Cybercrime in the Age of COVID-19
The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre has a series of papers on cybercrime during the coronavirus pandemic.
EDITED TO ADD (8/12): Interpol report.
Entries Tagged "cybercrime"
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Business Email Compromise (BEC) Criminal Ring
A criminal group called Cosmic Lynx seems to be based in Russia:
Dubbed Cosmic Lynx, the group has carried out more than 200 BEC campaigns since July 2019, according to researchers from the email security firm Agari, particularly targeting senior executives at large organizations and corporations in 46 countries. Cosmic Lynx specializes in topical, tailored scams related to mergers and acquisitions; the group typically requests hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars as part of its hustles.
[…]
For example, rather than use free accounts, Cosmic Lynx will register strategic domain names for each BEC campaign to create more convincing email accounts. And the group knows how to shield these domains so they’re harder to trace to the true owner. Cosmic Lynx also has a strong understanding of the email authentication protocol DMARC and does reconnaissance to assess its targets’ specific system DMARC policies to most effectively circumvent them.
Cosmic Lynx also drafts unusually clean and credible-looking messages to deceive targets. The group will find a company that is about to complete an acquisition and contact one of its top executives posing as the CEO of the organization being bought. This phony CEO will then involve “external legal counsel” to facilitate the necessary payments. This is where Cosmic Lynx adds a second persona to give the process an air of legitimacy, typically impersonating a real lawyer from a well-regarded law firm in the United Kingdom. The fake lawyer will email the same executive that the “CEO” wrote to, often in a new email thread, and share logistics about completing the transaction. Unlike most BEC campaigns, in which the messages often have grammatical mistakes or awkward wording, Cosmic Lynx messages are almost always clean.
The Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity
Interesting research: “Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures“:
Abstract: Well-meaning cybersecurity risk owners will deploy countermeasures (technologies or procedures) to manage risks to their services or systems. In some cases, those countermeasures will produce unintended consequences, which must then be addressed. Unintended consequences can potentially induce harm, adversely affecting user behaviour, user inclusion, or the infrastructure itself (including other services or countermeasures). Here we propose a framework for preemptively identifying unintended harms of risk countermeasures in cybersecurity.The framework identifies a series of unintended harms which go beyond technology alone, to consider the cyberphysical and sociotechnical space: displacement, insecure norms, additional costs, misuse, misclassification, amplification, and disruption. We demonstrate our framework through application to the complex,multi-stakeholder challenges associated with the prevention of cyberbullying as an applied example. Our framework aims to illuminate harmful consequences, not to paralyze decision-making, but so that potential unintended harms can be more thoroughly considered in risk management strategies. The framework can support identification and preemptive planning to identify vulnerable populations and preemptively insulate them from harm. There are opportunities to use the framework in coordinating risk management strategy across stakeholders in complex cyberphysical environments.
Security is always a trade-off. I appreciate work that examines the details of that trade-off.
On Marcus Hutchins
Long and nuanced story about Marcus Hutchins, the British hacker who wrote most of the Kronos malware and also stopped WannaCry in real time. Well worth reading.
ILOVEYOU Virus
It’s the twentieth anniversary of the ILOVEYOU virus, and here are three interesting articles about it and its effects on software design.
Collating Hacked Data Sets
Two Harvard undergraduates completed a project where they went out on the dark web and found a bunch of stolen datasets. Then they correlated all the information, and combined it with additional, publicly available, information. No surprise: the result was much more detailed and personal.
“What we were able to do is alarming because we can now find vulnerabilities in people’s online presence very quickly,” Metropolitansky said. “For instance, if I can aggregate all the leaked credentials associated with you in one place, then I can see the passwords and usernames that you use over and over again.”
Of the 96,000 passwords contained in the dataset the students used, only 26,000 were unique.
“We also showed that a cyber criminal doesn’t have to have a specific victim in mind. They can now search for victims who meet a certain set of criteria,” Metropolitansky said.
For example, in less than 10 seconds she produced a dataset with more than 1,000 people who have high net worth, are married, have children, and also have a username or password on a cheating website. Another query pulled up a list of senior-level politicians, revealing the credit scores, phone numbers, and addresses of three U.S. senators, three U.S. representatives, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and a Cabinet member.
“Hopefully, this serves as a wake-up call that leaks are much more dangerous than we think they are,” Metropolitansky said. “We’re two college students. If someone really wanted to do some damage, I’m sure they could use these same techniques to do something horrible.”
That’s about right.
And you can be sure that the world’s major intelligence organizations have already done all of this.
Apple Abandoned Plans for Encrypted iCloud Backup after FBI Complained
This is new from Reuters:
More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee.
Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said.
When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.
EDITED TO ADD (2/13): Android has enrypted backups.
Brazil Charges Glenn Greenwald with Cybercrimes
Glenn Greenwald has been charged with cybercrimes in Brazil, stemming from publishing information and documents that were embarrassing to the government. The charges are that he actively helped the people who actually did the hacking:
Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers, prosecutors say the journalist played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.”
For instance, prosecutors contend that Mr. Greenwald encouraged the hackers to delete archives that had already been shared with The Intercept Brasil, in order to cover their tracks.
Prosecutors also say that Mr. Greenwald was communicating with the hackers while they were actively monitoring private chats on Telegram, a messaging app. The complaint charged six other individuals, including four who were detained last year in connection with the cellphone hacking.
This isn’t new, or unique to Brazil. Last year, Julian Assange was charged by the US with doing essentially the same thing with Chelsea Manning:
The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications. Manning, who had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst, was using the computers to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks. Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log on to the computers under a username that did not belong to her. Such a deceptive measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures.
During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information. During an exchange, Manning told Assange that “after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.” To which Assange replied, “curious eyes never run dry in my experience.”
Good commentary on the Assange case here.
It’s too early for any commentary on the Greenwald case. Lots of news articles are essentially saying the same thing. I’ll post more news when there is some.
EDITED TO ADD (2/12): Marcy Wheeler compares the Greenwald case with the Assange case.
Attacker Causes Epileptic Seizure over the Internet
This isn’t a first, but I think it will be the first conviction:
The GIF set off a highly unusual court battle that is expected to equip those in similar circumstances with a new tool for battling threatening trolls and cyberbullies. On Monday, the man who sent Eichenwald the moving image, John Rayne Rivello, was set to appear in a Dallas County district court. A last-minute rescheduling delayed the proceeding until Jan. 31, but Rivello is still expected to plead guilty to aggravated assault. And he may be the first of many.
The Epilepsy Foundation announced on Monday it lodged a sweeping slate of criminal complaints against a legion of copycats who targeted people with epilepsy and sent them an onslaught of strobe GIFs—a frightening phenomenon that unfolded in a short period of time during the organization’s marking of National Epilepsy Awareness Month in November.
[…]
Rivello’s supporters—among them, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, including Richard Spencer—have also argued that the issue is about freedom of speech. But in an amicus brief to the criminal case, the First Amendment Clinic at Duke University School of Law argued Rivello’s actions were not constitutionally protected.
“A brawler who tattoos a message onto his knuckles does not throw every punch with the weight of First Amendment protection behind him,” the brief stated. “Conduct like this does not constitute speech, nor should it. A deliberate attempt to cause physical injury to someone does not come close to the expression which the First Amendment is designed to protect.”
Another article.
EDITED TO ADD(12/19): More articles.
EDITED TO ADD (1/14): There was a similar case in Germany in 2012—that attacker was convicted.
Fabricated Voice Used in Financial Fraud
This seems to be an identity theft first:
Criminals used artificial intelligence-based software to impersonate a chief executive’s voice and demand a fraudulent transfer of €220,000 ($243,000) in March in what cybercrime experts described as an unusual case of artificial intelligence being used in hacking.
Another news article.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.