have been compromised. Neil D. DiLorenzo CPA is notifying clients of unauthorized access to a system that contained files related to tax returns, and several clients have reported fraudulent activity related to their tax returns. NetCredit is warning a small percentage of customers that an unauthorized party used their credentials to access their accounts.
Other data breaches: A misconfiguration at Florida Virtual School led to the personal information of 368,000 students as well as thousands of former and current Leon County Schools employees being compromised. Okaloosa County Water and Sewer said that individuals may have had their payment card information stolen due to a breach involving external vendors that process credit and debit card payments. The Nampa School District said that an email account compromise may have compromised the personal information of 3,983 current and past employees. A cyber-attack at the Port of Longview may have exposed the personal information of 370 current and former employees as well as 47 vendors.
Arrests and legal actions: A Maryland Man was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his role in a multi-million dollar identity theft scheme that claimed fraudulent tax refunds over a seven-year period. The owner of Smokin’ Joe’s BBQ in Missouri has been charged with various counts related to the use of stolen credit cards. Svitzer said that 500 employees are impacted by the discovery of three employee email accounts in finance, payroll, and operations were auto-forwarding emails outside of the company for nearly 11 months without the company’s knowledge.
Other notable events: Up to 450 people who filed reports with Gwent Police over a two-year period had their data exposed due to security flaws in the online tool, and those people were never notified that their data may have been compromised. A security flaw on a Luxembourg public radio station may have exposed non-public information.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Two of the largest data breaches of recent memory were back in the news this week due to Mossack Fonseca announcing that it is shutting down following the fallout from the Panama Papers breach as well as a former Equifax employee being charged with insider trading related to its massive breach.

Documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and leaked to the media in April 2016 were at the center of the scandal known as the Panama Papers, which largely revealed how rich individuals around the world were able to evade taxes in various countries.

“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial circus and the unusual actions by certain Panamanian authorities, have occasioned an irreversible damage that necessitates the obligatory ceasing of public operations at the end of the current month,” Mossack Fonseca wrote in a statement.

While Mossack Fonseca’s data breach appears to have finally led to the organization shutting down, Equifax’s massive breach announcement in September 2017 has since sparked a variety of regulatory questions, as well as criticism of the company’s leadership and allegations of insider trading.

Last week the SEC officially filed a complaint that alleges that Jun Ying, who was next in line to be the company’s global CIO, conducted insider trading by using confidential information entrusted to him by the company to conclude Equifax had suffered a serious breach, and Ying then exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and sold the shares in the days before the breach was publicly disclosed.

“According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses,” the SEC wrote in a press release.

Ying also faces criminal charges from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Payment Card Breaches, Encryption Debate, and Breach Notification Laws

This past week saw the announcement of several new payment card breaches, including a point-of-sale breach at Applebee’s restaurants that affected 167 locations across 15 states.

The malware, which was discovered on February 13, 2018, was “designed to capture payment card information and may have affected a limited number of purchases” made at Applebee’s locations owned by RMH Franchise Holdings, the company said in a statement.

News outlets reported many of the affected locations had their systems infected between early December 2017 and early January 2018. Applebee’s has close to 2,000 locations around the world and 167 of them were affected by the incident.

In addition to Applebees, MenuDrive issued a breach notification to merchants saying that its desktop ordering site was injected with malware designed to capture payment card information. The incident impacted certain transactions from November 5, 2017 to November 28, 2017.

“We have learned that the malware was contained to ONLY the Desktop ordering site of the version that you are using and certain payment gateways,” the company wrote. “Thus, this incident was contained to a part of our system and did NOT impact the Mobile ordering site or any other MenuDrive versions.”

Finally, there is yet another breach notification related to Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ SynXis Central Reservations System — this time affecting Preferred Hotels & Resorts. Sabre said that a unauthorized individual used compromised user credentials to view reservation information, including payment card information, for a subset of hotel reservations that Sabre processed on behalf of the company between June 2016 and November 2017.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Marijuana businesses targeted: MJ Freeway Business Solutions, which provides business management software to cannabis dispensaries, is notifying customers of unauthorized access to its systems that may have led to personal information being stolen. The Canadian medical marijuana delivery service JJ Meds said that it received an extortion threat demanding $1,000 in bitcoin in order to prevent a leak of customer information.
Healthcare breach notifications: The Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services said that the personal information of 11,000 people was improperly emailed to local contractors by a now-fired employee. Front Range Dermatology Associates announced a breach related to a now-fired employee providing patient information to a former employee. Investigators said two Florida Hospital employees stole patient records, and local news reported that 9,000 individuals may have been impacted by the theft.
Notable data breaches: Ventiv Technology, which provides workers’ compensation claim management software solutions, is notifying customers of a compromise of employee email accounts that were hosted on Office365 and contained personal information. Catawba County services employees had their personal information compromised due to the payroll and human resources system being infected with malware. Flexible Benefit Service Corporation said that an employee email account was compromised and used to search for wire payment information. A flaw in Nike’s website allowed attackers to read server data and could have been leveraged to gain greater access to the company’s systems. A researcher claimed that airline Emirates is leaking customer data.
Other notable events: Cary E. Williams CPA is notifying employees, shareholders, trustees and partners of a ransomware attack that led to unauthorized access to its systems. The cryptocurrency exchange Binance said that its users were the target of “a large scale phishing and stealing attempt” and those compromised accounts were used to perform abnormal trading activity over a short period of time. The spyware company Retina-X Studios said that it “is immediately and indefinitely halting its PhoneSheriff, TeenShield, SniperSpy and Mobile Spy products” after being “the victim of sophisticated and repeated illegal hackings.”

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

There were several regulatory stories that made headlines this week, including the FBI’s continued push for a stronger partnership with the private sector when it comes to encryption, allegations that Geek Squad techs act as FBI spies, and new data breach notification laws.

In a keynote address at Boston College’s cybersecurity summit, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that there were 7,775 devices that the FBI could not access due to encryption in fiscal 2017, despite having approval from a judge. According to Fry, that meant the FBI could not access more than half of the devices they tried to access during the period.

“Let me be clear: the FBI supports information security measures, including strong encryption,” Fry said. “Actually, the FBI is on the front line fighting cyber crime and economic espionage. But information security programs need to be thoughtfully designed so they don’t undermine the lawful tools we need to keep the American people safe.”

However, Ars Technica noted that a consensus of technical experts has said that what the FBI has asked for is impossible.

In addition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that revealed the FBI and Best Buy’s Geek Squad have been working together for decades. In some cases Geek Squad techs were paid as much as $1,000 to be informants, which the EFF argued was a violation of Fourth Amendment rights as the computer searches were not authorized by their owners.

Finally, the Alabama senate unanimously passed the Alabama Breach Notification Act, and the bill will now move to the house.

“Alabama is one of two states that doesn’t have a data breach notification law,” said state Senator Arthur Orr, who sponsored Alabama’s bill. “In the case of a breach, businesses and organizations, including state government, are under no obligation to tell a person their information may have been compromised.”

With both Alabama and South Dakota recently introducing data breach notification legislation, every resident of the U.S. may soon be protected by a state breach notification law.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Record-Setting DDoS Attacks, Data Breach Costs

Last week, researchers observed a 1.35 Tbps distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) attack targeting GitHub. It was the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, surpassing the 1.2 Tbps attack against DNS provider Dyn in October 2016.

The attack leveraged a newly observed reflection and amplification vector known as memcached. Akamai researchers warned that other organizations experienced similar DDoS attacks using the new method following the GitHub attack and that even larger attacks may be possible in the future.

“Memcached can have both UDP and TCP listeners and requires no authentication,” the researchers wrote. “Since UDP is easily spoofable, it makes this service vulnerable to use as a reflector. Worse, memcached can have an amplification factor of over 50,000, meaning a 203 byte request results in a 100 megabyte response.”

The attack was mitigated within 10 minutes, GitHub said. The following day GitHub was the target of a second DDoS attack that disrupted availability for a 15-minute period, ThousandEyes reported.

“Because of its ability to create such massive attacks, it is likely that attackers will adopt memcached reflection as a favorite tool rapidly,” Akamai researchers wrote. “The good news is that providers can rate limit traffic from source port 11211 and prevent traffic from entering and exiting their networks, but this will take time.”

Wired reported there are approximately 100,000 memcached servers that currently have no authentication protection and can be abused by malicious attackers to carry out similar potentially massive, botnet-free DDoS attacks.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

W-2 information breached: The University of Alaska said that 50 current and former employees and students had their personal information compromised when hackers gained access to their university accounts by answering security questions and resetting their passwords. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is notifying employees that their W-2 information was compromised due to a spear phishing attack. Wallace Community College Selma said that current and former employees had their W-2 information compromised when an employee fell for a phishing scam. Curtis Lumber is notifying employees that their personal information was stolen in a spear phishing attack, and some of those employees have reported issues related to filing their federal taxes following the incident.
Ransomware infections continue: The Colorado Department of Transportation said that computers had been reinfected with ransomware eight days after an initial attack. Both the Children’s Aid Society of Oxford County and the Family and Children’s Services of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville in Canada were the victims of a ransomware infection. Jemison Internal Medicine is notifying 6,550 patients of a ransomware infection that may have compromised their personal information.
Payment card breaches and service disruptions: A number of Tim Hortons locations in Canada were temporarily shut down or were forced to close their drive-throughs after malware was discovered targeting Panasonic cash registers. NIS America said that customers of its online stores had their information compromised due to being redirected to a malicious site that would harvest their information during the checkout process. North 40 is notifying customers that their payment card information may have been compromised due to unauthorized access to its e-commerce website.
Notable data breaches: A hacker gained access to the intranet of Germany’s government and accessed confidential information. St. Peter’s Surgery and Endoscopy Center is notifying patients that their personal and medical information may have been compromised due to unauthorized access to its servers. Healthcare vendor FastHealth submitted a data breach notification regarding unauthorized access to its web server. Porsche Japan said that the information of customers was exposed due to a hack. Metro Wire Rope Corporation said that an employee email account was compromised after the employee opened a malicious attachment with credential-stealing capabilities. The French news magazine L’Express exposed a database containing the personal information of readers and after being notified of the exposure took a month to secure the data. U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve may have compromised the personal information of 21,426 individuals due to sending an unencrypted email with an attachment to the wrong email distribution list.
Other notable events: The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center said that one of its employees was successfully phished, and the compromised email account was used to send further phishing messages to other members, affiliates, and employees. The recent hack of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics that led to Internet disruptions and website downtime was a false-flag operation carried out by Russian military spies to make it appear as if the attack was carried out by North Korea, U.S. intelligence officials said. An Arkansas man who developed the remote-access Trojan NanoCore and marketed it on Hack Forums has been sentenced to 33 months in prison.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Equifax was back in the news this week after announcing it had discovered an additional 2.4 million U.S. consumers who were affected by its massive 2017 data breach, bringing the total number of people impacted to 147.9 million.

“This is not about newly discovered stolen data,” said Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr., Interim chief executive officer in a press release. “It’s about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers, and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals.”

The company also said that it expects breach-related costs to hit $275 million in 2018, which Reuters noted could make the Equifax breach the most costly hack in corporate history:

The projection, which was disclosed on a Friday morning earnings conference call, is on top of $164 million in pretax costs posted in the second half of 2017. That brings expected breach-related costs through the end of this year to $439 million, some $125 million of which Equifax said will be covered by insurance.

Those breach-related costs could rise further once legal actions from consumers and regulators are finally resolved. However, Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently stated that “Equifax is still making money off their own breach” and that even consumers who do not want to do business with them may end up buying credit protection services from another company who “very well may be using Equifax to do the back office part.”

It’s the same criticism she waged in January when introducing a bill with Sen. Mark Warner to address problems related to credit agencies collecting data without strict protections in place to secure that information. As CNET noted, if such a bill was in place at the time of the Equifax breach, the company likely would have faced a fine of at least $14.3 billion.