Counterfeit Social Media Accounts
Interesting article on the inner workings of a Facebook account farm, with commentary on fake social media accounts in general.
Entries Tagged "fraud"
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Ransomware as a Service
Tox is an outsourced ransomware platform that everyone can use.
Race Condition Exploit in Starbucks Gift Cards
A researcher was able to steal money from Starbucks by exploiting a race condition in its gift card value-transfer protocol. Basically, by initiating two identical web transfers at once, he was able to trick the system into recording them both. Normally, you could take a $5 gift card and move that money to another $5 gift card, leaving you with an empty gift card and a $10 gift card. He was able to duplicate the transfer, giving him an empty gift card and a $15 gift card.
Race-condition attacks are unreliable and it took him a bunch of tries to get it right, but there’s no reason to believe that he couldn’t have kept doing this forever.
Unfortunately, there was really no one at Starbucks he could tell this to:
The hardest part—responsible disclosure. Support guy honestly answered there’s absolutely no way to get in touch with technical department and he’s sorry I feel this way. Emailing InformationSecurityServices@starbucks.com on March 23 was futile (and it only was answered on Apr 29). After trying really hard to find anyone who cares, I managed to get this bug fixed in like 10 days.
The unpleasant part is a guy from Starbucks calling me with nothing like “thanks” but mentioning “fraud” and “malicious actions” instead. Sweet!
A little more from BBC News:
A spokeswoman for Starbucks told BBC News: “After this individual reported he was able to commit fraudulent activity against Starbucks, we put safeguards in place to prevent replication.”
The company did not answer questions about its response to Mr Homakov.
More info.
Stealing a Billion
It helps if you own the banks:
The report said Shor and his associates worked together in 2012 to buy a controlling stake in three Moldovan banks and then gradually increased the banks’ liquidity through a series of complex transactions involving loans being passed between the three banks and foreign entities.
The three banks then issued multimillion-dollar loans to companies that Shor either controlled or was connected to, the report said.
In the end, over $767 million disappeared from the banks in just three days through complex transactions.
A large portion of this money was transferred to offshore entities connected to Shor, according to the report. Some of the money was then deposited into Latvian bank accounts under the names of various foreigners.
Moldova’s central bank was subsequently forced to bail out the three banks with $870 million in emergency loans, a move designed to keep the economy afloat.
It’s an insider attack, where the insider is in charge.
What’s interesting to me is not the extent of the fraud, but how electronic banking makes this sort of thing easier. And possibly easier to investigate as well.
Online Dating Scams
Interesting research:
We identified three types of scams happening on Jiayuan. The first one involves advertising of escort services or illicit goods, and is very similar to traditional spam. The other two are far more interesting and specific to the online dating landscape. One type of scammers are what we call swindlers. For this scheme, the scammer starts a long-distance relationship with an emotionally vulnerable victim, and eventually asks her for money, for example to purchase the flight ticket to visit her. Needless to say, after the money has been transferred the scammer disappears. Another interesting type of scams that we identified are what we call dates for profit. In this scheme, attractive young ladies are hired by the owners of fancy restaurants. The scam then consists in having the ladies contact people on the dating site, taking them on a date at the restaurant, having the victim pay for the meal, and never arranging a second date. This scam is particularly interesting, because there are good chances that the victim will never realize that he’s been scammed—in fact, he probably had a good time.
Protecting Against Google Phishing in Chrome
Google has a new Chrome extension called “Password Alert”:
To help keep your account safe, today we’re launching Password Alert, a free, open-source Chrome extension that protects your Google and Google Apps for Work Accounts. Once you’ve installed it, Password Alert will show you a warning if you type your Google password into a site that isn’t a Google sign-in page. This protects you from phishing attacks and also encourages you to use different passwords for different sites, a security best practice.
Here’s how it works for consumer accounts. Once you’ve installed and initialized Password Alert, Chrome will remember a “scrambled” version of your Google Account password. It only remembers this information for security purposes and doesn’t share it with anyone. If you type your password into a site that isn’t a Google sign-in page, Password Alert will show you a notice like the one below. This alert will tell you that you’re at risk of being phished so you can update your password and protect yourself.
It’s a clever idea. Of course it’s not perfect, and doesn’t completely solve the problem. But it’s an easy security improvement, and one that should be generalized to non-Google sites. (Although it’s not uncommon for the security of many passwords to be tied to the security of the e-mail account.) It reminds me somewhat of cert pinning; in both cases, the browser uses independent information to verify what the network is telling it.
Slashdot thread.
EDITED TO ADD: It’s not even a day old, and there’s an attack.
Chinese CA Issuing Fraudulent Certificates
There’s a Chinese CA that’s issuing fraudulent Google certificates. Yet another example of why the CA model is so broken.
Defending Against Liar Buyer Fraud
It’s a common fraud on sites like eBay: buyers falsely claim that they never received a purchased item in the mail. Here’s a paper on defending against this fraud through basic psychological security measures. It’s preliminary research, but probably worth experimental research.
We have tested a collection of possible user-interface enhancements aimed at reducing liar buyer fraud. We have found that showing users in the process of filing a dispute that (1) their computer is recognized, and (2) that their location is known dramatically reduces the willingness to file false claims. We believe the reason for the reduction is that the would-be liars can visualize their lack of anonymity at a time when they are deciding whether to perform a fraudulent action. Interestingly, we also showed that users were not affected by knowing that their computer was recognized, but without their location being pin-pointed, or the other way around. We also determined that a reasonably accurate map was necessary—but that an inaccurate map does not seem to increase the willingness to lie.
Medical Records Theft and Fraud
There’s a Reuters article on new types of fraud using stolen medical records. I don’t know how much of this is real and how much is hype, but I’m certain that criminals are looking for new ways to monetize stolen data.
iPhone Payment Security
Apple is including some sort of automatic credit card payment system with the iPhone 6. It’s using some security feature of the phone and system to negotiate a cheaper transaction fee.
Basically, there are two kinds of credit card transactions: card-present, and card-not-present. The former is cheaper because there’s less risk of fraud. The article says that Apple has negotiated the card-present rate for its iPhone payment system, even though the card is not present. Presumably, this is because of some other security features that reduce the risk of fraud.
Not a lot of detail here, but interesting nonetheless.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.