STE WILLIAMS

The Internal Revenue Service has reported a significant decrease in tax-related identity theft for the second year in a row, pointing to its Security Summit program with state tax agencies and the tax industry as the reason for the improved numbers.

The Security Summit program, which was formed in 2015 to combat tax-related identity theft, provides multiple behind-the-scenes safeguards to protect taxpayers such as providing security best practices tips and enhancing taxpayer authentication procedures, for example. 

According to the IRS, the agency in 2017 received 242,000 reports from taxpayers that they were victims of tax-related identity theft, compared to 401,000 in 2016 – a drop of nearly 40%.

“These dramatic declines reflect the continuing success of the Security Summit effort,” says Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter. “This partnership between the IRS, states and tax community is helping protect taxpayers against identity theft. More work remains in this effort, an we look forward to continuing this collaborative effort to fight identity theft and refund fraud.”

Some Progress

Al Pascual, senior vice president, research director and head of fraud and security at Javelin Strategy Research, says that while the IRS has made progress, taxpayers need to understand that criminals are still keeping up the pressure.

Javelin, which tracks and conducts research on identity theft, found that reported incidents of tax-related identity fraud actually increased from 392,000 in 2016 to 425,000 in 2017. Pascual says these are people who told Javelin they were hit with tax-related identity fraud, but might not have necessarily reported it to the IRS.

The good news overall is that the total number of actual refund loss has gone down – as has the average amount, he says. Actual refund loss declined to $783 million in 2017, from $914 million in 2016. And the average individual refund loss dropped a little more than 14% to $1,750 in 2017, down from $2,214 in 2016.

“What’s happened is that there are more cases, but the criminals are getting away with less money,” Pascual says. “Overall, it’s trending in the right direction because the total amount of money stolen has gone down.”

Related Content:

• Equifax Lands $7.25 Million Contract with IRS
• 8 Nation-State Hacking Groups to Watch in 2018
• 1 in 9 Online Accounts Created in 2017 Was Fraudulent
• US, International Law Enforcement Shut Down Massive Cybercrime Marketplace

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Steve Zurier has more than 30 years of journalism and publishing experience, most of the last 24 of which were spent covering networking and security technology. Steve is based in Columbia, Md. View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/irs-reports-steep-decline-in-tax-related-id-theft--/d/d-id/1331077?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

The Internal Revenue Service has reported a significant decrease in tax-related identity theft for the second year in a row, pointing to its Security Summit program with state tax agencies and the tax industry as the reason for the improved numbers.

The Security Summit program, which was formed in 2015 to combat tax-related identity theft, provides multiple behind-the-scenes safeguards to protect taxpayers such as providing security best practices tips and enhancing taxpayer authentication procedures, for example. 

According to the IRS, the agency in 2017 received 242,000 reports from taxpayers that they were victims of tax-related identity theft, compared to 401,000 in 2016 – a drop of nearly 40%.

“These dramatic declines reflect the continuing success of the Security Summit effort,” says Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter. “This partnership between the IRS, states and tax community is helping protect taxpayers against identity theft. More work remains in this effort, an we look forward to continuing this collaborative effort to fight identity theft and refund fraud.”

Some Progress

Al Pascual, senior vice president, research director and head of fraud and security at Javelin Strategy Research, says that while the IRS has made progress, taxpayers need to understand that criminals are still keeping up the pressure.

Javelin, which tracks and conducts research on identity theft, found that reported incidents of tax-related identity fraud actually increased from 392,000 in 2016 to 425,000 in 2017. Pascual says these are people who told Javelin they were hit with tax-related identity fraud, but might not have necessarily reported it to the IRS.

The good news overall is that the total number of actual refund loss has gone down – as has the average amount, he says. Actual refund loss declined to $783 million in 2017, from $914 million in 2016. And the average individual refund loss dropped a little more than 14% to $1,750 in 2017, down from $2,214 in 2016.

“What’s happened is that there are more cases, but the criminals are getting away with less money,” Pascual says. “Overall, it’s trending in the right direction because the total amount of money stolen has gone down.”

Related Content:

• Equifax Lands $7.25 Million Contract with IRS
• 8 Nation-State Hacking Groups to Watch in 2018
• 1 in 9 Online Accounts Created in 2017 Was Fraudulent
• US, International Law Enforcement Shut Down Massive Cybercrime Marketplace

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Steve Zurier has more than 30 years of journalism and publishing experience, most of the last 24 of which were spent covering networking and security technology. Steve is based in Columbia, Md. View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/irs-reports-steep-decline-in-tax-related-id-theft--/d/d-id/1331077?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A cybercrime gang known as Gold Lowell has been using scan-and-exploit tactics to opportunistically infect business networks with ransomware and extort money from the victim organizations.

The group – which has been around since at least 2015 – appears to have ramped up activity in the last few weeks in keeping with its previous pattern of escalating attacks during the end part through the beginning of the calendar year, Secureworks said in a report this week.

Between late December and mid-January alone, Gold Lowell managed to collect at least $350,000 in extortion money after infecting victims with a custom version of SamSam, a previously known ransomware tool. The group’s victims include healthcare organizations, IT software providers, transportation companies, waste management firms, and business services organizations. Many of them have been small- to midsized organizations.

From a malware perspective itself, SamSam is little different from the slew of ransomware tools floating about in the wild currently. The tactic Gold Lowell has been using to install the malware on victim systems and networks is notable, however, notes Matthew Webster, senior security researcher at Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit.

“SamSam ransomware is essentially as sophisticated as it needs to be,” Webster says. “The main contrast between other ransomware capabilities is how it is deployed—after compromise of the victim’s systems and account credentials.”

According to Secureworks, Gold Lowell has shown a tendency to scan Internet-facing systems for known vulnerabilities and exploits. The group’s scanning has targeted systems and protocols like JBoss and RDP that are more likely to be used by organizations than by individuals. Early on, the threat group regularly targeted JBoss applications using an open source exploitation tool. In 2017, Gold Lowell began targeting legitimate Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) account credentials—often via brute force attacks, Secureworks said.

Once it gains at initial foothold on a network, Gold Lowell has shown a tendency to use both publicly available and proprietary tools and exploits in order to escalate privileges and find the most central and critical systems to exploit.

“[SamSam’s] encryption methodology is strong and it carries out actions that make it more difficult for recovery and investigation,” Webster says. Measures include wiping additional space on the disk and deleting itself, he says.

Gold Lowell typically demands a ransom of around $9,500 for decrypting files. But based on how effective the group has been at deploying SamSam inside breached networks, it is quite likely that some victims are paying up a lot more, according to Webster. In one campaign during mid-2017 that Secureworks researchers observed, the value of the ransom for decrypting the entire network of the victim organization was 28 bitcoins, or approximately $68,000 at the time, he says.

In at least one instance the threat actors doubled the decryption cost after a victim’s initial payment barely missed the deadline set for it. “The doubling of the ransom really goes to highlight that once the decision has been made to pay the ransom, then as victim you are handing control over to the adversary,” Webster says. Such incidents highlight the importance for organizations to have a well-tested data backup and incident response process in place, he notes.

Gold Lowell, however, generally takes steps to instill confidence that the victim will get their data back once payment has been received. It offers to decrypt files as a test, for instance, and advice on purchasing bitcoin and how to set up bitcoin wallet.

“Long-term ransomware campaigns only work if the victim is confident that they will get their data back, and the SamSam actors clearly take steps to instill that confidence,” Webster says.

Related Content:

• New Zero-Day Ransomware Evades Microsoft, Google Cloud Malware Detection
• Ransomware Actors Cut Loose on Health Care Organizations
• Ransomware Sales on the Dark Web Spike 2,502% in 2017
• 10 Scariest Ransomware Attacks of 2017

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cybercrime-gang-ramps-up-ransomware-campaign/d/d-id/1331079?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A cybercrime gang known as Gold Lowell has been using scan-and-exploit tactics to opportunistically infect business networks with ransomware and extort money from the victim organizations.

The group – which has been around since at least 2015 – appears to have ramped up activity in the last few weeks in keeping with its previous pattern of escalating attacks during the end part through the beginning of the calendar year, Secureworks said in a report this week.

Between late December and mid-January alone, Gold Lowell managed to collect at least $350,000 in extortion money after infecting victims with a custom version of SamSam, a previously known ransomware tool. The group’s victims include healthcare organizations, IT software providers, transportation companies, waste management firms, and business services organizations. Many of them have been small- to midsized organizations.

From a malware perspective itself, SamSam is little different from the slew of ransomware tools floating about in the wild currently. The tactic Gold Lowell has been using to install the malware on victim systems and networks is notable, however, notes Matthew Webster, senior security researcher at Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit.

“SamSam ransomware is essentially as sophisticated as it needs to be,” Webster says. “The main contrast between other ransomware capabilities is how it is deployed—after compromise of the victim’s systems and account credentials.”

According to Secureworks, Gold Lowell has shown a tendency to scan Internet-facing systems for known vulnerabilities and exploits. The group’s scanning has targeted systems and protocols like JBoss and RDP that are more likely to be used by organizations than by individuals. Early on, the threat group regularly targeted JBoss applications using an open source exploitation tool. In 2017, Gold Lowell began targeting legitimate Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) account credentials—often via brute force attacks, Secureworks said.

Once it gains at initial foothold on a network, Gold Lowell has shown a tendency to use both publicly available and proprietary tools and exploits in order to escalate privileges and find the most central and critical systems to exploit.

“[SamSam’s] encryption methodology is strong and it carries out actions that make it more difficult for recovery and investigation,” Webster says. Measures include wiping additional space on the disk and deleting itself, he says.

Gold Lowell typically demands a ransom of around $9,500 for decrypting files. But based on how effective the group has been at deploying SamSam inside breached networks, it is quite likely that some victims are paying up a lot more, according to Webster. In one campaign during mid-2017 that Secureworks researchers observed, the value of the ransom for decrypting the entire network of the victim organization was 28 bitcoins, or approximately $68,000 at the time, he says.

In at least one instance the threat actors doubled the decryption cost after a victim’s initial payment barely missed the deadline set for it. “The doubling of the ransom really goes to highlight that once the decision has been made to pay the ransom, then as victim you are handing control over to the adversary,” Webster says. Such incidents highlight the importance for organizations to have a well-tested data backup and incident response process in place, he notes.

Gold Lowell, however, generally takes steps to instill confidence that the victim will get their data back once payment has been received. It offers to decrypt files as a test, for instance, and advice on purchasing bitcoin and how to set up bitcoin wallet.

“Long-term ransomware campaigns only work if the victim is confident that they will get their data back, and the SamSam actors clearly take steps to instill that confidence,” Webster says.

Related Content:

• New Zero-Day Ransomware Evades Microsoft, Google Cloud Malware Detection
• Ransomware Actors Cut Loose on Health Care Organizations
• Ransomware Sales on the Dark Web Spike 2,502% in 2017
• 10 Scariest Ransomware Attacks of 2017

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cybercrime-gang-ramps-up-ransomware-campaign/d/d-id/1331079?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A cybercrime gang known as Gold Lowell has been using scan-and-exploit tactics to opportunistically infect business networks with ransomware and extort money from the victim organizations.

The group – which has been around since at least 2015 – appears to have ramped up activity in the last few weeks in keeping with its previous pattern of escalating attacks during the end part through the beginning of the calendar year, Secureworks said in a report this week.

Between late December and mid-January alone, Gold Lowell managed to collect at least $350,000 in extortion money after infecting victims with a custom version of SamSam, a previously known ransomware tool. The group’s victims include healthcare organizations, IT software providers, transportation companies, waste management firms, and business services organizations. Many of them have been small- to midsized organizations.

From a malware perspective itself, SamSam is little different from the slew of ransomware tools floating about in the wild currently. The tactic Gold Lowell has been using to install the malware on victim systems and networks is notable, however, notes Matthew Webster, senior security researcher at Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit.

“SamSam ransomware is essentially as sophisticated as it needs to be,” Webster says. “The main contrast between other ransomware capabilities is how it is deployed—after compromise of the victim’s systems and account credentials.”

According to Secureworks, Gold Lowell has shown a tendency to scan Internet-facing systems for known vulnerabilities and exploits. The group’s scanning has targeted systems and protocols like JBoss and RDP that are more likely to be used by organizations than by individuals. Early on, the threat group regularly targeted JBoss applications using an open source exploitation tool. In 2017, Gold Lowell began targeting legitimate Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) account credentials—often via brute force attacks, Secureworks said.

Once it gains at initial foothold on a network, Gold Lowell has shown a tendency to use both publicly available and proprietary tools and exploits in order to escalate privileges and find the most central and critical systems to exploit.

“[SamSam’s] encryption methodology is strong and it carries out actions that make it more difficult for recovery and investigation,” Webster says. Measures include wiping additional space on the disk and deleting itself, he says.

Gold Lowell typically demands a ransom of around $9,500 for decrypting files. But based on how effective the group has been at deploying SamSam inside breached networks, it is quite likely that some victims are paying up a lot more, according to Webster. In one campaign during mid-2017 that Secureworks researchers observed, the value of the ransom for decrypting the entire network of the victim organization was 28 bitcoins, or approximately $68,000 at the time, he says.

In at least one instance the threat actors doubled the decryption cost after a victim’s initial payment barely missed the deadline set for it. “The doubling of the ransom really goes to highlight that once the decision has been made to pay the ransom, then as victim you are handing control over to the adversary,” Webster says. Such incidents highlight the importance for organizations to have a well-tested data backup and incident response process in place, he notes.

Gold Lowell, however, generally takes steps to instill confidence that the victim will get their data back once payment has been received. It offers to decrypt files as a test, for instance, and advice on purchasing bitcoin and how to set up bitcoin wallet.

“Long-term ransomware campaigns only work if the victim is confident that they will get their data back, and the SamSam actors clearly take steps to instill that confidence,” Webster says.

Related Content:

• New Zero-Day Ransomware Evades Microsoft, Google Cloud Malware Detection
• Ransomware Actors Cut Loose on Health Care Organizations
• Ransomware Sales on the Dark Web Spike 2,502% in 2017
• 10 Scariest Ransomware Attacks of 2017

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cybercrime-gang-ramps-up-ransomware-campaign/d/d-id/1331079?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple