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Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Spain-Catalonia Conflict Goes Digital, Russian Hacking Revealed

The Spanish government was the week’s top trending cybercrime target due to a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and other attacks that were orchestrated by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

The Anonymous’ campaign against the Spanish government comes on the heels of Catalonia’s recent referendum on independence. As Miguel-Anxo Murado wrote in The New York Review last month, the multi-year independence movement finally came to a head in October as secessionists ignored both a ban placed on the vote by the Spanish Constitutional Court as well as the threat of police action and voted for independence.

That vote led to “mayhem,” Murado wrote, resulting in almost nine hundred people being injured throughout Catalonia as Spanish police confronted protesters and stormed polling stations in order to seize the ballot boxes. On Sunday, Reuters reported that Spain had issued arrest warrants for ex-Catalonia leader Carles Puigdemont and four associates due to rebellion and sedition charges related to the push for recession.

The independence movement has also been accompanied by what one Washington Post editorial described as “The great Catalonian cyberwar of 2017.” According to the Post, Spanish courts and authorities have in the past few months ordered telecom companies to shut down websites pertaining to the vote and forced Google Play to remove an app related to the referendum.

Scattered cyber-attacks have occurred as the issue unfolded over the past couple months; however, attacks ramped up towards the end of October as Anonymous groups on Twitter and elsewhere urged others to join the #FreeCatalonia campaign, which resulted in numerous organizations being targeted with DDoS attacks, website defacements, and other low-level malicious activity.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Extortion attacks: TheDarkOverlord said it hacked the customer database of Hollywood production studio Line 204, and the group is threatening to leak the company’s internal client data, which includes contracts, files, invoices, and more. The group told media outlets that it will leak the data if it does not receive an unspecified ransom, a threat the group has made to numerous other hacked organizations. A malicious actor has released the personal information of 29 University of the Fraser Valley students and is threatening to release more data if the school does not pay a $30,000 ransom.
Data leaked: Information related to 46.2 million Malaysian mobile phone numbers that was taken from Malaysian telephone companies and mobile virtual network operators in 2014 has leaked, and the data appears to have been traded among multiple malicious actors. An unnamed third party contractor for government agencies, a bank, and a utility exposed the details of 48,270 Australian employees due to a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket.
Third-party-related breaches: Malicious actors used information apparently stolen in another breach to create Iowa Public Employees Retirement Systems accounts for individuals who had never created one, and they used those accounts to steal pension checks by redirecting them to different bank accounts. Kimberly-Clark is notifying a “small number” of customers that their personal information may have been compromised due to attacks that targeted registered accounts using a list of credentials leaked in other data breaches not related to the company. Midland County in Texas said a third-party payment system used to pay fines may have been compromised resulting in an undisclosed number of individuals having their payment card information stolen.
Other data breaches: North Korean hackers were likely behind an April 2016 hack of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering that led to the theft of sensitive documents. Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Albany said that the personal information of clients and some employees was compromised due to hackers gaining access to a server. The certified public accountants Chiorini, Hunt & Jacobs are notifying customers that their personal information may have been compromised due to three email accounts being accessed. The Union Labor Life Insurance Company is notifying customers that their information may have been compromised when an unauthorized third-party briefly gained access to an employee’s email account and used that account to send spam messages that contained PDF documents with links to malicious sites.
Other notable incidents: Numerous art galleries confirmed they were targeted by business email compromise scams that hijacked email communications and requested payment details be changed in order to steal amounts up to £1 million. T-Mobile said it has called all of the few hundred customers targeted by malicious actors with attempts to “swap” the victims’ SIM cards and impersonate them. An unspecified cyber attack at the Oklahoma Corporate Commission led to its network being shut down for a week. A former University of Iowa student used keyloggers to steal credentials, access 250 student and faculty accounts, and then change his grades and access his exams early.

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.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

The investigation into Russia’s alleged election-related hacking brought several new developments this past week.

For starters, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice department has identified at least six members of the Russian government connected to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack, and evidence is being assembled to potentially bring official charges against those individuals next year. The WSJ said that dozens of others may have played a role in the hack; however, it is possible prosecutors may wait to identify some or all of those involved until Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into alleged Russian hacking is complete.

The Mueller investigation has already resulted in several indictments as well as a guilty plea for lying to the FBI from George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. The guilty plea has some overlap with the hacked emails, as court documents state that an overseas professor Papadopoulos met with multiple times “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails.’”

A Sunday report from the Associated Press lays out the timeline of Russia’s hacking attempts, and that campaign appears to have begun with phishing emails sent to a list of email addresses tied to staffers of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Most of those emails bounced back, but one of those staffers who had also joined the 2016 campaign ended up clicking on multiple phishing links — possibly providing the attackers with a fresh batch of email addresses to target. More than a dozen democrats were ultimately hacked, including John Podesta. One of Podesta’s hacked emails was the first document published by Guccifer 2.0, although it was altered. Guccifer 2.0 airbrushed the word “CONFIDENTIAL” onto the document and claimed the document came from the DNC rather than Podesta in order to entice reporters.

APT28, the group tied to the hacks, had wide-reaching targets far beyond the U.S. election, the AP reported. The group targeted the gmail accounts of 4,700 users spread across 116 countries, including Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors, and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin. In the U.S. the targets included diplomatic and military officials; defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, some republicans, and more than 130 democratic party workers.

Recent Campaigns Highlight Evolving Social Engineering Tactics

Over the past month, researchers have observed several new phishing campaigns that demonstrate a more sophisticated and targeted approach to social engineering by threat actors.

For example, on Monday Trustwave wrote about the Carbanak gang targeting the hospitality and restaurant sectors. The actors began the attack by using public tools such as LinkedIn to find the names of company department heads or other key employees. Then they called the organization’s customer service line and claim that they were having difficulties with the online registration system and ask to send the information via email. They would spend a significant amount of time on the phone with the employee — often dropping those researched names in order to build trust — until the employee eventually opened the malicious Word document attached in the email.

Finally, the organization would be infected with malware capable of stealing system information, taking desktop screenshots, and downloading additional tools such as point-of-sale malware.

Targeted Social Engineering Becomes Less Direct

Other threat actors are shifting towards similarly indirect paths of compromise — beginning their attacks with a message, or several messages, designed to build trust before attempting to cause harm. This is the case with recent business email compromise (BEC) scams, which the FBI has repeatedly warned is a growing problem for organizations.

“In most cases, a BEC scam attempts to portray an email or request as being urgent, placing pressure on the recipient to act fast without asking questions,” SurfWatch Labs noted in a blog post about the FBI’s July alert. “The email is often sent from a legitimate looking source — such as a high-ranking company official or a bank that works with the company — which further eliminates questions from the recipient.”

However, Symantec recently warned that BEC scams had shifted to a less urgent approach. Instead, most BEC scams now begin with a simple introductory message before requesting a fraudulent wire transfer, as this email exchange demonstrates:

An actor using an informal introduction before going on to a more traditional wire transfer request, as shown by Symantec.

In June, shortly before the FBI’s last BEC warning, just 20 percent of BEC emails began by inquiring about the recipient’s availability — with the rest directly requesting a wire transfer, according to Symantec. By October, 60 percent of the emails began with the more indirect approach of inquiring about the recipient’s availability.

A Look at SurfWatch Labs’ Threat Intelligence Data

Warnings of targeted attacks like the ones described above have led to spear phishing being the most common practice tag related to social engineering over the past 90 days, according to SurfWatch Labs’ data.

A wide variety of industry groups have been tied to spear phishing threats over the period. However, the most talked about cybercrime stories of the past month may have been the hacking and publication of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, as well as what role those breaches had in shaping the recent US presidential election.

In those cases, the leaks have been tied to spear phishing emails from Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, one of the most prominent hacking groups related to spear phishing over the past 90 days, behind only Peter Romar, a 37-year-old Syrian national who recently pled guilty to his role in the Syrian Electronic Army.

Those Fancy Bear attacks used a particular tactic: the use of shortened URLs. As Esquire’s Thoma Rid wrote explained, those shortened URLs both tricked users into clicking malicious links at an alarming rate and, ultimately, helped researchers uncover the actors behind those targeted attacks:

To manage so many short URLs, Fancy Bear had created an automated system that used a popular link-shortening service called Bitly. The spear-phishing emails worked well—one in seven victims revealed their passwords—but the hackers forgot to set two of their Bitly accounts to “private.” … Between October 2015 and May 2016, the hacking group used nine thousand links to attack about four thousand Gmail accounts, including targets in Ukraine, the Baltics, the United States, China, and Iran. … Among the group’s recent breaches were the German parliament, the Italian military, the Saudi foreign ministry, the email accounts of Philip Breedlove, Colin Powell, and John Podesta—Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—and, of course, the DNC.

These breaches highlight some of the ways in which social engineering has continued to affect organizations across all sectors and how new techniques are incorporated in order to make it harder for individuals to detect suspicious activity.

That’s why training and awareness is often touted as the most important and cost effective step in combating social engineering, as we noted in a prior social engineering blog. Having the proper tools and training, along with up-to-date threat intelligence to inform them of the latest threats, can help organizations and their employees provide a better front line of defense against the evolving techniques used by threat actors.

WADA, Presidential Election Highlight Threat of Data Being Altered

Last week the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released an update about its investigation into the recent hack and subsequent leaks of Olympic Athletes’ confidential information, and one of the more interesting revelations was that some of the stolen data may have been manipulated prior to being leaked.

“WADA has determined that not all data released by Fancy Bear (in its PDF documents) accurately reflects ADAMS [Anti-Doping Administration and Management System] data,” the agency wrote in a blog post. “However, we are continuing to examine the extent of this as a priority and we would encourage any affected parties to contact WADA should they become aware of any inaccuracies in the data that has been released.”

WADA did not elaborate on which athletes’ data may have been altered or provide any other explanations for the discrepancies, but it does highlight a unique cybersecurity concern that has surfaced recently: threat actors manipulating stolen data in order to increase the fallout from a breach.

A History of Fake and Exaggerated Breaches

Hackers have a long history of re-purposing data in order to claim new attacks.

Just last week the actor known as Guccifer 2.0 posted a dump of data allegedly stolen from the Clinton Foundation, claiming that “it was just a matter of time to gain access to the Clinton Foundation server.” However, a variety of news outlets have since reported the data appears to be from a previous hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee — not the Clinton Foundation. Prior to that there was a Pastebin post alleging a “full database leak” at cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. Once again, the company was quick to dispute the claim, posting on social media that the data was actually from another company’s breach a year prior.

Claims of fake or exaggerated data breaches are troublesome for organizations, but they’re not as insidious as the manipulation of legitimate data.

“Imagine trying to explain to the press, eager to publish the worst of the details in [leaked] documents, that everything is accurate except this particular email. Or that particular memo,” security blogger Bruce Schneier wrote last month. “It would be impossible. Who would believe you? No one.”

WikiLeaks, Sputnik News and Donald Trump

An example of this potential issue was highlighted yesterday through a combination of WikiLeaks, Russia’s Sputnik News, and Donald Trump. On Monday morning, WikiLeaks released 2,000 emails that appear to be from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. One of those emails was from Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal and contained a Newsweek article about the Benghazi hearings. Sputnik News then incorrectly reported on the email — either intentionally or as a result of sloppy journalism — quoting the Newsweek article email as if it were Blumenthal’s own thoughts on the subject. Hours later, Donald Trump quoted that false Sputnik News article at a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, telling the crowd that Blumenthal said the “attack was almost certainly preventable” and that Blumenthal was “now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi.”

That falsehood could be the result of the miscommunication inherent in a game of telephone — from Podesta’s email to WikiLeaks to Sputnik News to Donald Trump to the booing crowd — or it could be, as the author of the original Newsweek article suggested, an intentional effort from Russia.

This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? …

The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election.

It was just last week that Congressman Adam Schiff put forth this very idea in The New York Times. Russia could take already-stolen emails, alter them, and give the impression that one of the presidential candidates had done something outrageous or illegal, potentially altering the election.

The Blumenthal story was quickly corrected by viewing the source email on WikiLeaks, but what if the source itself had been altered? In a dump of 2000 legitimate-looking emails, who would believe that one email or one line within an email was altered.

As Schneier wrote: “No one.”

Tactic Beyond Nation-States?

The examples cited above have been extremely high-profile events. Leaked data tied to the Olympics or a presidential race faces a far higher level of journalistic scrutiny than an ordinary dump of company documents, communications or other internal data. For those breached organizations, proving that leaked data was altered may be more difficult, and it may prove harder still to spread news of that proof without a media echo chamber to amplify that message.

While altering data may not be the most profitable avenue for cybercriminal groups, not all threat actors are concerned about profits. Hacktivists could alter data to create a scandal for political purposes. Malicious insiders may manipulate leaked communications to embarrass an executive or otherwise harm their organization. Competitors may tweak stolen documents to damage their rivals’ reputation and steal customers.

Even those motivated by profit may find ways to incorporate data alteration into their toolset. Data destruction has quickly become a common tag in SurfWatch Labs’ cyber threat intelligence data due to the surge in ransomware infections in recent years, and actors who are demanding tens or hundreds of thousand of dollars in extortion are likely to use every tool available to them to push organizations towards paying ransoms.

Many of the stories related to altered data currently revolve around nation-states, but like everything in cybersecurity, copycats can be expected if it proves to be a successful tactic. It’s just one more cyber risk facing organizations — and one more reason to prioritize keeping your organization’s data safe from malicious actors.