Who’s wearing the pyjamas while they take down North Korea’s internet? Is it a case of cop or cosplay in Oregon? And what’s to fear about the metaverse?
All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of the award-winning “Smashing Security” podcast by computer security veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault, joined this week by The Cyberwire’s Dave Bittner.
I had a lovely chat with one of my favorite CISOs the other day, helping them think through the security metrics that they report upwards. Front and center, as I see in almost every security metrics presentation, was a pair of my least favorite monthly measurements: average age of open vulnerabilities, and total open vulnerabilities.
I don’t hate a lot of things—okay, actually, I might actually hate a lot of things, but very few things top the professional hatred I have for vulnerability metrics reporting. At best, they are a measurement of activity, not of effectiveness. They remind me of the old firewall reports (“Look at how many port scans we stopped!”), which I’ll admit I had a special loathing for because security teams would block their web teams from using a content delivery network (CDN) simply because they would lose this report. [Disclosure: I used to be CISO at Akamai.]
The sentencing of Haiteng Wu on February 2, 2022, for his participation in a three-plus-year conspiracy to defraud Apple out of just over $1.5 million shines the light on criminals who operate in the margins of warranty fulfillment of consumer products, such as the iPhone. All in, the criminals were able to garner 2,500 new iPhones for subsequent resale and had attempted to acquire 600 more but failed due to Apple quality control rejecting the warranty submission.
Wu graduated from the master’s program at Virginia Tech in 2015. He secured a position as an architectural engineer shortly thereafter. He also embarked on creating, evolving and growing a criminal enterprise that netted him $987,000, allowing him to pay cash for two condos (McLean and Arlington, Virginia).
US, UK and Australian agencies claim mid-sized firms are increasingly targeted
Russian authorities have arrested six men accused of operating some of the most active online bazaars for selling stolen payment card data. The crackdown — the second closure of major card fraud shops by Russian authorities in as many weeks — comes closely behind Russia’s arrest of 14 alleged affiliates of the REvil ransomware gang, and has many in the cybercrime underground asking who might be next.
Dept. K’s message for Trump’s Dumps users.
On Feb. 7 and 8, the domains for the carding shops Trump’s Dumps, Ferum Shop, Sky-Fraud and UAS were seized by Department K, a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation that focuses on computer crimes. The websites for the carding stores were retrofitted with a message from Dept. K asking, “Which one of you is next?”
According to cyber intelligence analysts at Flashpoint, that same message was included in the website for UniCC, another major and venerated carding shop that was seized by Dept. K in January.
Around the same time Trump’s Dumps and the other three shops began displaying the Dept. K message, the Russian state-owned news outlet TASS moved a story naming six Russian men who were being charged with “the illegal circulation of means of payment.”
TASS reports the six detained include Denis Pachevsky, general director of Saratovfilm Film Company LLC; Alexander Kovalev, an individual entrepreneur; Artem Bystrykh, an employee of Transtekhkom LLC; Artem Zaitsev; an employee of Get-net LLC; and two unemployed workers, Vladislav Gilev and Yaroslav Solovyov.
None of the stories about the arrests tie the men to the four carding sites. But Flashpoint found that all of the domains seized by Dept. K. were registered and hosted through Zaitsev’s company — Get-net LLC.
“All four sites frequently advertised one another, which is generally atypical for two card marketplaces competing in the same space,” Flashpoint analysts wrote.
Stas Alforov is director of research for Gemini Advisory, a New York firm that monitors underground cybercrime markets. Alforov said it is most unusual for the Russians to go after carding sites that aren’t selling data stolen from Russian citizens.
“It’s not in their business to be taking down Russian card shops,” Alforov said. “Unless those shops were somehow selling data on Russian cardholders, which they weren’t.”
A carding shop that sold stolen credit cards and invoked 45’s likeness and name was among those taken down this week by Russian authorities.
Debuting in 2011, Ferum Shop is one of the oldest observed dark web marketplaces selling “card not present” data (customer payment records stolen from hacked online merchants), according to Gemini.
“Every year for the last 5 years, the marketplace has been a top 5 source of card not present records in terms of records posted for sale,” Gemini found. “In this time period, roughly 66% of Ferum Shop’s records have been from United States financial institutions. The remaining 34% have come from over 200 countries.”
In contrast, Trump’s Dumps focuses on selling card data stolen from hacked point-of-sale devices, and it benefited greatly from the January 2021 retirement of Joker’s Stash, which for years dwarfed most other carding shops by volume. Gemini found Trump’s Dumps gained roughly 40 percent market share after Joker’s closure, and that more than 87 percent of the payment card records it sells are from U.S. financial institutions.
“In the past 5 years, Ferum Shop and Trump’s Dumps have cumulatively added over 64 million compromised payment cards,” Alforov wrote. “Based on average demand for CP and CNP records and the median price of $10, the total revenue from these sales is estimated to be over $430 million. Due to the 20 to 30% commission that shops generally receive, the administrators of Ferum Shop and Trump’s Dumps likely generated between $86 and $129 million in profits from these card sales.”
The arrests of the six men comes less than two weeks after Russian law enforcement officials detained four suspected carders — including Andrey Sergeevich Novak, the reputed owner of the extremely popular and long-running UniCC carding shop.
In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department charged Novak and three dozen other defendants thought to be key members of “Infraud,” a long-running cybercrime forum that prosecutors say cost merchants and consumers more than half a billion dollars.
Unicc shop, which sold stolen credit card data as well as Social Security numbers and other consumer information that can be used for identity theft. It was seized by Dept. K in January 2020.
Flashpoint said the recent arrests represent the first major actions against Russia-based cybercriminals since March 2020, when the FSB detained more than thirty members of an illicit carding operation, charging twenty-five of them with “illegal circulation of means of payment.”
Dumps, or card data stolen from compromised point-of-sale devices, have been declining in popularity among fraudsters for years as more financial institutions have issued more secure chip-based cards. In contrast, card-not-present data stolen from online stores continues to be in high demand, because it helps facilitate fraud at online retailers. Gemini says the supply of card-not-present data rose by 50 percent in 2021 versus 2020, fed largely by the success of Magecart e-skimmers that target vulnerabilities in e-commerce sites.
Alforov says while the carding shop closures are curiously timed, he doubts the supply of stolen card data is going to somehow shrink as a result. Rather, he said, some of the lower-tier card shops that were previously just resellers working with Trump’s Dumps and others are now suddenly ramping up inventory with their own new suppliers — very likely thanks to the same crooks who were selling cards to the six men arrested this week in Russia.
“What we’re seeing now is a lot of those reseller shops are coming to the market and saying, ‘We don’t have that order data we were getting from Ferum Shop but now have our own vendors,’” Alforov said. “Some of the lesser tier shops are starting to move up the food chain.”
Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in SAP products, the most severe of which (CVE-2022-22536) could allow for remote code execution. SAP is a software company which creates software to manage business operations and customer relations. Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code on the affected systems. Depending on the privileges associated with the application, an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Applications configured to have fewer restrictions on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with elevated privileges.
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