A 19-year-old man from the United Kingdom who headed a cybercriminal group whose motto was “Feds Can’t Touch Us” pleaded guilty this week to making bomb threats against thousands of schools. On Aug. 31, officers with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested Hertfordshire resident George Duke-Cohan, who admitted making bomb threats to thousands of schools and a United Airlines flight traveling from the U.K. to San Francisco last month. Duke-Cohan — a.k.a. “7R1D3N7,” “DoubleParallax” and “Optcz1” — was among the most vocal members of a group of Internet hooligans that goes by the name “Apophis Squad,” which for the better part of 2018 has been launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against multiple Web sites, including KrebsOnSecurity and Protonmail.com. Incredibly, all self-described members of Duke-Cohan’s clique were active users of Protonmail, even as they repeatedly attacked its servers and taunted the company on social media. “What we found, combined with intelligence provided by renowned cyber security journalist Brian Krebs, allowed us to conclusively identify Duke-Cohan as a member of Apophis Squad in the first week of August, and we promptly informed law enforcement,” Protonmail wrote in a blog post published today. “British police did not move to immediately arrest Duke-Cohan however, and we believe there were good reasons for that. Unfortunately, this meant that through much of August, ProtonMail remained under attack, but due to the efforts of Radware, ProtonMail users saw no impact.” On Aug. 9, 2018, the attention-seeking Apophis Squad claimed on their Twitter account that flight UAL 949 had been grounded due to their actions. “In a recording of one of the phone calls which was made while the plane was in the air, he takes on the persona of a worried father and claims his daughter contacted him from the flight to say it had been hijacked by gunmen, one of whom had a bomb,” the NCA said of Duke-Cohan’s actions in a press release on Sept. 4. “On arrival in San Francisco the plane was the subject of a significant security operation in a quarantined area of the airport. All 295 passengers had to remain on board causing disruption to onward journeys and financial loss to the airline.” The Apophis Squad modeled itself after the actions of the Lizard Squad, another group of e-fame seeking online hoodlums who also ran a DDoS-for-hire service, called in bomb threats to airlines, DDoSed this Web site repeatedly and whose members were nearly all subsequently arrested and charged with various cybercrimes. Indeed, the Apophis Squad’s Web site and DDoS-for-hire service is hosted on the same Internet server used by a handful of other domains that were tied to the Lizard Squad. Unsophisticated but otherwise time-wasting and annoying groups like Apophis Squad are a dime a dozen. But as I like to say, each time my site gets attacked by one of them two things usually happen not long after: Those responsible get arrested, and I get at least one decent story out of it. And if Protonmail is right, there are additional charges on the way. “We believe further charges are pending, along with possible extradition to the US,” the company said. “In recent weeks, we have further identified a number of other individuals engaged in attacks against ProtonMail, and we are working with the appropriate authorities to bring them to justice.” from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/leader-of-ddos-for-hire-gang-pleads-guilty-to-bomb-threats/
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Popular file-sharing site Mega.nz is warning users that cybercriminals hacked its browser extension for Google Chrome so that any usernames and passwords submitted through the browser were copied and forwarded to a rogue server in Ukraine. This attack serves as a fresh reminder that legitimate browser extensions can and periodically do fall into the wrong hands, and that it makes good security sense to limit your exposure to such attacks by getting rid of extensions that are no longer useful or actively maintained by developers. In a statement posted to its Web site, Mega.nz said the extension for Chrome was compromised after its Chrome Web store account was hacked. From their post:
Browser extensions can be incredibly handy and useful, but compromised extensions — depending on the level of “permissions” or access originally granted to them — also can give attackers access to all data on your computer and the Web sites you visit. For its part, Google tries to communicate the potential risk of extensions using three “alert” levels: Low, medium and high, as detailed in the screenshot below. In practice, however, most extensions carry the medium or high alert level, which means that if the extension is somehow compromised (or malicious from the get-go), the attacker in control of it is going to have access to ton of sensitive information on a great many Internet users. In many instances — as in this week’s breach with Mega — an extension gets compromised after someone with legitimate rights to alter its code gets phished or hacked. In other cases, control and ownership of an established extension may simply be abandoned or sold to shady developers. In either scenario, hacked or backdoored extensions can present a nightmare scenario for users. A basic tenet of cybersecurity holds that individuals and organizations can mitigate the risk of getting hacked to some degree by reducing their overall “attack surface” — i.e., the amount of software and services they rely upon that are potentially vulnerable to compromise. That precept holds fast here as well, because limiting one’s reliance on third-party browser extensions reduces one’s risk significantly. Personally, I do not make much use of browser extensions. In almost every case I’ve considered installing an extension I’ve been sufficiently spooked by the permissions requested that I ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the risk. I currently trust just three extensions in my Google Chrome installation; two of them are made by Google and carry “low” risk alert levels. The other is a third-party extension I’ve used for years that carries a “medium” risk rating, but that is also maintained by an individual I know who is extremely paranoid and security-conscious. If you’re the type of person who uses multiple extensions, it may be wise to adopt a risk-based approach going forward. In other words, given the high stakes that typically come with installing an extension, consider carefully whether having a given extension is truly worth it. By the way, this applies equally to plug-ins designed for Web site content management systems like WordPress and Joomla. At the very least, do not agree to update an extension if it suddenly requests more permissions than a previous version. This should be a giant red flag that something is not right. Also, never download and install an extension just because a Web site says you need it to view some type of content. Doing otherwise is almost always a high-risk proposition. Here, Rule #1 from KrebsOnSecurity’s Three Rules of Online Safety comes into play: “If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it.” Finally, in the event you do wish to install something, make sure you’re getting it directly from the entity that produced the software. Google Chrome users can see any extensions they have installed by clicking the three dots to the right of the address bar, selecting “More tools” in the resulting drop-down menu, then “Extensions.” In Firefox, click the three horizontal bars next to the address bar and select “Add-ons,” then click the “Extensions” link on the resulting page to view any installed extensions. from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/browser-extensions-are-they-worth-the-risk/ mSpy, the makers of a software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than a million paying customers spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, has leaked millions of sensitive records online, including passwords, call logs, text messages, contacts, notes and location data secretly collected from phones running the stealthy spyware. Less than a week ago, security researcher Nitish Shah directed KrebsOnSecurity to an open database on the Web that allowed anyone to query up-to-the-minute mSpy records for both customer transactions at mSpy’s site and for mobile phone data collected by mSpy’s software. The database required no authentication. Before it was taken offline sometime in the past 12 hours, the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy license over the past six months. The private key would allow anyone to track and view details of a mobile device running the software, Shah said. In addition, the database included the Apple iCloud username and authentication token of mobile devices running mSpy, and what appear to be references to iCloud backup files. Anyone who stumbled upon this database also would have been able to browse the Whatsapp and Facebook messages uploaded from mobile devices equipped with mSpy. Other records exposed included the transaction details of all mSpy licenses purchased over the last six months, including customer name, email address, mailing address and amount paid. Also in the data set were mSpy user logs — including the browser and Internet address information of people visiting the mSpy Web site. Shah said when he tried to alert mSpy of his findings, the company’s support personnel ignored him. “I was chatting with their live support, until they blocked me when I asked them to get me in contact with their CTO or head of security,” Shah said. KrebsOnSecurity alerted mSpy about the exposed database on Aug. 30. This morning I received an email from mSpy’s chief security officer, who gave only his first name, “Andrew.” “We have been working hard to secure our system from any possible leaks, attacks, and private information disclosure,” Andrew wrote. “All our customers’ accounts are securely encrypted and the data is being wiped out once in a short period of time. Thanks to you we have prevented this possible breach and from what we could discover the data you are talking about could be some amount of customers’ emails and possibly some other data. However, we could only find that there were only a few points of access and activity with the data.” Some of those “points of access” were mine. In fact, because mSpy’s Web site access logs were leaked I could view evidence of my own activity on their site in real-time via the exposed database, as could Shah of his own poking around.
WHO IS MSPY?mSpy has a history of failing to protect data about its customers and — just as critically — data secretly collected from mobile devices being spied upon by its software. In May 2015, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that mSpy had been hacked and its customer data posted to the Dark Web. At the time, mSpy initially denied suffering a breach for more than a week, even as many of its paying customers confirmed that their information was included in the mSpy database uploaded to the Dark Web. mSpy later acknowledged a breach to the BBC, saying it had been the victim of a “predatory attack” by blackmailers, and that the company had not given in to demands for money. mSpy pledged to redouble its security efforts in the wake of the 2015 breach. But more than two weeks after news of the 2015 mSpy breach broke, the company still had not disabled links to countless screenshots on its servers that were taken from mobile devices running mSpy. It’s unclear exactly where mSpy is based; the company’s Web site suggests it has offices in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, although the firm does not appear to list an official physical address. However, according to historic Web site registration records, the company is tied to a now-defunct firm called MTechnology LTD out of the United Kingdom. Documents obtained from Companies House, an official register of corporations in the U.K., indicate that the two founding members of the company are self-described programmers Aleksey Fedorchuk and Pavel Daletski. Those records (PDF) indicate that Daletski is a British citizen, and that Mr. Fedorchuk is from Russia. Neither men could be reached for comment. Court documents (PDF) obtained from the U.S. District Court in Jacksonville, Fla. regarding a trademark dispute involving mSpy and Daletski state that mSpy has a U.S.-based address of 800 West El Camino Real, in Mountain View, Calif. Those same court documents indicate that Daletski is a director at a firm based in the Seychelles called Bitex Group LTD. Interestingly, that lawsuit was brought by Retina-X Studios, an mSpy competitor based in Jacksonville, Fla. that makes a product called MobileSpy. The latest mSpy security lapse comes days after a hacker reportedly broke into the servers of TheTruthSpy — another mobile spyware-as-a-service company — and stole logins, audio recordings, pictures and text messages from mobile devices running the software. U.S. regulators and law enforcers have taken a dim view of companies that offer mobile spyware services like mSpy. In September 2014, U.S. authorities arrested a 31-year-old Hammad Akbar, the CEO of a Lahore-based company that makes a spyware app called StealthGenie. The FBI noted that while the company advertised StealthGenie’s use for “monitoring employees and loved ones such as children,” the primary target audience was people who thought their partners were cheating. Akbar was charged with selling and advertising wiretapping equipment. “Advertising and selling spyware technology is a criminal offense, and such conduct will be aggressively pursued by this office and our law enforcement partners,” U.S. Attorney Dana Boente said in a press release tied to Akbar’s indictment. Akbar pleaded guilty to the charges in November 2014, and according to the Justice Department he is “the first-ever person to admit criminal activity in advertising and selling spyware that invades an unwitting victim’s confidential communications.” A public relations pitch from mSpy to KrebsOnSecurity in March 2015 stated that approximately 40 percent of the company’s users are parents interested in keeping tabs on their kids. Assuming that is a true statement, it’s ironic that so many parents may now have unwittingly exposed their kids to predators, bullies and other ne’er-do-wells thanks to this latest security debacle at mSpy. As I wrote in a previous story about mSpy, I hope it’s clear that it is foolhardy to place any trust or confidence in a company whose reason for existence is secretly spying on people. Alas, the only customers who can truly “trust” a company like this are those who don’t care about the privacy and security of the device owner being spied upon. from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/for-2nd-time-in-3-years-mobile-spyware-maker-mspy-leaks-millions-of-sensitive-records/ A 20-year-old from Vancouver, Washington was indicted last week on federal hacking charges and for allegedly operating the “Satori” botnet, a malware strain unleashed last year that infected hundreds of thousands of wireless routers and other “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices. This outcome is hardly surprising given that the accused’s alleged alter ego has been relentless in seeking media attention for this global crime machine. The Daily Beast‘s Kevin Poulsen broke the news last week that federal authorities in Alaska indicted Kenneth Currin Schuchman of Washington on two counts of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by using malware to damage computers between August and November 2017. The 3-page indictment (PDF) is incredibly sparse, and includes few details about the meat of the charges against Schuchman. But according to Poulsen, the charges are related to Schuchman’s alleged authorship and use of the Satori botnet. Satori is a variant of the Mirai botnet, a powerful IoT malware strain that first came online in July 2016. “Despite the havoc he supposedly wreaked, the accused hacker doesn’t seem to have been terribly knowledgeable about hacking,” Poulsen notes. Schuchman reportedly went by the handle “Nexus Zeta,” the nickname used by a fairly inexperienced and clumsy ne’er-do-well who has tried on multiple occasions to get KrebsOnSecurity to write about the Satori botnet. In January 2018, Nexus Zeta changed the login page for his botnet control panel that he used to remotely control his hacked routers to include a friendly backhanded reference to this author: This wasn’t the first time Nexus Zeta said hello. In late November 2017, he chatted me up on on Twitter and Jabber instant message for several days. Most of the communications came from two accounts: “9gigs_ProxyPipe” on Twitter, and [email protected] (9gigs_ProxyPipe would later change its Twitter alias to Nexus Zeta, and Nexus Zeta himself admitted that 9gigs_ProxyPipe was his Twitter account.) In each case, this person wanted to talk about a new IoT botnet that he was “researching” and that he thought deserved special attention for its size and potential disruptive impact should it be used in a massive Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack aimed at knocking a Web site offline — something for which Satori would soon become known. Nexus Zeta’s Twitter nickname initially confused me because both 9gigs and ProxyPipe are names claimed by Robert Coelho, owner of ProxyPipe hosting (9gigs is a bit from one of Coelho’s Skype account names). Coelho’s sleuthing was quite instrumental in helping to unmask 21-year-old New Jersey resident Paras Jha as the author of the original Mirai IoT botnet (Jha later pleaded guilty to co-authoring and using Mirai and is due to be sentenced this month in Alaska and New Jersey). “Ogmemes” is from a nickname used by Jha and his Mirai botnet co-author. On Nov. 28, 2017, 9gigs_ProxyPipe sent a message to the KrebsOnSecurity Twitter account: “I have some information in regards to an incredibly dangerous IoT botnet you may find interesting,” the Twitter message read. “Let me know how you would prefer to communicate assuming you are interested.” We connected on Jabber instant message. In our chats, Ogmemes123 said he couldn’t understand why nobody had noticed a botnet powered by a Mirai variant that had infected hundreds of thousands of IoT devices (he estimated the size of the botnet to be about 300,000-500,000 at the time). He also talked a lot about how close he was with Jha. Nexus Zeta’s Twitter account profile photo is a picture of Paras Jha. He also said he knew this new botnet was being used to attack ProxyPipe. Less than 24 hours after that tweet from Nexus Zeta, I heard from ProxyPipe’s Coelho. They were under attack from a new Mirai variant. “We’ve been mitigating attacks recently that are about 270 gigabits [in volume],” Coelho wrote in an email. “Looks like somebody tagged you on Twitter pretending to be from ProxyPipe — likely the attacker? Just wanted to give you a heads up since that is not us, or anyone that works with ProxyPipe.” From reviewing Nexus Zeta’s myriad postings on the newbie-friendly hacker forum Hackforums-dot-net, it was clear that Nexus Zeta was an inexperienced, impressionable young man who wanted to associate himself with people closely tied to the 2017 whodunnit over the original Mirai IoT botnet variant. He also asked other Hackforums members for assistance in assembling his Mirai botnet: In one conversation with Ogmemes123, I lost my cool and told him to quit running botnets or else go bore somebody else with his quest for publicity. He mostly stopped bugging me after that. That same day, Nexus Zeta spotted a tweet from security researcher Troy Mursch about the rapid growth of a new Mirai-like botnet. “This is an all-time record for the most new unique IP addresses that I’ve seen added to the botnet in one day,” Mursch tweeted of the speed with which this new Mirai strain was infecting devices. For weeks after that tweet, Nexus Zeta exchanged private twitter messages with Mursch and his team of botnet hunters at Bad Packets LLC in a bid to get them to Tweet or write about Satori/Masuta. The following screenshots from their private Twitter discussions, republished with Mursch’s permission, showed that Nexus Zeta kept up the fiction with Mursch about his merely “researching” the activities of Satori. Mursch played along, and asked gently probing questions about the size, makeup and activities of a rapidly growing Satori botnet. Early in their conversations, Nexus Zeta says he is merely following the visible daily Internet scanning that Satori generated each day in a constant search for newly infectable IoT devices. But as their conversations continue over several weeks, Nexus Zeta intimates that he has much deeper access to Satori. Although it long ago would have been easy to write a series of stories about this individual and his exploits, I had zero interest in giving him the attention he clearly craved. But thanks to naivete and apparently zero sense of self-preservation, Nexus Zeta didn’t have to wait long for others to start connecting his online identities to his offline world. On Dec. 5, Chinese cybersecurity firm Netlab360 released a report on Satori noting that the IoT malware was spreading rapidly to Chinese-made Huawei routers with the help of two security vulnerabilities, including one “zero day” flaw that was unknown to researchers at the time. The report said a quarter million infected devices were seen scanning for vulnerable systems, and that much of the scanning activity traced back to infected systems in Argentina, Columbia and Egypt, the same hotspots that Nexus Zeta cited in his Nov. 29 Twitter chat with Troy Mursch (see screen shot directly above). In a taunting post published Dec. 29, 2017 titled “Good Zero Day Kiddie,” researchers at Israeli security firm CheckPoint pointed out that the domain name used as a control server to synchronize the activities of the Satori botnet — nexusiotsolutions-dot-net — was registered in 2016 to the email address [email protected]. The CheckPoint report noted the name supplied in the original registration records for that domain was a “Caleb Wilson,” although the researchers correctly noted that this could be a pseudonym. Perhaps the CheckPoint folks also knew the following tidbit, but chose not to publish it in their report: The email address [email protected] was only ever used to register a single domain name (nexusiotsolutions-dot-net), according to a historic WHOIS record search at Domaintools.com [full disclosure: DomainTools is an advertiser on this site.] But the phone number in that original domain name record was used to register one other domain: zetastress-dot-net (a “stresser” is another name for a DDoS-for-hire-service). The registrant name listed in that original record? You guessed it: Registrant Name: kenny Schuchman In April 2018 I heard from a source who said he engaged Nexus Zeta in a chat about his router-ravaging botnet and asked what kind of router Nexus Zeta trusted. According to my source, Nexus Zeta shared a screen shot of the output from his wireless modem’s Web interface, which revealed that he was connecting from an Internet service provider in Vancouver, Wash., where Schuchman lives. “During our discussions, I learned we have the same model of router,” the source said. “He asked me my router model, and I told him. He shared that his router was also an ActionTec model, and sent a picture. This picture contains his home internet address.” This matched a comprehensive “dox” that someone published on Pastebin in Feb. 2018, declaring Nexus Zeta to be 20-year-old Kenneth Currin Schuchman from Vancouver, Washington. The dox said Schuchman used the aliases Nexus Zeta and Caleb Wilson, and listed all of the email addresses tied to Nexus Zeta above, plus his financial data and physical address. “Nexus is known by many to be autistic and a compulsive liar,” the dox begins.
As detailed in the Daily Beast story and Nexus Zeta’s dox, Schuchman was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and autism disorder, and at one point when he was 15 Schuchman reportedly wandered off while visiting a friend in Bend, Ore., briefly prompting a police search before he was found near his mother’s home in Vancouver, Wash. Nexus Zeta clearly had limited hacking skills initially and almost no operational security. Indeed, his efforts to gain notoriety for his illegal hacking activities eventually earned him just that, as it usually does. But it’s clear he was a quick learner; in the span of about a year, Nexus Zeta was able to progress from a relatively clueless newbie to the helm of an international menace that launched powerful DDoS attacks while ravaging hundreds of thousands of systems. from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/alleged-satori-iot-botnet-operator-sought-media-spotlight-got-indicted/ |
ABOUT MEHi my name is Anthony I am 32 years old from Houston. I am working in local store selling electronic devices. I have been interested in eclectronics since childhood and I like to reacd about it. Archives
April 2019
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