internet of things – SurfWatch Labs, Inc.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: More CIA Leaks, New Mirai Attacks, and LastPass Vulnerabilities

The CIA remained as the top trending cybercrime target of the week as WikiLeaks released a third set of documents related to the agency. The new release includes 676 source code files for the CIA’s secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which WikiLeaks said “is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.”

“The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi,” WikiLeaks wrote in its announcement. “This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion.”

The fact that an intelligence agency would have tools to cover its tracks is hardly surprising. However, it appears that WikiLeaks will continue to leak CIA documents for the foreseeable future, and those leaks may have yet-to-be known implications for governments, tech companies, and cybercriminal actors. After the initial CIA leak in early March, WikiLeaks tweeted that is has released less than one percent of its Vault7 series.

Another recurring story in these roundups is the Mirai botnet, and researchers said this week that a new variant is likely behind a 54-hour long DDoS attack that targeted a U.S. college. The attack peaked at 37,000 requests per second, the most Incapsula has seen out of any Mirai botnet. The company said 56 percent of all IPs used in the attack belonged to DVRs manufactured by the same vendor. IoT devices continue to make headlines for vulnerabilities – including certain devices that were allegedly targeted by the CIA – and this past week saw new warnings of methods for hacking smart televisions as well as a vulnerability in an Internet-connected washer-disinfector. As SurfWatch Labs chief security strategist Adam Meyer recently wrote, IoT devices have potentially become the largest digital footprint of organizations that is not under proper security management.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Data breaches expose more credentials: A hacker has stolen the email addresses and MD5-hashed passwords of 6.5 million accounts from Dueling Network, a now-defunct Flash game based on the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game. Although the game was shut down in 2016, the forum continued to run until recently. Nearly 14 million stolen and fake email credentials from the 300 largest U.S. universities are for sale on the dark web, a rise from only 2.8 million last year, according to the nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance. The stolen email addresses and passwords sell from $3.50 to $10 each.

Warnings of skimming and keylogging devices: Carleton University in Ottawa said it discovered USB keylogging devices on six classroom computers during a routine inspection, and the university is urging staff and students to change passwords for any accounts they may have accessed from classroom computers. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has received more than 70 reports of credit card fraud tied to a suspected card skimming device in Big Bear. A Romanian citizen pleaded guilty to a scheme to defraud customers of Bank of America and PNC Bank via ATM skimming.

Ransomware notifications continue: Urology Austin has notified 200,000 patients of a January 22 ransomware attack that may have compromised their information. Ransomware encrypted files belonging to Forsyth Public Schools and information such as lesson plans and schedules stored by teachers on the district server is likely lost due to the incident. Estill County Chiropractic is notifying 5,335 patients of unauthorized access to its system and a ransomware infection that may have compromised their personal information. Ransomware was found on the computer systems of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch parliament.

Former employee causes serious problems: A former IT administrator of the Lucchese Boot Company pleaded guilty to hacking the servers and cloud accounts of his employer after he was fired, and the company claims it lost $100,000 in new orders in addition to the extra IT costs it had to endure due to the attack. According to the complaint, the former employee logged into an administrator account after being fired and proceeded to shut down the corporate email and application servers, deleted files on the servers to block any attempts for a reboot, and then began shutting down or changing the passwords on the company’s cloud accounts.

Other notable cybercrime events: The personal information of 3.7 million Hong Kong voters and the city’s 1,200 electors may have been compromised when two laptops were stolen. Approximately 95,000 individuals who applied online for a job at McDonald’s in Canada had their information compromised due to unauthorized access to the company’s database. Multiple employees of the Washington University School of Medicine fell for phishing emails designed to steal credentials used to access their email. While investigating a data breach related to employees’ W-2 forms, Daytona State College discovered a second data breach involving student financial aid forms. A Russian citizen has pleaded guilty to his role in helping spread malware known as “Ebury,” which harvested log-on credentials from infected computer servers, allowing the criminal enterprise behind the operation to operate a botnet comprising tens of thousands of infected servers throughout the world.

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 password manager LastPass has addressed a series of vulnerabilities that were discovered by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, including one now-patched “unique and highly sophisticated” client-side vulnerability in the LastPass browser extension.

In a March 31 update, LastPass advised its users to ensure they are running the latest version (4.1.44 or higher) of the extension so that they are protected.

The vulnerability, which could be exploited to steal data and manipulate the LastPass extension, required first luring a user to either a malicious website or a website running malicious adware and then taking advantage of the way LastPass behaves in “isolated worlds,” the company said.

An isolated world is a JavaScript execution environment that shares the same DOM (Document Object Model) as other worlds, but things like variables and functions are not shared. LastPass explained:

The separation is supposed to keep both sides safer from external manipulation. In some cases, these variables can influence the logic of the content script. It is difficult to inject arbitrary values into JavaScript using this technique. But in a particularly clever move, the report demonstrated that arbitrary strings could be injected, and one of these was enough to trick the extension into thinking it was executing on lastpass.com. By doing so, an attacker could manipulate the LastPass extension into revealing the stored data of that user, and launch arbitrary executables in the case of the binary version.

Fixing the issue required “a significant change” to the browser extensions and LastPass urges other extension developers to look for this pattern in their code and ensure that they are not vulnerable to a similar attack.

The patch came just 10 days after LastPass issued another update to address two other issues discovered by Ormandy that could allow the attacker to potentially retrieve and expose information from the LastPass account, such as user’s login credentials.

The incident serves as a reminder that vulnerabilities continue to be discovered in a variety of products, including the tools used to help keep individuals and organizations safe. Having a full accounting of an organization’s technology infrastructure as well as policies and procedures to track new vulnerabilities and patch software is one of the most effective ways to combat malicious actors who rely on exploiting well-known vulnerabilities.

Webinar: IoT Devices Expanding Digital Footprints, Security Issues

We’ve seen a lot of discussion about the collective threat of the Internet-of-Things, ever since malicious actors proved in October 2016 that they could disrupt whole chunks of the Internet by stringing to together thousands of compromised smart devices and pointing them all at a single target.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against DNS provider Dyn led to a number of popular websites being unavailable throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, including Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, CNN, The New York Times, and many more. There have been other IoT-powered DDoS attacks, both before and after the Dyn attack, but that incident served as a the tipping point in many ways. For years security researchers had been warning of the poor security around insecure Internet-connected devices — from baby monitors to televisions to thermostats to vehicles — and the Dyn attack was the culmination of so many small insecurities being leveraged by malicious actors in a big way.

As I’ve written before, the core pillars of cyber threats are capability, intent, and opportunity. The billions of IoT devices making their way into homes and businesses provide an ample amount of opportunity for attackers, and it was only a matter of time before they exploited that opportunity.

Register for SurfWatch Labs’ webinar:
IoT Devices Expanding Your Level or Presence (and Your Digitital Risk Footprint)
Tuesday, March 28
1:00 – 2:00 PM (ET)

IoT devices have potentially become the largest digital footprint NOT under proper security management. In addition, many reports have projected the number of Internet-connected devices to double or even triple within the next four years. It’s a concern for businesses, particularly since the devices often lack even basic cybersecurity features, but the issues stemming from IoT devices are not new or unique.

The security community has seen similar developments over the past 15 years, as I noted in my recent Security Week column, including Virtual Machines becoming the go-to technology in the early 2000s and BYOD beginning to be adopted later in the decade. In both cases, the digital footprints of organizations expanded, and security strategies had to evolve to match those risks. A similar effort needs to be taken in the face of IoT threats.

Take a look at this chart our threat analysts put together highlighting some of the top trending targets associated with IoT cyber threats over the past year. SurfWatch Labs has collected data on everything from cameras, routers and wearable devices to numerous “Other” tags such as home security systems, printers, light bulbs, and more.

SurfWatch Labs has collected data on dozens of different types of IoT devices that can be exploited by malicious actors.

And there continues to be more developments on the IoT front. Over just the past few weeks we’ve seen:

CIA exploits tied to smart devices, such as WikiLeaks’ claim that Samsung TVs can be placed in a “fake-off” mode and used as a bug to spy on targets.
The discovery of Imeij, a new IoT malware that exploits a vulnerability in devices from AVTech, a surveillance technology company,
New reported breaches related to IoT devices, such as CloudPets line of Internet-connected toys, on the heels of a study that revealed 84% of companies have already experienced some sort of IoT breach.

This is a problem that is likely going to get worse in the near future as more of these types of threats move from the periphery of the cybercrime conversation into center stage.

For more information on this threat join Kristi Horton, Senior Risk Analyst with Gate 15 & Real Estate ISAC, and myself, Chief Security Strategist with SurfWatch Labs, for an upcoming discussion around IOT device risks, trends, and best practices for pulling these devices under better control.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: DDoS Attacks Disrupt Services and SEC Probes Yahoo

A series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against financial institutions led to customers of Lloyds Banking Group experiencing intermittent outages over a 48-hour period and was the top trending cybercrime event over the past week.

The Guardian reported that the attacks hit Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland from January 11 to January 13. IBTimes reported that other unnamed lenders were targeted, but experienced no down time. Motherboard spoke to a hacker who claimed to be behind the attack and allegedly tried to ransom Lloyds over the incident. However, Lloyds issued a statement saying it was able to provide normal service for “the vast majority” of customers and that “only a small number” experienced any issues during the attack.

In other DDoS news, the ticketing systems for the Sundance Film Festival were taken offline due to a cyber-attack on January 21. “We have been subject to a cyberattack that has shut down our box office,” the festival tweeted. “Our artist’s voices will be heard and the show will go on.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, “although the festival was able to get its ticketing systems back online within an hour of the Saturday breach, multiple other denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Sundance’s IT infrastructure followed.”

Finally, the Korea Internet & Security Agency recently issued a report echoing concerns shared by other security professionals, including SurfWatch Labs Adam Meyer: expect DDoS attacks leveraging Internet-of-Things devices to rise in 2017. South Korea has recently faced political turmoil, and in December the country’s Constitutional Court began its first hearings on the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. The agency report predicted that DDoS attacks may occur against key government agencies and social infrastructure-related facilities with the goal of stirring the political and social instability brought on by the impeachment proceedings and potential upcoming election. According to SurfWatch Labs’ data, government was the third highest trending sector related to DDoS attacks in 2016, behind only information technology and consumer goods.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Another year of W-2 breaches begins: Approximately 1,400 Campbell County Health employees had their W-2 information stolen when an employee fell for a phishing email impersonating a hospital executive. Eight Missouri school districts were targeted with identical phishing messages impersonating the superintendent and requesting employee W-2 information, and an employee at the Odessa School District fell for the scam and forwarded the information. The Argyle Independent School District in Texas and the Tipton County School District also reported breaches due to similar phishing emails.

Media outlets hit with political attacks: The Twitter accounts of BBC Northampton and The New York Times video were both hijacked and used to spread fake messages saying that President Donald Trump was injured in the arm by gunfire at his inauguration and that Russia was planning to attack the U.S. with missiles. Crescent Hill Radio WCHQ said its FM feed was hacked and a song titled “Fuck Donald Trump” was played on repeat for 15 minutes before the station could shut down the broadcast.

Exposed databases reveal sensitive data: Security researchers have found nearly 400,000 audio recordings belonging to VICI Marketing exposed to the Internet, and as many as 17,649 of those recordings include customer payment card numbers and private customer information. The other 375,368 audio recordings are “cold calls,” some of which contain personal information. A misconfigured database used by The Candid Board, a subscription website dedicated to images and video of women who appear unaware they are being recorded, led to the leak more than 178,000 members’ information. The source also said that he or she is in possession of “a large chunk of data from multiple boards operated by this group,” which IBTimes explained was in reference to another leaked database holding tens of thousands of records from a website called NonNudeGirls.

Arrests and charges: A former employee of First Niagara call center admitted to using his position to steal callers’ personal information and then using that information to transfer $15,492.59 from customer accounts to his own. An IT worker employed by the New York Police Department accessed personnel files of police officers and then attempted to sell that information to an undercover informant. A 32-year old Russian programmer suspected of developing the NeverQuest banking Trojan was arrested in Barcelona, according to Spanish authorities.

Other cybercrime announcements: A hacker gained access to a server for the National Aids Research Institute in India and was able to access an archive containing the results of dozens of HIV tests. Malware was found on computers at 21 locations of Bowlmor AMF, the world’s largest bowling center operator, leading to a point-of-sale breach. Cockrell Hill Police Department in Texas lost some digital videos and documents dating back to 2009 after ransomware encrypted the departments files and those encrypted files were then saved to the automatic backup system. Other breach announcements include the South Washington County School district in Minnesota, MultiCare Health System, Ohio State Veterinary Medical Center at Dublin, Catholic Charities of Baltimore, and Wisconsin Democratic Party websites.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

The fallout over two massive data breaches at Yahoo continued this past week as it was reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened an investigation into the timeline of Yahoo’s data breach disclosure and that the sale of Yahoo’s main web operations to Verizon has been delayed until the next quarter.

Sources told The Wall Street Journal that the SEC issued a request for documents from Yahoo in December and is looking into whether Yahoo’s breach disclosures may have violated civil securities laws. The investigation will likely focus on Yahoo’s 2014 data breach affecting 500 million users, which was announced in September 2016. Yahoo is said to have linked the 2014 breach to state-sponsored actors two years before the public disclosure. In December 2016 Yahoo disclosed a separate breach affecting more than one billion users.

The SEC has never brought a case against a company for failing to disclose a data breach, the Wall Street Journal reported, but experts said the SEC has been looking for a case to clarify guidance issued in 2011. That guidance requires the disclosure of material information about cybersecurity risks and incidents if it could affect investors, but what is “material” is still a question – a question that this case may potentially help answer.

Those two data breaches have led to speculation over the past few months of how they may impact Verizon Communication’s acquisition of Yahoo, which was valued at $4.83 billion last July. Yahoo said it is “working expeditiously” to finish the deal; nevertheless, the sale has been pushed back until next quarter.

“Yahoo has been an interesting process,” Verizon Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis said in an interview last Tuesday with Bloomberg. “There’s been good progress, but we are still awaiting the final reports and therefore we haven’t reached any conclusions yet.”

2017 Cyber Forecast: The IoT Problem is Going to Get Worse

The new year is underway, and one of the biggest causes of concern carrying over into 2017 is the threat posed by the growing number of compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. As I stated in my previous cyber forecast blog on extortion, I prefer to base my “predictions” around actual intelligence and verifiable data. IoT-related security threats have been talked about for the past few years, but they have been relegated to the periphery of the cybercrime conversation due to the fact there wasn’t much threat data around real-world attacks. However, the second half of 2016 saw those concerns move front-and-center due to a series of incidents tied to the Mirai botnet:

In September, both KrebsOnSecurity and French hosting provider OVH were hit with massive DDoS attacks, reportedly hitting 620 Gbps attack and 1 Tbps in size.
Those attacks were quickly tied the Mirai botnet, the source code of which was subsequently released by a user on Hackforums.
A few weeks after the source code went public, DNS provider Dyn was hit with what appears to have been an even larger DDoS attack – causing major sites such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify and others to be disrupted across the U.S. and Europe.

Those attacks will certainly lead to increased scrutiny within the IoT marketplace both now and in the future, but in the meantime cybercriminals are focusing their attention on finding new ways to leverage the numerous vulnerable IoT devices for their own malicious purposes. The past few months have seen various hacking groups fighting to take control over their share of those compromised devices, as well as companies such as Deutsche Telekom and others suffering outages as those groups tried to expand their botnets by attempting to infect customers’ routers with Mirai. One group has even been observed selling IoT-powered DDoS services that claim to provide as much as 700 Gbps in traffic.

All of that activity has led to one of the clearest trends in SurfWatch Labs’ data over the past few months: an enormous rise in threat intelligence surrounding the “service interruption” category.

serviceinterruption_cfs — This chart from SurfWatch Labs’ 2016 Cyber Threat Trends Report shows a sharp increase in the amount of threat intelligence related to the service interruption category in Q4 2016.

“Over the past two years, the ‘service interruption’ tag has typically appeared in approximately 16% of the negative CyberFacts collected by SurfWatch Labs,” SurfWatch Labs noted in its annual cyber trends report, Rise of IoT Botnets Showcases Cybercriminals’ Ability to Find New Avenues of Attack. “However, that number jumped to more than 42% over the last half of the year due to growing concern around IoT-powered botnets such as Mirai.”

The problem of botnets powered by compromised IoT devices goes beyond just service interruption. It reflects many of the larger cybersecurity issues facing organizations in 2017:

an expanding number of vulnerable devices
the problem of default or easy-to-guess credentials
the difficulty of identifying vulnerabilities and patching them in a timely manner
questions of who along the supply chain is responsible for security
and issues outside your organization’s direct control that impact your cyber risk

Compromised IoT devices are a perfect example of the interconnectedness of cybercrime and how the poor security of one component by one manufacturer can led to hundreds of thousands of devices being vulnerable.

The sudden surge in concern around IoT devices reminds me of similar cyber risk discussions that have occurred around ICS/SCADA over the last few years. In both cases, the devices were often designed without cybersecurity in mind and those cybersecurity implications are now leading to serious potential consequences. However, unlike ICS/SCADA devices, IoT devices are primarily consumer focused. As we noted in the 2016 Cyber Trends Report, the potential of having multiple devices per household for any developed nation means that collectively these vulnerable devices are the largest digital footprint in the world not under proper security management.

DDoS attacks have always been a staple of cybercrime, but the expanding number of potentially compromised devices, along with cybercriminal tools designed to easily exploit those devices, has created growing concern around the tactic. Due to these concerns, I forecast with moderate confidence that IoT-driven botnets will affect a greater number organizations in 2017 as suppliers, manufacturers, regulators and the security community all continue to wrestle with this ongoing issue.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Shamoon is Back and Marai Problems Continue

The European Commission is the top trending cybercrime target over the past two weeks after experiencing a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that brought down Internet access for several hours over two separate periods, making it difficult for employees to work, a staff member told Politico.

However, the most impactful event from the period is the campaign that targeted organizations in Saudi Arabia with the Shamoon malware and wiped the hard drives of thousands of computers. The campaign targeted six organizations, resulting in extensive damage at four of them. People familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg that thousands of computers were destroyed at the headquarters of Saudi’s General Authority of Civil Aviation and that office operations came to a halt for several days after critical data was erased. Among the other targets were the Saudi Central Bank and several unnamed government agencies.

Saudi authorities said evidence suggests Iran is to blame. The attackers used the exact same Shamoon malware that hit Saudi Aramco in 2012 and destroyed 35,000 computers, according to people familiar with the investigation. Ars Technica noted that Shamoon attempts to spread across networks by turning on file sharing and attempting to connect to common network file shares. In addition, the attackers used stolen credentials hard-coded into the malware.

Shamoon is made up of three components. The dropper component determines whether to install a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the malware. The wiper component uses RawDisk, the same driver that was used against Sony Pictures in 2014. The communications component was not used in this attack as the malware was configured with the IP of 1.1.1.1.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Another week of “oops” breaches: Security researcher Chris Vickery discovered a file repository for Allied-Horizontal exposed to the Internet and requiring no authentication that contained sensitive information related to explosives. Confidential police files on 54 terrorist cases were copied onto a staffer’s private storage device that was connected to the Internet without a password. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accidentally made the personal information of almost 600,000 individuals temporarily available to the public via its website.

Individuals and organizations face blackmail: Hackers have allegedly stolen data from Valartis Bank Liechtenstein and are threatening individual customers that they will leak their stolen information to financial authorities and the media if they do not pay ransom demands. The hacking group known as TheDarkOverlord said they gained access to Dropbox and email accounts for Gorilla Glue and stole 500 GB of information, including intellectual property and product designs. TheDarkOverlord said they offered the company “a handsome business proposition,” which is the group’s way of saying they demanded ransom.

Ransomware disrupts organizations: The computer systems of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency were infected with ransomware, and the actor behind the attack demanded $73,000 in ransom. Passengers unable to pay fares due to locked machines were temporarily given free rides. Bigfork School District in Montana recently experienced a ransomware infection due to a malicious email attachment, but the district said it would not pay any ransom demands. Computers at Carleton University in Canada were infected with ransomware, bringing research to a halt. The attackers asked for around $39,000 to decrypt the data.

Business-to-business cybercrime: Gaming company Zynga is suing two former employees over the theft of “extremely sensitive” information, which was then allegedly taken to rival company Scopely. James Frazer-Mann, a 35-year-old former operator of Elite Loans, was sentenced by a UK court for hiring a hacker to DDoS his former company’s competitors and the website of the Consumer Action Group.

More data breaches announced: The Madison Square Garden Company announced a point-of-sale data breach affecting customers who used payment cards to purchase food and merchandise at Madison Square Garden, the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Beacon Theater and Chicago Theater. The Navy was notified by Hewlett Packard that the names and Social Security numbers of more than 130,000 sailors were compromised. An unauthorized party gained access to a Michigan State University server containing personal information on 400,000 individuals, but only 449 of those records are confirmed to have been accessed. The hacker behind the data breach at Casino Rama has uploaded a five gigabyte file containing more than 14,000 documents to a torrent website. UK Telecom company Three announced a data breach after cybercriminals were able to gain access to its upgrade system using authorized logins.The sensitive personal information of 17,000 students was compromised in a data breach at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past two weeks. 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

Over the past two weeks, most industry sectors have seen an increase in their SurfWatch Labs’ cyber risk scores. The IT sector, once again, has the highest overall score. That is due, in part, to ongoing worry over DDoS attacks tied to Marai and other botnets compromised of Internet-of-Things devices.

Around 900,000 customers of Deutsche Telekom had their service disrupted due to external actors trying and failing to infect routers with malware, the company said. The attack caused crashes or restrictions on approximately four to five percent of all routers. Thousands of KCOM customers also lost their Internet access due to routers being targeted in a cyber-attack. KCOM issued a statement about the incident:

“We have now identified that the root cause of the problem was a cyber attack that targets a vulnerability in certain broadband routers, causing them to crash and disconnect from the network. The only affected router we have supplied to customers is the ZyXel AMG1302-T10B. The vast majority of our customers are now able to connect to and use their broadband service as usual.”

Researchers have identified other companies that use routers made by ZyXel and may be vulnerable to similar attacks, including Irish telecom operator Eir and Vodafone Group Plc in Britain.

Two hackers have since claimed credit for the attack against Deutsche Telekom and apologized for the outage. They were trying to enlist those routers in a growing Marai botent, which they claim is now the most powerful Marai-based botnet. One of the hackers told Motherboard the botnet included over a million devices; however, other researchers have estimated that number to be around 400,000.

The hackers, going by the name BestBuy and Popopret, are advertising a DDoS service powered by their new botnet with attacks allegedly ranging up to 700 Gbps.

2016-12-03_botnetad — Source: BleepingComputer

Popopret told BleepingComputer that the price for a two-week long attack using 50,000 bots — and an attack duration of one hour along with a 5-10 minute cooldown time between attacks — is approximately $3000-$4,000. BestBuy reported similarly high fees, telling Motherboard that a similar attack using 600,000 bots would cost $15,000-$20,000.

It is unclear exactly how many devices the group controls at the moment, but it is clear that various groups are competing to infect and retain control over a growing number of Internet-connected devices.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Adult Friend Finder’s Massive Breach and Securing IoT Devices

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were once again among the most discussed cybercrime events of the week as discussion around the Marai botnet continued and a handful of Russian banks were targeted with attacks powered by compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The week also saw one of the largest data breaches ever as the Adult Friend Network was hacked and the details of 412 million accounts were compromised.

The information compromised in the Adult Friend Finder hack dates back 20 years, according to LeakedSource, and includes email addresses, passwords stored in either plain visible format or SHA1, dates of last visits, browser information, IP addresses and site membership status. Accounts for a variety of sites were infected: 339 million Adult Friend Finder accounts, 62 millions Cams.com accounts, 7 million Penthouse.com accounts, 1.4 million Stripshow.com accounts and 1.1 million iCams.com accounts.

This is the second time Adult Friend Network has been hacked in 18 months. In May 2015 almost four million users had their personal details leaked by hackers.

It’s not clear who was ultimately behind the recent hack. A researcher going by the name revolver posted screenshots of a Local File Inclusion vulnerability being exploited on Adult Friend Finder in October and threatened to “leak everything,” but he said he was not behind the breach. Friend Finder Networks vice president and senior counsel, Diana Ballou did say that the company identified and fixed “a vulnerability that was related to the ability to access source code through an injection vulnerability.” The breach is the second largest of the year in terms of the number of customer accounts compromised — behind only Yahoo, which affected more half a billion accounts.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

More large data breaches: Casino Rama Resort in Ontario recently announced the theft of a variety of data including IT information, financial reports, security incident reports, Casino Rama Resort email, patron credit inquiries, collection and debt information, vendor information, and contracts and employee information such as performance reviews, payroll data, terminations, social insurance numbers and dates of birth. A man hacked into the website of the Indian state of Kerala’s government’s civil supplies department, stole information on all of 8,022,360 of Kerala’s Public Distribution System beneficiaries and their family members, and then uploaded that information to Facebook. Recruitment firm Michael Page may have had as much as 30GB of data exposed when it was published to a publicly exposed website, according to researcher Troy Hunt. Hunt said multinational consulting and outsourcing firm Capgemini was behind the exposed data.

Retail woes both criminal and accidental: A&M has announced a payment card breach affecting customers who shopped at Annie Sez, Afaze, Mandee, Sirens and Urban Planet locations between November 2015 and August 2016. Australian discount department store Big W is apologizing to customers after a technical issue led to a small number of customers having the first stage of the online checkout process pre-populated with the personal information of another customer.

More ransomware attacks and payments: The office of Robert J. Magnon at Seguin Dermatology is informing patients of a September ransomware attack that likely accessed protected health information. The Lansing Board of Water & Light acknowledged it paid a $25,000 ransom after an employee opened an infected attachment and the resulting ransomware infection shut down the board’s accounting systems, email systems and phone lines.

Hacktivist attacks and sentences: A hacking group known as “Amn3s1a Team” claims to have stolen internal documents, source code and other information from the file-sharing site Mega.nz. ZDNet examined an 800-megabyte archive of source code — which appears to be related to its instant messenger service Megachat, the site’s Chrome browser extension, and a private RSA key. A 22-year-old Tennessee man and member of the NullCrew hacking collective has been sentenced to 45 months in prison for his role in hacking Bell Canada. Canadian prosecutors said the hackers exfiltrated million of files from Bell Canada, and the man posted about 12,700 customer logins and passwords and Tweeted a link to the data. A hacker going by the Twitter handle @CyberZeist announced that he had hacked the Windham County Sheriff’s Office, posted the stolen database on Pastebin, and was even offering to give away backdoor access.

Cybercrime goes virtual: A group of hackers wrote software that tricked Electronic Arts’ servers into thinking that thousands of FIFA soccer matches had been completed in order to “mine” FIFA coins, and that virtual currency was then sold via black market sites for millions of dollars in profits, according to a recently unsealed FBI indictment.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

For the second week in a row, most sectors saw a decline in their overall SurfWatch Labs’ cyber risk scores. The financials sector saw the biggest drop and is now at its lowest score of all of 2016 after steadily declining throughout October.

Much of the discussion around cyber risk over the past month has been focused on issues related to DDoS attacks and Internet-connected devices. The most discussed new cybercrime event of the past week, by far, was the DDoS attacks against at least five of Russia’s largest banks. Reports indicate that the attacks were carried out over a two-day period and generally lasted for one hour each, although one attack lasted for almost 12 hours. The attacks were powered by around 24,000 compromised IoT devices across 30 countries, and Sberbank said the attacks were among the most powerful the bank had seen.

The concern around IoT devices has also led the Department of Homeland Security to release its Strategic Principles for Securing the Internet of Things (IoT), which is designed as “a first step to motivate and frame conversations about positive measures for IoT security among IoT developers, manufacturers, service providers, and the users who purchase and deploy the devices, services, and systems.” The document contains six principles that would “dramatically improve the the security posture of IoT,” and those principles are meant to be adapted and applied as needed.

In addition, the document outlines four key areas of effort going forward:

Coordinate across federal departments and agencies to engage with IoT stakeholders and jointly explore ways to mitigate the risks posed by IoT.
Build awareness of risks associated with IoT across stakeholders.
Identify and advance incentives for incorporating IoT security.
Contribute to international standards development processes for IoT.

“We recognize the efforts underway by our colleagues at other federal agencies, and the work of private sector entities to advance architectures and institute practices to address the security of the IoT,” DHS wrote “This document is a first step to strengthen those efforts by articulating overarching security principles. But next steps will surely be required.”

DDoS Attacks Dominate News, Spark Calls for Regulation

Last week’s massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, which made popular websites and services inaccessible to users across the East Coast and elsewhere, has since led to widespread concern about insecure Internet-connected devices and calls for government agencies to get involved in order to ensure those devices are secured against future attacks.

In fact, the attack against DNS provider Dyn, which happened just six days ago, has already become the most talked about target tied to “service interruption” in all of 2016, according to SurfWatch Labs’ data.

Friday’s DDoS attack against Dyn is concerning for several reasons. First, reports have claimed the attack reached 1.2 terabytes per second. If true, that would make it the largest DDoS attack ever. Second, Dyn confirmed yesterday that the Mirai botnet was a primary source of malicious attack traffic. The source code for that botnet was made public earlier this month, and last week Level 3 Threat Research Labs said that the number of Marai bots it had observed had more than doubled since the code was released. Finally, some researchers have claimed the attack was carried out by amateur hackers, not sophisticated state-sponsored or financially-motivated actors.

That combination suggests that more attacks like the one against Dyn will occur in the future, adding to a trend that SurfWatch Labs has observed throughout the year of increased evaluated intelligence around the service interruption tag.

The number of CyberFacts collected by SurfWatch Labs related to “service interruption” has steadily increased throughout the year, peaking with last week’s attack against Dyn.

The Marai-driven attacks have also put one company as the face of the Internet-of-Things problem, unfairly or not: XiongMai Technologies.

XiongMai Technologies is a Chinese electronic company that makes products used in a variety of brands, including DVRs and cameras tied to the recent DDoS attacks. XiongMai said on Monday that it would issue a recall of some of its U.S. products, although it’s unclear how successful that recall will be.

Like Yahoo, Wells Fargo and other companies tied to major cyber incidents this year, XiongMai Technologies and manufacturers of Internet-connected devices have now moved onto the radar of politicians and regulators. On Wednesday, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner sent letters to the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center about his “growing concern” over the “unprecedented” volume of DDoS attacks driven by the Marai botnet exploiting connected devices.

“[O]ver 500,000 connected devices were vulnerable to Mirai because of an exploitable component from a single vendor’s management software,” Warner wrote. “Manufacturers today are flooding the market with cheap, insecure devices, with few market incentives to design the products with security in mind, or to provide ongoing support.”

The letter continued: “DDoS attacks can be powerful tools for censorship, criminal extortion, or nation-state aggression. Tools such as Mirai source code, amplified by an embedded base of insecure devices worldwide, accomplish more than isolated nuisance; these are capabilities – weapons even – that can debilitate entire ranges of economic activity.”

Warner provided a list of questions on how to potentially deal with the issue of insecure Internet-connected devices, including ways to make consumers more aware of the risk, trying to work with ISPs to designate insecure devices and deny them connections to their networks, and establishing and enforcing minimal technical security standards.

“I am interested in a range of expert opinions and meaningful action on new and improved tools to better protect American consumers, manufacturers, retailers, Internet sites and service providers,” Warner said.

Being thrust into the spotlight is an unusual situation for XiongMai, a company whose brand tends to remain behind the curtain of its “white label” products, which are sold and then incorporated into other brands’ offerings. Accurately gauging the potential fallout to companies such as XiongMai is difficult, but it’s safe to say that no company wants to be referenced, even indirectly, as the poster child for “cheap, insecure” devices. However, the recent DDoS attacks powered by the Marai botnet — against Krebs on Security, OVH and now Dyn — are quickly on their way to becoming the most discussed cybersecurity stories of 2016, and XiongMai and other manufacturers of connected devices are along for that ride.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Internet of Things Sparks Security Concerns

There has been growing concern around distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this week as the source code for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) driven botnet “Mirai” has been publicly released by a user on Hackforums. The Mirai botnet has been tied to the recent massive DDoS attack against Brian Krebs website and is made up of a growing number of Internet-connected devices.

The botnet includes a variety of compromised home and small office items such as routers, DVRs and security cameras – many of which use default usernames and passwords. The IoT devices are aimed at users often more concerned about convenience than security, and as Brian Krebs pointed out, even if users do take steps to secure devices by changing default credentials the malware may still spread.

Cybercriminal actors may use botnets like Marai to create more powerful DDoS attacks against industries that are traditionally vulnerable to extortion, such as gaming and ecommerce, but the Marai source code release also empowers actors looking to disrupt organizations for ideological or political reasons. For example, Newsweek alleged it was the victim of such an attack this week when its website was hit with a DDoS attack after publishing a story claiming that one of Donald Trump’s companies violated the Cuba trade embargo in 1998. In part due to that attack, consumer publishing was the most discussed industry group associated with cybercrime over the past seven days.

With Marai added to the growing list of free tools available to actors, expect to see more DDoS attacks like the ones against KrebsOnSecurity and Newsweek, which appear to be aimed at silencing or punishing critics.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Another week, another list of companies hit with ransomware: Cloud service provider VESK paid £18,600 after being infected with a new strain of the Samas DR ransomware. The New Jersey Spine Center paid an undisclosed amount after a July CryptoWall attack encrypted all electronic medical records and the most recent backup as well as disabled the phone system. The forest department of the state government of Kerala in India was infected with ransomware known as RSA-4096. Urgent Care Clinic of Oxford is notifying patients that their data may have been compromised by what appears to be a ransomware attack. A “glitch” after a ransomware attack led the Marin Healthcare District and Prima Medical Foundation to notify more than 5,000 patients that some of their medical data has been lost, even though they paid the ransom.

Data exposed through mistakes and flaws: C&Z Tech Limited acknowledged that a database of more than 1.5 million user records was exposed online, but said that the leak was from a test database; however, ZDNet disputes that claim, writing that their own verification of the data found “no reason to believe that this is test or dummy data.” Census data on 96,000 employees of the Australian federal government was downloaded nearly 60 times before being removed from official websites. A vulnerability discovered in the Charter Communications website could have exposed the personal information of customers. Customers of Ottawa marijuana dispensary chain Magna Terra Health Services had their email addresses exposed when an employee sent an email with 470 of their customers cc’d.

Alleged political dumps, both old and new: A hacker who goes by the name Guccifer 2.0 published an 860-megabyte file of donor information allegedly stolen from the Clinton foundation servers; however, a variety of news outlets have reported that the data appears to actually be from a previous hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee. Berat Albayrak, Turkey’s Energy Minister and son-in-law of President Erdoğan, is the week’s second highest trending new target (after Newsweek) on the heels of hacking group RedHack leaking 17 gigabytes of data, which the group said was stolen by discovering Albayrak’s mobile operating system, writing an exploit to steal his password, and gaining access to his iPad after several weeks of attempts.

More data breach announcements: Hutton Hotel is notifying customers of a payment card breach affecting guests who placed hotel reservations during the period from September 2012 to April 2015, as well as those who made purchases at the onsite food and beverage outlets from November 2015 to June 2016. Hackers gained access to computer systems at Wheeler & Egger, CPAs and used the information to fraudulently file 45 tax returns. Apria Healthcare, a provider of home respiratory services and other medical equipment, is notifying patients that an employee’s email account was compromised.

Out with the old hacktivists, in with the new: Federal authorities in Chicago have charged two suspected members of the hacking group Lizard squad for operating DDoS-for-hire websites. Although Lizard Squad has been quiet of late, other hacking groups continue to disrupt organizations. For example, OurMine defaced and deleted several articles on the BuzzFeed website in retaliation for a story claiming to have identified one of the group’s members as a Saudi teen called “Ahmad Makki.”

Insulin Pump Vulnerability and Other Advisories

The focus on IoT devices was prevalent throughout SurfWatch Labs’ data this week. In addition to all of the botnet-related discussion, Johnson & Johnson announced that a security vulnerability in its Animas OneTouch Ping insulin pump that could be exploited to overdose diabetic patients with insulin.

The Reuters story cited medical device experts who claim this is the first time a manufacturer has issued such a warning to patients about a cyber vulnerability in their devices; however, the company’s letter to patients described the risk as “extremely low.”

“It would require technical expertise, sophisticated equipment and proximity to the pump, as the OneTouch Ping system is not connected to the internet or to any external network,” the letter said.

The issue, which was discovered by Rapid7 researcher Jay Radcliffe, is that a hacker can spoof communications between a wireless remote control and the insulin pump since that communication is not encrypted. About 114,000 patients use the device in the United States and Canada.

The company said that if patients were concerned, they could stop potential attacks by discontinuing use of the wireless remote control and programming the pump to limit the maximum insulin dose. Johnson & Johnson said it first reviewed the vulnerability with the FDA, which issued draft guidance on managing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in medical devices in January.

Other noteworthy advisories and cybercrime news from the week include:

68 million stolen Dropbox credentials published online: The previously stolen database of more than 68 million user records has been published online by Thomas White on his I’m Cthulhu blog. Nearly half of the passwords are secured with the strong hashing function bcrypt, Motherboard wrote. The other half appear to use the older SHA-1 algorithm. The publication adds to the already massive list of now-public user credentials.

Vulnerability discovered in OpenJPEG: Cisco Talos researchers have disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in the jpeg2000 image file format parser as implemented in the OpenJpeg library. The vulnerability can lead to an attacker executing arbitrary code. “For a successful attack, the target user needs to open a malicious jpeg2000 file,” the researchers wrote. “The jpeg2000 image file format is mostly used for embedding images inside PDF documents and the OpenJpeg library is used by a number of popular PDF renderers making PDF documents a likely attack vector.”

Users report suspected malvertising on Spotify: Users of Spotify’s free desktop streaming service are reporting strange behavior that is suspected to be related to malvertising. “If you have Spotify Free open, it will launch – and keep on launching – the default internet browser on the computer to different kinds of malware/virus sites. Some of them do not even require user action to be able to cause harm,” wrote one user. “I have 3 different systems (computers) which are all clean and they are all doing this, all via Spotify – I am thinking it’s the Ads in Spotify Free. I hope this has been noticed and Spotify staff are fixing it – fast.”

TalkTalk fined £400,000 over data breach: The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a record £400,000 fine to TalkTalk over a data breach that “could have been prevented if TalkTalk had taken basic steps to protect customers’ information.” In October 2015, a hacker used SQL injection to access the personal data of 156,959 customers including their names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses. In more than 15,000 cases, bank account details and sort codes were also compromised. “The data was taken from an underlying customer database that was part of TalkTalk’s acquisition of Tiscali’s UK operations in 2009,” the ICO said. “TalkTalk failed to properly scan this infrastructure for possible threats and so was unaware the vulnerable pages existed or that they enabled access to a database that held customer information.”

SurfWatch Labs collected data on a variety of cybercrime advisories over the past week. Some of the trending practice tags associated with those advisories are shown in the chart below.