Tag: Ashley Madison

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Ashley Madison Blackmail Returns, Facebook and Google Victims of Fraud

An old data breach came back to life this week as Ashley Madison users who had their data compromised back in July 2015 are once again being blackmailed — this time by an extortion group threatening to launch a public website and contact people in victims’ social media networks. The website will allegedly be launched on Monday, at which point it will be clear if the threat is just a ploy to extort victims who are low-hanging fruit or if the group will actually carry out their attempt at public shaming.

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“On May 1 2017 we are launching our new site — Cheaters Gallery – exposing those who cheat and destroy families,” a group using a Ukrainian top level domain recently wrote in an email to some Ashley Madison users. “We will launch the site with a big email to all the friends and family of cheaters taken from Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites. This will include you if do not pay to opting out.”

Robin Harris wrote on ZDNet that the email he received quoted his personal Ashley Madison profile and that the blackmail price for “opting out” of the Cheaters Gallery website was around $500. Of course, paying that blackmail won’t accomplish much unless the victims are willing to keep paying ransoms in an endless game of extortion whack-a-mole. The breached Ashley Madison data has been circulating for 20 months now — ever since the account details of around 32 million users were published on the dark web — and numerous other actors have attempted to extort the victims in the past via extortion emails and letters sent to victims and their spouses. The repeated blackmail campaigns indicate that either victims are paying up and the campaigns are profitable or that the actors behind them at least believed they would be worth the investment.

Seeing another round of Ashley Madison blackmail threats nearly two years after the breach is a reminder that once data is exposed, it remains exposed forever. As SurfWatch Labs noted in a report last year, the pool of compromised data never empties; it only grows. That means that malicious actors can use, reuse, build upon, and find new ways to monetize that expanding pool of data now and in the future.

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Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

  • More payment card breaches: Chain restaurant Chipotle said that it is investigating a possible point-of-sale breach after detecting “unauthorized activity on the network that supports payment processing for purchases made in our restaurants.” The investigation is focusing transactions that occurred at locations from March 24, 2017 through April 18, 2017. Trading card dealer Blowout Cards announced a data breach due to “an exploit in the form of a modified payment .php file” that allowed the intruders to skim payment card information as customers checked out via its website. As a result, those who used credit and debit cards to check out via the site’s shopping cart between January 2017 and April 20, 2017, had their information compromised.
  • Espionage groups behind South Korea, Israel attacks: Iran’s OilRig hacking group is behind a series of targeted attacks against 250 individuals in government agencies, high-tech companies, medical organizations, and educational institutions such as the renowned Ben-Gurion University. The attacks took place between April 19 and 24 and employed the just-patched Microsoft CVE-2017-0199 remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) application programming interface. Two cyber-espionage groups linked to China have been observed launching a variety of attacks against South Korea’s government, military, defense companies, and a big conglomerate involved in deploying Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, a U.S. missile-defense system designed to protect South Korea from a North Korean missile threat.
  • FIN7 campaign uses social engineering: The FIN7 group (also known as Carbanak) is targeting large restaurant chains, hospitality, and financial service organizations with spear phishing messages centered around complaints, catering orders, or resumes. The group has also been observed calling stores at targeted organizations to ensure they received the email and attempting to walk them through the infection process, as it has done in previous campaigns.  
  • Phishing leads to fraud, data breaches: Fraudsters were able to convince more than 500 University of California students to hand over their health information, and that information was used to steal almost $12 million from the university by writing fake medical prescriptions in the students’ names. The Iowa Veterans Home is notifying 2,969 people that their medical and financial information may have been compromised after three IVH employees fell for phishing emails that compromised their email account credentials.
  • Other notable cybercrime events: A vulnerability in a popular third-party library used by HipChat.com led to a data breach. The email addresses and unique IMEI numbers from Ciphr phone users have been dumped online, and Ciphr claims that the leak was carried out by a rival secure phone company. A hacker claims to have compromised the forums of R2 games. Concordia University said that approximately 9,000 students may have been affected by unauthorized access to its online course systems. The information of 8,000 Home Depot customers who had lodged complaints with its MyInstall program was found exposed online. Ransomware infected some City of Newark computers. WikiLeaks has published the user guide for the “Weeping Angel” tool allegedly developed by the CIA.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of those “newly seen” targets, meaning they either appeared in SurfWatch Labs’ data for the first time or else reappeared after being absent for several weeks, are shown in the chart below.

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Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

2017-04-28_RiskScoresFacebook and Google confirmed this week that they were the victims of the $100 million phishing scheme announced by the Department of Justice of last month.

The scheme was carried out by Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian man who allegedly impersonated the large Taiwan-based manufacturer Quanta Computer in order to dupe the companies into making a series of fraudulent payments. According to the indictment, Rimasauskas, registered and incorporated a company in Latvia with the same name as Quanta Computer and then forged email addresses, invoices, and corporate stamps in order to convince the accounting departments at the two tech companies to make transfers worth tens of millions of dollars over a two year span, stealing $100 million in total.

Facebook and Google both told Fortune that they have since recovered the bulk of the funds. 

Acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said in a DOJ press release that “this case should serve as a wake-up call to all companies – even the most sophisticated – that they too can be victims of phishing attacks by cyber criminals.”

That same concern was echoed in a report from the Association for Financial Professionals published in early April. According to the report, 74 percent of finance professionals reported that their organizations were victims of business email compromise (BEC) scams in 2016, a 10-percentage point increase from the previous year.

Likewise, in December 2016 the FBI warned of a dramatic increase in BEC scams, which attempt to assume the identity of a person of authority within the company or — in the case of the Facebook and Google thefts — a trusted vendor before asking to initiate a fraudulent wire transfer.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Largest Breach Ever and Law Firm Lawsuits

On Wednesday, Yahoo announced a data breach that affects more than one billion user accounts. The intrusion, which Yahoo believes occurred in August 2013, comes just months after the company announced a separate breach involving “at least 500 million user accounts.” The new breach was discovered after law enforcement received Yahoo data from a third party. The compromised information includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, MD5-hashed passwords, and some encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

2016-12-16_ITT.pngAs The New York Times noted, the breach gives Yahoo the distinction of having the largest ever data breach – on two separate occasions.

It also appears that the intruders were able to use stolen source code to forge cookies, which allowed the malicious actors to gain access to some users’ accounts without needing a password.

Yahoo said those forged cookies have been invalidated, along with any unencrypted security questions and answers. Yahoo did not make clear how many unencrypted security questions and answers were stolen, but users who used those same questions and answers on other sites may face increased risk around those accounts being compromised in the future.

The newly announced breach has also led to more speculation about the potential impact on Yahoo’s pending $4.8 billion deal to be acquired by Verizon. Sources told Reuters that Verizon is looking for “major concessions” from Yahoo, and Verizon reiterated that it would “review the impact of this new development before reaching any final conclusions” about proceeding with the deal.

The incident may also have an affect on the size of Yahoo’s user base. Reuters reported that several cybersecurity experts and bodies such as Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security are now advising Yahoo users to consider abandoning the service for email providers that may be more secure.

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Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

  • Russian hacking put front-and-center: U.S. intelligence officials have “a high level of confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in the effort to interfere with the presidential election. Officials told ABC News that Russian hackers targeted as many as two email systems associated with the Republican National Committee, but the incidents didn’t raise the same level of concern as similar attacks against the DNC because the systems had long been unused. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency reported that Russia is trying to destabilize German society via targeted cyber-attacks against political parties and disinformation campaigns.  The head of the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service said that Russian hacking is a “serious threat” that may “influence democratic decision-making.”
  • Insiders cause more cyber headaches: The February 2016 theft at Bangladesh Bank was aided by five low to mid-level employees who were negligent and careless but not directly involved in the crime, according to a Bangladesh government-appointed panel. Hong Kong officials have arrested 29 current and former employees across five financial institutions for alleged bribery and sharing of confidential customer information. A two-year investigation found that lax privacy procedures at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction contributed to a $422,000 scheme that used prisoners’ identities to apply for federal student loans. An employee of Banner Boswell Hospital in Arizona has been arrested for allegedly stealing patients’ credit card information and using that information to buy items online.
  • More DDoS attacks amid arrests: A series of DDoS attacks aimed at disrupting updates about the pro-Russian separatist conflict brought down the websites for Ukraine’s Finance Ministry and State Treasury. Nearly three dozen users of “booter” services were arrested in a global effort dubbed “Operation Tarpit,” a law enforcement campaign aimed at weakening demand for cybercrime-for-hire services and raising awareness of the risks of engaging in cybercrime.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of those “newly seen” targets, meaning they either appeared in SurfWatch Labs’ data for the first time or else reappeared after being absent for several weeks, are shown in the chart below.

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Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

2016-12-16_riskThe past week saw several legal developments involving both past breaches and possible future lawsuits.

Ruby Corp, the operator of AshleyMadison, has agreed to pay $1.6 million to settle state and Federal Trade Commission charges related to its massive July 2015 data breach. The total fine was $17.5 million, but the remaining portion was suspended based on Ruby Corp.’s inability to pay.

“I recognize that it was a far lower number frankly than I would have liked,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said on a conference call with reporters. “We want them to feel the pain. We don’t want them to profit from unlawful conduct. At the same time, we are not going to seek to put a company out of business.”

The settlement also requires the implementation of a comprehensive data-security program, including third-party assessments.

Another interesting story of note is a lawsuit that was recently filed against the Chicago-based law firm Johnson & Bell that alleges the firm failed to protect confidential customer information. According to the lawyer that filed the case, it is the first class action lawsuit against a law firm over inadequate data security measures. The same lawyer previously said he had identified a total of 15 firms lacking basic security measures that may be targeted by lawsuits, although the others have not yet been publicly named.

The Johnson & Bell lawsuit was filed back in April 2016; however, it only recently became public and moved to arbitration. Although the complaint does not claim that any data was actually stolen, it alleges that the firm put clients at risk due to using an out of date time-entry system, a VPN that was prone to man-in-the-middle attacks, and an email system that was vulnerable to the DROWN attack.

As SurfWatch Labs noted in our whitepaper, Flipping the Script: Law Firms Hunted by Cybercriminals, law firms are attractive targets for malicious actors as they often have weaker security than the clients they represent. Breaches may also be especially damaging for law offices as confidentiality is at the core of the legal process and law firms often have access to valuable data.