Private investigator pleads guilty to involvement in global fraud and hacking conspiracy

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When KrebsOnSecurity recently explored how cybercriminals were using hacked email accounts at police departments worldwide to obtain warrantless Emergency Data Requests (EDRs) from social media firms and technology providers, many security experts called it a fundamentally unfixable problem. But don’t tell that to Matt Donahue, a former FBI agent who recently quit the agency to launch a startup that aims to help tech companies do a better job screening out phony law enforcement data requests — in part by assigning trustworthiness or “credit ratings” to law enforcement authorities worldwide.

Donahue is co-founder of Kodex, a company formed in February 2021 that builds security portals designed to help tech companies “manage information requests from government agencies who contact them, and to securely transfer data & collaborate against abuses on their platform.”

The 30-year-old Donahue said he left the FBI in April 2020 to start Kodex because it was clear that social media and technology companies needed help validating the increasingly large number of law enforcement requests domestically and internationally.

“So much of this is such an antiquated, manual process,” Donahue said of his perspective gained at the FBI. “In a lot of cases we’re still sending faxes when more secure and expedient technologies exist.”

Donahue said when he brought the subject up with his superiors at the FBI, they would kind of shrug it off, as if to say, “This is how it’s done and there’s no changing it.”

“My bosses told me I was committing career suicide doing this, but I genuinely believe fixing this process will do more for national security than a 20-year career at the FBI,” he said. “This is such a bigger problem than people give it credit for, and that’s why I left the bureau to start this company.”

One of the stated goals of Kodex is to build a scoring or reputation system for law enforcement personnel who make these data requests. After all, there are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world — including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone — and all it takes for hackers to abuse the EDR process is illicit access to a single police email account.

Kodex is trying to tackle the problem of fake EDRs by working directly with the data providers to pool information about police or government officials submitting these requests, and hopefully making it easier for all customers to spot an unauthorized EDR.

Kodex’s first big client was cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, which confirmed their partnership but otherwise declined to comment for this story. Twilio confirmed it uses Kodex’s technology for law enforcement requests destined for any of its business units, but likewise declined to comment further.

Within their own separate Kodex portals, Twilio can’t see requests submitted to Coinbase, or vice versa. But each can see if a law enforcement entity or individual tied to one of their own requests has ever submitted a request to a different Kodex client, and then drill down further into other data about the submitter, such as Internet address(es) used, and the age of the requestor’s email address.

Donahue said in Kodex’s system, each law enforcement entity is assigned a credit rating, wherein officials who have a long history of sending valid legal requests will have a higher rating than someone sending an EDR for the first time.

“In those cases, we warn the customer with a flash on the request when it pops up that we’re allowing this to come through because the email was verified [as being sent from a valid police or government domain name], but we’re trying to verify the emergency situation for you, and we will change that rating once we get new information about the emergency,” Donahue said.

“This way, even if one customer gets a fake request, we’re able to prevent it from happening to someone else,” he continued. “In a lot of cases with fake EDRs, you can see the same email [address] being used to message different companies for data. And that’s the problem: So many companies are operating in their own silos and are not able to share information about what they’re seeing, which is why we’re seeing scammers exploit this good faith process of EDRs.”

NEEDLES IN THE HAYSTACK

As social media and technology platforms have grown over the years, so have the volumes of requests from law enforcement agencies worldwide for user data. For example, in its latest transparency report mobile giant Verizon reported receiving 114,000 data requests of all types from U.S. law enforcement entities in the second half of 2021.

Verizon said approximately 35,000 of those requests (~30 percent) were EDRs, and that it provided data in roughly 91 percent of those cases. The company doesn’t disclose how many EDRs came from foreign law enforcement entities during that same time period. Verizon currently asks law enforcement officials to send these requests via fax.

Validating legal requests by domain name may be fine for data demands that include documents like subpoenas and search warrants, which can be validated with the courts. But not so for EDRs, which largely bypass any official review and do not require the requestor to submit any court-approved documents.

Police and government authorities can legitimately request EDRs to learn the whereabouts or identities of people who have posted online about plans to harm themselves or others, or in other exigent circumstances such as a child abduction or abuse, or a potential terrorist attack.

But as KrebsOnSecurity reported in March, it is now clear that crooks have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. Using illicit access to hacked police email accounts, the attackers will send a fake EDR along with an attestation that innocent people will likely suffer greatly or die unless the requested data is provided immediately.

In this scenario, the receiving company finds itself caught between two unsavory outcomes: Failing to immediately comply with an EDR — and potentially having someone’s blood on their hands — or possibly leaking a customer record to the wrong person. That might explain why the compliance rate for EDRs is usually quite high — often upwards of 90 percent.

Fake EDRs have become such a reliable method in the cybercrime underground for obtaining information about account holders that several cybercriminals have started offering services that will submit these fraudulent EDRs on behalf of paying clients to a number of top social media and technology firms.

An individual who’s part of the community of crooks that are abusing fake EDR told KrebsOnSecurity the schemes often involve hacking into police department emails by first compromising the agency’s website. From there, they can drop a backdoor “shell” on the server to secure permanent access, and then create new email accounts within the hacked organization.

In other cases, hackers will try to guess the passwords of police department email systems. In these attacks, the hackers will identify email addresses associated with law enforcement personnel, and then attempt to authenticate using passwords those individuals have used at other websites that have been breached previously.

EDR OVERLOAD?

Donahue said depending on the industry, EDRs make up between 5 percent and 30 percent of the total volume of requests. In contrast, he said, EDRs amount to less than three percent of the requests sent through Kodex portals used by customers.

KrebsOnSecurity sought to verify those numbers by compiling EDR statistics based on annual or semi-annual transparency reports from some of the largest technology and social media firms. While there are no available figures on the number of fake EDRs each provider is receiving each year, those phony requests can easily hide amid an increasingly heavy torrent of legitimate demands.

Meta/Facebook says roughly 11 percent of all law enforcement data requests — 21,700 of them — were EDRs in the first half of 2021. Almost 80 percent of the time the company produced at least some data in response. Facebook has long used its own online portal where law enforcement officials must first register before submitting requests.

Apple said it received 1,162 emergency requests for data in the last reporting period it made public — July – December 2020. Apple’s compliance with EDRs was 93 percent worldwide in 2020. Apple’s website says it accepts EDRs via email, after applicants have filled out a supplied PDF form. [As a lifelong Apple user and customer, I was floored to learn that the richest company in the world — which for several years has banked heavily on privacy and security promises to customers — still relies on email for such sensitive requests].

Twitter says it received 1,860 EDRs in the first half of 2021, or roughly 15 percent of the global information requests sent to Twitter. Twitter accepts EDRs via an interactive form on the company’s website. Twitter reports that EDRs decreased by 25% during this reporting period, while the aggregate number of accounts specified in these requests decreased by 15%. The United States submitted the highest volume of global emergency requests (36%), followed by Japan (19%), and India (12%).

Discord reported receiving 378 requests for emergency data disclosure in the first half of 2021. Discord accepts EDRs via a specified email address.

For the six months ending in December 2021, Snapchat said it received 2,085 EDRs from authorities in the United States (with a 59 percent compliance rate), and another 1,448 from international police (64 percent granted). Snapchat has a form for submitting EDRs on its website.

TikTok‘s resources on government data requests currently lead to a “Page not found” error, but a company spokesperson said TikTok received 715 EDRs in the first half of 2021. That’s up from 409 EDRs in the previous six months. Tiktok handles EDRs via a form on its website.

The current transparency reports for both Google and Microsoft do not break out EDRs by category. Microsoft says that in the second half of 2021 it received more than 25,000 government requests, and that it complied at least partly with those requests more than 90 percent of the time.

Microsoft runs its own portal that law enforcement officials must register at to submit legal requests, but that portal doesn’t accept requests for other Microsoft properties, such as LinkedIn or Github.

Google said it received more than 113,000 government requests for user data in the last half of 2020, and that about 76 percent of the requests resulted in the disclosure of some user information. Google doesn’t publish EDR numbers, and it did not respond to requests for those figures. Google also runs its own portal for accepting law enforcement data requests.

Verizon reports (PDF) receiving more than 35,000 EDRs from just U.S. law enforcement in the second half of 2021, out of a total of 114,000 law enforcement requests (Verizon doesn’t disclose how many EDRs came from foreign law enforcement entities). Verizon said it complied with approximately 91 percent of requests. The company accepts law enforcement requests via snail mail or fax.

AT&T says (PDF) it received nearly 19,000 EDRs in the second half of 2021; it provided some data roughly 95 percent of the time. AT&T requires EDRs to be faxed.

The most recent transparency report published by T-Mobile says the company received more than 164,000 “emergency/911” requests in 2020 — but it does not specifically call out EDRs. Like its old school telco brethren, T-Mobile requires EDRs to be faxed. T-Mobile did not respond to requests for more information.

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Software supply chain security provider Chainguard is launching its first product, Chainguard Enforce, a native Kubernetes application for securing deployment of container images.

Enforce is designed to let developers define, observe, distribute, and enact policies that ensure only trusted container images are deployed and run in their clusters.

“Chainguard Enforce is built on cryptographic signatures, which allows it to authenticate the contents of an image rather than where it was served from,” says Kim Lewandowski, co-founder, Chainguard. “This system can be used to protect against insider risks and to restrict production deployments to a set of highly secured build systems.” 

To read this article in full, please click here

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The research firm’s latest report also provides market insights security professionals can use to improve their vulnerability management strategy.

IDC recently published its Worldwide Device Vulnerability Management Market Shares, 2020: Addressing Multiple Attack Surfaces and Realizing Great Precision Through Prioritization Report1 to highlight the top worldwide Vulnerability Management vendors. For the third consecutive year, Tenable ranks No. 1 in market share.

IDC credits Tenable’s success to our strong acquisition strategy that enables Tenable to discover more vulnerabilities on more attack surfaces. They also credit Tenable’s success to our ability to bring together vulnerability data from many sources into a converged platform, and our ability to then take that data and help you prioritize the vulnerabilities with the greatest risk. 

IDC’s report also provides market insight and developments, as well as advice for technology suppliers to ensure they’re aligned with future market needs. We believe Tenable’s vision and strategy aligns with advice from IDC, validating that we are well positioned to help your needs now and into the future. 

Here are three recommendations the IDC report makes to technology providers, along with ways in which Tenable is already addressing these: 

Spend energy on solutions to detect vulnerabilities on Operational Technology (OT) devices, since they are increasingly attacked by threat actors. IT and OT environments are rapidly converging as organizations in the industrial and critical infrastructure sectors adopt internet-facing technology at an unprecedented rate. Tenable’s acquisition of Indegy, now Tenable.ot, gives you visibility into your industrial control networks to discover and assess vulnerabilities on OT devices. Tenable’s Industrial Control System (ICS) security capabilities maximize the safety and reliability of OT environments by offering complete visibility across the entire attack surface, including threat detection and asset tracking, vulnerability management and configuration control.
Provide organizations with transparent risk scoring so their security teams can prioritize vulnerabilities that are most important to their organization. To combat vulnerability overload and to quickly remediate high risk vulnerabilities, security teams must prioritize vulnerabilities with the biggest risk to their organization. Tenable provides a Vulnerability Priority Rating in Tenable.io and Tenable.sc to help you prioritize vulnerabilities and understand a vulnerability’s risk and likelihood of exploitation. Tenable Lumin elevates cyber risk management even further with additional prioritization metrics and capabilities, such as cyber exposure visualizations, asset criticality ratings, cyber exposure risk scoring and peer benchmarking, as well as providing the ability to track risk reduction over time.
Incorporate external internet scans to find shadow IT that will not show up using current network scan methods. Organizations are adopting the cloud at exponential rates, and they struggle to protect and secure resources and workloads in the public cloud. Using Tenable solutions, such as Tenable.cs, Tenable Web Application Scanning, Tenable.io VM and Nessus, you can scan external internet devices to find shadow IT. With Tenable.cs, you get a complete, continuously updated view across all your cloud resources and assets. With this comprehensive view you can find, detect and fix cloud infrastructure misconfigurations to discover and assess shadow IT and prevent exposures from reaching production. Further, Tenable.cs helps you establish guardrails in DevOps pipelines (e.g., continuous integration/continuous deliver [CI/CD] systems) and automated workflows to prevent unresolved misconfigurations or vulnerabilities from reaching the runtime environment. It monitors infrastructure deployed in Amazone Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to ensure all compliant runtime changes and drifts are propagated back to the infrastructure as code (IaC).

1Worldwide Device Vulnerability Management Market Shares, 2020: Addressing Multiple Attack Surfaces and Realizing Greater Precision Through Prioritization (doc. # US48459621, Dec. 2021)

Get the report today!

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Download Tenable’s 2021 Threat Landscape Retrospective 
Download Frost & Sullivan: Global Vulnerability Management Market, 2021
Read the press release: 
Tenable Ranked #1 for 2020 Market Share in Device Vulnerability Management for Third Consecutive Year by Leading Analyst Firm

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Around two-thirds (66%) of organizations were hit by a ransomware attack in 2021, surging from 37% in 2020

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Graham Cluley Security News is sponsored this week by the folks at Specops. Thanks to the great team there for their support! With the help of live attack data from our own honeypots, Specops Software’s Breached Password Protection can now detect over 2 billion known breached passwords in your Active Directory. Using our database, you … Continue reading “Block over two billion known breached passwords from your AD with Specops Password Policy tools”

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This is part one of a three-part series, written by an independent guest blogger. Please keep an eye out for the next blog in this series.

Remote work is the new reality for companies of all sizes and across every industry.  As the majority of employees now perform their job functions outside the technology ecosystem of their local office, the cybersecurity landscape has evolved with the adoption of terms such as Zero Trust and Secure Services Edge (SSE).  To accommodate this new landscape, organizations have undergone fundamental changes to allow employees to work from anywhere, using any device, and many times at the expense of data security. As a result, a paradigm shift has occurred that demonstrates employees are increasingly dependent on their smartphones and tablets which have jointly become the new epicenter of endpoint security.

This next-level dependence on mobile devices is consistent across the remote work environment.  There are countless anecdotes about the new reality of hybrid work.  For example, workers using personal tablets to access sensitive data via SaaS apps, or taking a work Zoom call while waiting in the school pickup line.   The constant for each of these stories has been the overwhelming preference to use whatever device is available to complete the task at hand. Therefore, it is extremely logical that bad actors have pivoted to mobile to launch their attacks given the overwhelming use of non-traditional endpoints to send email, edit spreadsheets, update CRMs and craft presentations.  

4.32B Active Mobile Internet Users

56.89% Mobile Internet Traffic as Share of Total Global Online Traffic

Although the experience paradigm quickly changed with the adoption of remote work, the perception of mobile devices as a risk vector has been more gradual for most customers. In fact, Gartner estimates that only 30% of enterprise customers currently employ a mobile threat detection solution.  Many organizations still assume that their UEM solution provides security or that iOS devices are already safe enough. The most shocking feedback from customers indicates that they historically haven’t seen attacks on mobile, so they have no reason to worry about it.  Given this mindset, it’s again no surprise that hackers have trained their focus on mobile as their primary attack vector and entry point to harvest user credentials.

16.1 % of Enterprise Devices Encountered one (or more) Phishing or Malicious links in 3Q2021 globally
51.2% of Personal Devices Encountered one (or more) Phishing or Malicious links in 3Q2021 globally.

What this mindset reveals is a certain naivete from many organizations, regardless of size or industry, that believe mobile devices do not present significant risk and therefore don’t need to be considered in their data security and compliance strategies. This oversight points to two separate tenants that must be addressed when protecting sensitive data via mobile devices:

Endpoint security is an absolute requirement to protect sensitive data and it includes laptops, desktops, and mobile devices

There isn’t a single business that would issue a laptop to an employee without some version of anti-virus or anti-malware security installed yet most mobile devices have no such protections.  The primary explanation for this is that organizations think mobile device management is the same as mobile endpoint security.  While device management tools are capable of locking or wiping a device, they lack the vast majority of capabilities necessary to proactively detect threats. Without visibility into threats like mobile phishing, malicious network connections, or advanced surveillanceware like Pegasus, device management falls far short of providing the necessary capabilities for true mobile security.

Even cybersecurity thought leaders sometimes overlook the reality of cyber-attacks on mobile.  In a recent blog, “5 Endpoint Attacks Your Antivirus Won’t Catch”, the entire story was exclusive to the impact on traditional endpoints even though rootkits and ransomware are just as likely to occur on mobile. 

Traditional security tools do not inherently protect mobile devices

Given the architectural differences that exist between mobile operating systems (iOS/Android) and traditional endpoint OS (MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc.), the methods for securing them are vastly different.  These differences inhibit traditional endpoint security tools, which are not purpose-built for mobile, from providing the right level of protection. 

This is especially true when talking about the leading EPP/EDR vendors such as Carbon Black, SentinelOne and Crowdstrike.  Their core functionality is exclusive to traditional endpoints, although the inclusion of mobile security elements to their solutions is trending.  We’re seeing strategic partnerships emerge and it’s expected that the mobile security and traditional endpoint security ecosystems will continue to merge as customers look to consolidate vendors. 

What’s more is that there are so many ways that users interact with their smartphones and tablets that are unique to these devices. For example, a secure email gateway solution can’t protect against phishing attacks delivered via SMS or QR codes. Also, can you identify all of your devices (managed and unmanaged) that are subject to the latest OS vulnerability that was just identified and needs to be patched immediately?  Did one of your engineers just fall victim to a man-in-the-middle attack when they connected to a malicious WiFi network at a random coffee shop?  These are just some of the examples of the threats and vulnerabilities that can only be mitigated with the use of a mobile endpoint security tool, dedicated to protecting mobile endpoints.

The acceleration of remote work and the “always-on” productivity that’s expected has shifted your employees’ preferences for the devices they use to get work done.   Reading email, sending an SMS rather than leaving a voicemail (who still uses voicemail?), and the fact that just about every work-related application now resides in the cloud has changed how business is transacted.  This pivot to mobile has already occurred. It’s well past time that companies acknowledge this fact and update their endpoint security posture to include mobile devices.  

If you would like to learn more or are interested in a Mobile Security Risk Assessment to provide visibility into the threat landscape of your existing mobile fleet, please click here or contact your local AT&T sales team.           

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