Operating a Fake Bank
Here’s a story of a fake bank in China—a real bank, not an online bank—that stole $32m from depositors over a year. Pro tip: real banks never offer 2%/week interest.
Entries Tagged "theft"
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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.
Cell Phone Kill Switches Mandatory in California
California passed a kill-switch law, meaning that all cell phones sold in California must have the capability to be remotely turned off. It was sold as an antitheft measure. If the phone company could remotely render a cell phone inoperative, there would be less incentive to steal one.
I worry more about the side effects: once the feature is in place, it can be used by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.
The law raises concerns about how the switch might be used or abused, because it also provides law enforcement with the authority to use the feature to kill phones. And any feature accessible to consumers and law enforcement could be accessible to hackers, who might use it to randomly kill phones for kicks or revenge, or to perpetrators of crimes who might—depending on how the kill switch is implemented—be able to use it to prevent someone from calling for help.
“It’s great for the consumer, but it invites a lot of mischief,” says Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the law. “You can imagine a domestic violence situation or a stalking context where someone kills [a victim’s] phone and prevents them from calling the police or reporting abuse. It will not be a surprise when you see it being used this way.”
I wrote about this in 2008, more generally:
The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That’s a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices—computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders—with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.
Once we go down this path—giving one device authority over other devices—the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?
The law only affects California, but phone manufacturers won’t sell two different phones. So this means that all cell phones will eventually have this capability. And, of course, the procedural controls and limitations written into the California law don’t apply elsewhere
EDITED TO ADD (9/12): Users can opt out, at least for now: “The bill would authorize an authorized user to affirmatively elect to
disable or opt-out of the technological solution at any time.”
How the bill can be used to disrupt protests.
Over a Billion Passwords Stolen?
I’ve been doing way too many media interviews over this weird New York Times story that a Russian criminal gang has stolen over 1.2 billion passwords.
As expected, the hype is pretty high over this. But from the beginning, the story didn’t make sense to me. There are obvious details missing: are the passwords in plaintext or encrypted, what sites are they for, how did they end up with a single criminal gang? The Milwaukee company that pushed this story, Hold Security, isn’t a company that I had ever heard of before. (I was with Howard Schmidt when I first heard this story. He lives in Wisconsin, and he had never heard of the company before, either.) The New York Times writes that “a security expert not affiliated with Hold Security analyzed the database of stolen credentials and confirmed it was authentic,” but we’re not given any details. This felt more like a PR story from the company than anything real.
Yesterday, Forbes wrote that Hold Security is charging people $120 to tell them if they’re in the stolen-password database:
“In addition to continuous monitoring, we will also check to see if your company has been a victim of the latest CyberVor breach,” says the site’s description of the service using its pet name for the most recent breach. “The service starts from as low as 120$/month and comes with a 2-week money back guarantee, unless we provide any data right away.”
Shortly after Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Yadron linked to the page on Twitter and asked questions about it, the firm replaced the description of the service with a “coming soon” message.
Holden says by email that the service will actually be $10/month and $120/year. “We are charging this symbolical fee to recover our expense to verify the domain or website ownership,” he says by email. “While we do not anticipate any fraud, we need to be cognizant of its potential. The other thing to consider, the cost that our company must undertake to proactively reach out to a company to identify the right individual(s) to inform of a breach, prove to them that we are the ‘good guys’. Believe it or not, it is a hard and often thankless task.”
This story is getting squirrelier and squirrelier. Yes, security companies love to hype the threat to sell their products and services. But this goes further: single-handedly trying to create a panic, and then profiting off that panic.
I don’t know how much of this story is true, but what I was saying to reporters over the past two days is that it’s evidence of how secure the Internet actually is. We’re not seeing massive fraud or theft. We’re not seeing massive account hijacking. A gang of Russian hackers has 1.2 billion passwords—they’ve probably had most of them for a year or more—and everything is still working normally. This sort of thing is pretty much universally true. You probably have a credit card in your wallet right now whose number has been stolen. There are zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered right now that can be used to hack your computer. Security is terrible everywhere, and it it’s all okay. This is a weird paradox that we’re used to by now.
Oh, and if you want to change your passwords, here’s my advice.
EDITED TO ADD (8/7): Brian Krebs vouches for Hold Security. On the other hand, it had no web presence until this story hit. Despite Krebs, I’m skeptical.
EDITED TO ADD (8/7): Here’s an article about Hold Security from February with suspiciously similar numbers.
EDITED TO ADD (8/9): Another skeptical take.
Here's How Brazilian Crooks Steal Billions
Man-in-the-middle attack against a Brazilian payment system:
Brazil has an extremely active and talented cybercrime underground, and increasingly Brazilian organized crime gangs are setting their sights on boleto users who bank online. This is typically done through malware that lies in wait until the user of the hacked PC visits their bank’s site and fills out the account information for the recipient of a boleto transaction. In this scenario, the unwitting victim submits the transfer for payment and the malware modifies the request by substituting a recipient account that the attackers control.
This is the sort of attack that bypasses any two-factor authentication system, since it occurs after all authentication has happened. A defense would be to send a confirmation notice to another device the account-owner owns, confirming the details of the transaction.
These Pickpocket Secrets Will Make You Cry
Pickpocket tricks explained by neuroscience.
So while sleight of hand helps, it’s as much about capturing all of somebody’s attention with other movements. Street pickpockets also use this effect to their advantage by manufacturing a situation that can’t help but overload your attention system. A classic trick is the ‘stall’, used by pickpocketing gangs all over the world. First, a ‘blocker’, walks in front of the victim (or ‘mark’) and suddenly stops so that the mark bumps into them. Another gang member will be close behind and will bump into both of them and then start a staged argument with the blocker. Amid the confusion one or both of them steal what they can and pass it to a third member of the gang, who quickly makes off with the loot.
I’ve seen Apollo Robbins in action. He’s very good.
1971 Social Engineering Attack
From Betty Medsger’s book on the 1971 FBI burglary (page 22):
As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft board office was always locked. There was no padlock to replace, as they had done at a draft board raid in Philadelphia a few months earlier, and no one in the group was able to pick the lock. The break-in technique they settled on at that office must be unique in the annals of burglary. Several hours before the burglary was to take place, one of them wrote a note and tacked it to the door they wanted to enter: “Please don’t lock this door tonight.” Sure enough, when the burglars arrived that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The burglars entered the office with ease, stole the Selective Service records, and left. They were so pleased with themselves that one of them proposed leaving a thank-you note on the door. More cautious minds prevailed. Miss Manners be damned, they did not leave a note.
1971 FBI Burglary
Interesting story:
…burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
Interesting precursor to Edward Snowden.
Poached Eggs
The story of people who poach and collect rare eggs, and the people who hunt them down.
Securing wildlife against poachers is a difficult problem, especially when the defenders are poor countries with not a lot of resources.
The Importance of Backups
I’ve already written about the guy who got a new trial because a virus ate his court records. Here’s someone who will have to redo his thesis research because someone stole his only copy of the data. Remember the rule: no one ever wants backups, but everyone always wants restores.
I have no idea if that image is real or not, but I’ve been hearing such stories for at least two decades.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.