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Top dark web drug vendors nabbed by ‘Operation Darkness Falls’

The US government stepped up its attack on dark web criminals this week, announcing the arrests of several alleged drug traffickers that used hidden online services.

The Department of Justice announced the arrests, along with some charges and guilty pleas, as part of Operation Darkness Falls, a joint initiative involving several government agencies.

Together, they collared a couple that they called “the most prolific dark net fentanyl vendor in the United States and the fourth most prolific in the world”. San Antonio-based Matthew and Holly Roberts traded under the name MH4Life, among others. Way to obscure your identities, guys.

The couple traded on several dark web sites, including Dream Market, Silk Road, Darknet Heroes League and Nucleus. They also used AlphaBay, one of the largest dark web marketplaces, before it shut down last year.

They used Tor to communicate, and bought postage in cryptocurrency to hide their tracks, the DoJ said.

This was the big ticket arrest for the operation, but it included several others. When law enforcement arrested an alleged Xanax dealer, Nick Powell, earlier this year, they seized $438,000 in Bitcoin.

Some arrests have already led to guilty pleas. Ryan Kluth, who admitted to distributing fentanyl and child abuse images via dark web sites, is likely to get ten years in jail as part of his plea.

The authorities also worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to nab Canadian Robert Kiessling, labeled the third largest fentanyl reseller in North America.

Dark web sites cannot be reached via regular browsers using the HTTP protocol. Instead, they are located on private servers accessible only via encrypted, anonymising protocols such as Tor and I2P. This makes it difficult to know who is operating them or visiting them.

Like any enabling technology, dark web protocols can be used for good and bad. Dark web sites help dissidents and whistleblowers share information, for example, and many legitimate sites have created Tor instances, including Facebook.

However, anonymity is also a draw for criminals, and dark web marketplaces are havens for illegal sellers. They post advertisements for generally illegal items ranging from narcotics to weapons, and customers order them using cryptocurrency. The goods usually ship via the regular mail.

While the dark web makes it more difficult for authorities to track down wrongdoers, it doesn’t make it impossible. Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who founded the original Silk Road dark web marketplace, was laid low by poor operational security.

More recently, the DoJ revealed that law enforcers had posed as bitcoin exchanges to lure criminals on the dark web with fake money laundering offers. Powell’s arrest was among those announced at the time.

The authorities have gone to extreme measures to track down dark web criminals. When the FBI gained access to Freedom Hosting, a company that hosted illegal Tor hidden service sites, agents adapted all of the pages that it served with hidden code.

In this latest initiative, the DoJ worked with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Europol has also established a team to tackle dark web crime, which it launched officially in May.


Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/7JpI5kiD3tk/

T-Mobile suffers data breach affecting 2.2 million customers

The third most popular mobile network in the US, T-Mobile, has suffered a data breach that affected more than two million of its customers.

According to the company’s website, on 20 August 2018, T-Mobile’s inhouse security team noticed unusual activity that was immediately “shut down.”

Data potentially compromised before the shutdown included subscribers’ names, billing zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers and account types (e.g. pre-paid or billed).

Apparently, no social security numbers (SSNs), financial data or account passwords were accessed during the attack.

The alert doesn’t mention the number of subscribers involved but this is being reported by Motherboard as just shy of 3%, or around 2.26 million accounts.

Users caught up in the breach would be contacted with further instructions, T-Mobile said, though the company didn’t say how or when that would happen. (Motherboard quoted a spokesperson as saying that affected customers would be told by text message.)

If there’s good news in this incident, it’s that the breach seems to have been noticed quickly by T-Mobile’s inhouse security team, and the company has told its customers within a matter of days.

In plenty of other breach incidents, companies have realised what happened only after they were contacted by a third-party researcher, by the attackers themselves, or, in the worst-case scenario, by customers reporting fraud attempts.

This is often weeks or months – sometimes even years – after the event, by which time a lot of damage has been done.

According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, so far in 2018 (to early August) 513 disclosed data breaches covering 819 million records have been recorded. For comparison, the whole of 2017 saw 831 breaches covering just over two billion records.


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Uni credential-swiping hack campaign linked to Iranian government

US infosec firm Secureworks has uncovered a login credential-hoovering operation linked to Iran that targeted universities across a number of Western nations.

Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit (CTU) found a mass credential-stealing campaign targeting over 70 universities in 14 countries, including Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and US. The company pinned this on a hacker crew it has dubbed Cobalt Dickens, which it alleged is associated with the Iranian government.

Having found a URL pointing to a spoofed login page for a university’s website, Secureworks did some IP address-based research and identified a network of 16 domains with more than 300 spoofed websites. Further research into the IP address hosting the spoofed page revealed a broader campaign to steal login credentials.

After entering their credentials into the fake login page, victims were redirected to the legitimate website where they were automatically logged into a valid session, or were prompted to re-enter their details.

“Numerous spoofed domains referenced the targeted universities’ online library systems, indicating the threat actors’ intent to gain access to these resources,” Secureworks said.

“Many of the domains were registered between May and August 2018, with the most recent being registered on August 19. Domain registrations indicate the infrastructure to support this campaign was still being created when CTU researchers discovered the activity.”

In March the American Department of Justice charged nine Iranians with carrying out a series of attacks on more than 300 universities and 47 companies. Those individuals were said to have been linked to an Iranian company called the Mabna Institute, which the Americans said at the time was engaged in theft of academic logins and data.

Secureworks said that its Cobalt Dickens group was linked to both the Mabna Institute and the charged Iranians.

Defending one’s institution against such attacks is straightforward: implement two-factor authentication and ensure technological security measures are fully up to date with the latest vendors’ patches. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/iranian_hackers_secureworks/

Researcher Cracks San Francisco’s Emergency Siren System

Bastille’s director of vulnerability research, Balint Seeber discusses the process of creating SirenJack and cracking one of a city’s critical safety systems. Filmed at Dark Reading News Desk at Black Hat USA 2018.

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/iot/researcher-cracks-san-franciscos-emergency-siren-system/v/d-id/1332604?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Modular Downloaders Could Pose New Threat for Enterprises

Proofpoint says it has recently discovered two downloaders that let attackers modify malware after it has been installed on a system.

Two recent malware discoveries suggest that attackers are turning to new modular downloaders that allow them to modify and update their software at will after it has been installed on a victim’s system.

Security vendor Proofpoint says its researchers have observed a previously undocumented downloader, called Advisorsbot, being used in a malicious email campaign targeting workers in the restaurant, hotel, and telecommunications industries since at least May 2018.

The malware is designed in such a way that attackers can add new payloads and capabilities to it post-infection. For the moment, at least, all that AdvisorsBot is doing is loading a fingerprinting module on infected systems presumably so it can identify systems of interest.

The data being collected and sent back to the malware’s command-and-control server includes system ID, operating system version, domain-related information, Microsoft Outlook account details, information on any antimalware tools on the system, and some unknown hard-coded values. AdvisorsBot currently can receive and execute only two commands — one to load a module and the other to load shellcode in a threat, Proofpoint says.

The malware is identical in function to another modular downloader named Marap, which researchers at Proofpoint also recently discovered. It is being used in a relatively large email campaign targeting users in the financial sector.

Like AdvisorsBot, Marap is designed to let attackers update their malware at will after it has been installed on a victim’s system, but it, too, currently only has a system fingerprinting module.

Growing use of such malware could pose new problems for enterprises.

“Modular downloaders tend to be small and ‘quiet’ in contrast, for example, to ransomware that lets victims know quite clearly that they are infected,” says Sherrod DeGrippo, director of threat research and detection at Proofpoint. “For the enterprise, having stealthy malware installed on clients and servers capable of carrying out a variety of malicious actions in the future presents significant risks to organizations and real benefits to threat actors.”  

Both AdvisorsBot and Marap employ features aimed at making it harder for security researchers to analyze the malware. For example, AdvisorsBot contains a lot of extra loops, statements, instructions, and other junk code designed to slow down reverse-engineering, according to Proofpoint. It also includes features for detecting anti-malware tools and for when it might be running in a sandbox so it can exit without executing.

The threat actor behind the campaign — an entity that Proofpoint identifies as TA555 — has been distributing AdvisorsBot via phishing emails containing a macro that initially executed a PowerShell command to download the malware. Since early August, the attacker has been using a macro to run a PowerShell command, which then downloads a PowerShell script capable of running AdvisorsBot without writing it to disk first, Proofpoint said.

Interestingly, since first releasing the malware in May, its authors have completely rewritten it in PowerShell and .NET. Proofpoint has dubbed the new variant as PoshAdvisor and describes it as not identical to AdvisorsBot but containing many of the same functions, including the ability to download additional modules.

“At this time, it is unclear why the author might have rewritten the malware in PowerShell,” DeGrippo says. It is certainly unusual for malware authors to do so and may be an attempt to further evade defenses.

“For the enterprise, more variety in the threat landscape and newly coded malware increase complexity for defenders and should be driving investments in threat intelligence, robust layered defenses, and end user education,” she says.

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Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/modular-downloaders-could-pose-new-threat-for-enterprises/d/d-id/1332658?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Half of Small Businesses Believe They’re Not Cybercrime Targets

New SMB version of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework could help these organizations properly assess and respond to their security risks.

Even with increased public awareness of cybersecurity threats, small- to midsized businesses (SMBs) mostly remain behind the curve: some 51% of SMB leaders are convinced their companies are not a target for cybercrime.

Meanwhile, 76% of them say they haven’t activated multifactor authentication (MFA) for their enterprise email accounts, according to a new report released today from Switchfast Technologies. 

“Frankly, we see similar numbers for MDM [mobile device management]” MFA adoption as well, says Nik Vargas, CTO for Switchfast. He says a single breach can cost a small business up to $130,000, mostly for legal work, cyber remediation, and reputational damage.

Meanwhile, the federal government is giving SMBs an assist: President Trump signed the NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act last week, which directs NIST to develop a streamlined version of its famed Cybersecurity Framework.

“The fact that the federal government has made this a focus is a positive step,” Vargas says. “Of course, one of the real dangers is that small businesses can be a launching pad for much larger attacks on government sites and the large commercial giants.”

The reality of SMB security challenges for some time has been painfully obvious: a Ponemon Institute report in 2016 that found that roughly half of the nation’s 30 million small businesses had been breached. And the new Switchfast report demonstrates that there’s still plenty of work to do to get SMBs up to speed in securing their systems.

Daniel Eliot, director of small business education at the National Cyber Security Alliance, looks for NIST to offer a simplified version of its framework, plus some tools he can use in the NCSA’s small business workshops.

“The idea is to make security approachable to small businesspeople, not to use scare tactics,” Eliot says. “I’m glad Congress recognizes the unique need of small businesses, that they typically lack the bodies or budget to do cybersecurity well.”

NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework provides a way for organizations to assess their security risk, and provides guidelines for  protecting, detecting and responding to cyber threats. 

Kevin Stine, chief of the applied cybersecurity division in NIST’s Information Technology Lab, says NIST’s work on SMB security will come from existing agency funding.

“I don’t envision grants being made available to small businesses and there won’t be a list of preferred products; that’s not what NIST does,” Stine explains. “NIST has supported small businesses since the early 2000s, so I think we can hit the ground running. Our support may not always be with documents; it may also come in the form of video clips and info graphics that will be useful to small businesses.”

Bill Conner, CEO of SonicWall, says it’s good news to get the feds’ support for SMBs. “The government finally understands the importance of SMBs and plans to put some resources to better understand the risk factor, that SMBs really are not prepared,” Conner says.  

Switchfast’s Vargas says his company’s focus on small businesses started with the first ransomware cases in 2013. In the past, SMB owners could pass off viruses as minor annoyances (think pop-ups) that caused computers to slow down, he says. But once ransomware hit, it became clear that companies could lose money or data – and SMBs were targets, too.

“Small business leaders have to become security champions and communicate it to the staff,” he says. “They have to explain to employees that security it not just about protecting the boss’s Mercedes Benz. They have to understand that their W2s or tax refunds can be stolen, so cybercrime affects them, too.”

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Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/half-of-small-businesses-believe-theyre-not-cybercrime-targets/d/d-id/1332656?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A False Sense of Security

Emerging threats over the next two years stem from biometrics, regulations, and insiders.

Over the coming years, the foundations of today’s digital world will shake — violently. Innovative and determined attackers, along with big changes to the way organizations conduct their operations, will combine to threaten even the strongest establishments.

At the Information Security Forum, we recently released “Threat Horizon 2020,” the latest in an annual series of reports that provide businesses a forward-looking view of the increasing threats in today’s always-on, interconnected world. In this report, we highlight the top threats to information security emerging over the next two years, as determined by our research.

Let’s take a look at a few of our predictions and what they mean for your organization.

Biometrics Offer a False Sense of Security
Biometric authentication technologies will flood into every part of an organization, driven by consumer demands for convenience and the promise of added security for corporate information. However, organizations will quickly realize that they are not as protected as they thought as this sense of security turns out to be unfounded. Attackers will learn to find increasingly sophisticated ways to overcome biometric safeguards.

Demands for convenience and usability will drive organizations to move to biometric authentication methods as the default for all forms of computing and communication devices, replacing today’s multifactor approach. However, any misplaced trust in the efficacy of one or more biometric methods will leave sensitive information exposed. Attacks on biometrics will affect finances and damage reputations.

Existing security policies will fall well short of addressing this issue as organizations — from the boardroom down — use new devices that depend on biometric technology. Failure to plan and prepare for this change will leave some organizations unwittingly using a single, vulnerable biometric factor to protect critical or sensitive information.

New Regulations Increase the Risk and Compliance Burden
By 2020, the number and complexity of new international and regional regulations to which organizations must adhere, combined with those already in place, will stretch compliance resources and mechanisms to breaking point. These new compliance demands will also result in an ever swelling “attack surface” that must be protected fully while attackers continually scan, probe, and seek to penetrate it.

For some organizations, the new compliance requirements will increase the amount of sensitive information — including customer details and business plans — that must be stockpiled and protected. Other organizations will see regulatory demands for data transparency resulting in information being made available to third parties that will transmit, process, and store it in multiple locations.

Balancing potentially conflicting demands while coping with the sheer volume of regulatory obligations, some companies may either divert essential staff away from critical risk mitigation activities or raise the impact of compliance failure to new levels. Business leaders will be faced with tough decisions. Those that make a wrong call may leave their organization facing extremely heavy fines and damaged reputations.

Trusted Professionals Divulge Organizational Weak Points
The relentless hunt for profits and never-ending changes in the workforce will create a constant atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity that reduces loyalty to an organization. This lack of loyalty will be exploited: the temptations and significant rewards from leaking corporate secrets will be amplified by the growing market worth of those secrets, which include organizational weak points such as security vulnerabilities. Even trusted professionals will face temptation.

Most organizations recognize that passwords or keys to their mission-critical information assets are handed out sparingly and only to those that have both a need for them and are considered trustworthy. However, employees who pass initial vetting and background checks may now — or in the future — face any number of circumstances that entice them to break that trust: duress through coercion; being passed over for promotion; extortion or blackmail; offers of large amounts of money; or simply a change in personal circumstances.

While the insider threat has always been important, more than the organizational crown jewels are under threat. The establishment of bug bounty and ethical disclosure programs, together with a demand from cybercriminals and hackers, means the most secret of secrets (essential penetration test results and vulnerability reports, for example) are extremely valuable. Organizations that rely on existing mechanisms to ensure the trustworthiness of employees and contracted parties with access to sensitive information will find existing mechanisms inadequate.

Preparation Must Begin Now
To face mounting global threats, organizations must make methodical and extensive commitments to ensure that practical plans are in place to adapt to major changes in the near future. Employees at all levels of the organization will need to be involved, from board members to managers in nontechnical roles.

The themes listed above could affect businesses operating in cyberspace at breakneck speeds, particularly as the use of the Internet and connected devices spreads. Many organizations will struggle to cope as the pace of change intensifies. These threats should stay on the radar of every organization, both small and large, even if they seem distant. The future arrives suddenly, especially when you aren’t prepared.

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Steve Durbin is Managing Director of the Information Security Forum (ISF). His main areas of focus include the emerging security threat landscape, cybersecurity, BYOD, the cloud, and social media across both the corporate and personal environments. Previously, he was Senior … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/insider-threats/a-false-sense-of-security-/a/d-id/1332636?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

T-Mobile Hit With Customer Information Hack

Approximately 2 million users said to be affected.

On Aug. 20, hackers hit T-Mobile and, according to a statement from the company, gained access to personal information for some of its customers. While no financial data or Social Security numbers were exposed, information including names, billing ZIP codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account types were potentially compromised.

While the company has not released concrete numbers for the hack, it is estimated that approximately 2 million customers were affected.

The company, with approximately 77 million total users, has notified affected customers via text message.

Read here and here for more.

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Dark Reading’s Quick Hits delivers a brief synopsis and summary of the significance of breaking news events. For more information from the original source of the news item, please follow the link provided in this article. View Full Bio

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Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen Chain Suffers Data Breach

The cyberattack occurred sometime between Nov. 3, 2017 and Jan. 2, 2018.

Another day, another restaurant chain data breach: this time was Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen. The Darden Restaurants-owned food chain said it was alerted this month that its network had been hacked and customer payment card data exposed.

The cyberattack occurred sometime between Nov. 3, 2017 and Jan. 2, 2018. The culprits “were able to access and potentially obtain payment card information used to make purchases in certain Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen restaurants” in some states, the company said in a breach notification notice on its website. The affected states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The exposed network is an older infrastructure that was replaced on April 10 of this year, the company said. “It’s important to note that there are no indications of unauthorized access to the current Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen network and systems,” the company said.

Read more here.

Dark Reading’s Quick Hits delivers a brief synopsis and summary of the significance of breaking news events. For more information from the original source of the news item, please follow the link provided in this article. View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cheddars-scratch-kitchen-chain-suffers-data-breach/d/d-id/1332662?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

DNC ‘spearphishing attack’ was actually a test

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), on Wednesday: We’ve been spearphished! The committee called the FBI about what it said was a fake login page designed to intercept usernames and passwords that would get attackers into the party’s voter database.

The DNC, early on Thursday morning: False alarm! It was a test, but we don’t know who’s behind it.

Here’s the statement from DNC chief security officer Bob Lord:

We have continued to investigate the phishing site reported to the DNC yesterday. We, along with the partners who reported the site, now believe it was built by a third party as part of a simulated phishing test on VoteBuilder. The test, which mimicked several attributes of actual attacks on the Democratic party’s voter file, was not authorized by the DNC, VoteBuilder nor any of our vendors.

The DNC’s voter database contains information on tens of millions of voters. Alarm bells went off when the committee was notified that a fake login page had been created. The DNC initially said that it quickly thwarted the attack by suspending the attacker’s account and that no information was compromised.

But as of Thursday morning, the mystery cleared up. It turns out that what looked like an attempted attack was actually a test from within: specifically, as the Washington Post reported, the Michigan Democratic Party.

The state party officials had invited a group of volunteer white-hat hackers – DigiDems – to conduct penetration testing on the voter database. Unfortunately, they did so without letting the DNC know what it was up to.

As unnerving as the unauthorized (at least, not by the nation-level DNC) test was, the silver lining was that the “spearphishing” attack was spotted and shut down. In other words, the DNC’s cyber security defenses passed the test.

The cybersecurity firm Lookout was the first to have spotted the phishing attempt, the Post reports. Lookout vice president Mike Murray had this to say about the test:

The thing about “false alarms” is that you don’t know that they’re false until you’ve showed up to investigate. All the folks who pulled together on this were amazing, and had this been a real attack, would have stopped something terrible.

Lord replied by thanking everybody who worked “round the clock” with him to respond to the perceived threat:

The positive result of the unauthorized test is a testament to the DNC having likely learned a thing or two after campaign manager John Podesta’s credentials got phished out of him by a malicious email purporting to be a Google security notice in 2016.

Although this incident had a happy ending, it doesn’t mean that true election meddling attacks aren’t coming in thick and fast.

On Monday night, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) reported that it took control of six internet domains that were about to be used by the Russian Fancy Bear hacking group – also known as APT28 – to spoof US political organizations.

They included two domains that were passing themselves off as US think tanks – the International Republican Institute and the Hudson Institute – plus three that appeared to be about to target services connected to the US Senate.

Other recent incidents:

Last week, Rolling Stone reported that a candidate running against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), known as “Putin’s favorite congressman” for his friendliness toward Russia, was successfully spearphished by clicking on a malicious email link.

In July, Microsoft said it helped block spearphishing attacks from Russia’s military spy agency that were launched against three midterm candidates, including Missouri’s Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Christopher Scott, chief technology officer and remediation lead for IBM’s X-Force IRIS, which conducts incident response and threat intelligence, told the Post that it’s no skin off hackers’ backs if one spearphishing attempt fails. After all, it doesn’t cost anything to keep throwing attempts at a target until the attacker hits pay dirt:

You’re just trying to get one person to click. If I get one person to click and enter credentials, I’ve gotten the capability – and I can throw thousands of messages out to a company.

Scott says that to fend off attacks, you’ve got to get people to keep up their guards:

When we get a message, we want to see what it’s about. We don’t pause and say, ‘Is this suspicious?’ [It’s important for organizations to teach users] to ask the question of your security teams, ‘Hey this looks suspicious, can you check it out for me?’

Here are more tips to help you recognize, and steer clear of, phishing links.


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