Category: USDoD

In the first week of August this year, a hacker released a dataset containing personal information of Americans from the servers of National Public Data, an organization providing background check services to businesses. By the third week of the month, the same hacker published another data dump, revealing approximately 2.7 billion records. This dataset included social security numbers, names, mailing addresses, and names of relatives, potentially setting the stage for future phishing attacks.

Initial investigations suggest that the hacker, identified as USDoD, was responsible for breaching data belonging to citizens from the US, UK, and Canada. It is believed that this information was obtained after paying a substantial amount to another threat actor known as SXuL.

While there is no conclusive evidence linking the attack to Russian hackers, it is notable that USDoD is the same individual who previously infiltrated CrowdStrike’s servers and attempted to breach Microsoft servers. This latter attack caused significant disruptions, including issues with Windows 10 and 11 due to a bug in CrowdStrike Falcon sensors.

Attacks on software firms and technology infrastructure have become lucrative for threat actors. Victims often feel compelled to pay ransoms because their data is crucial to their operations. Such data frequently sells quickly on the dark web, where it is highly sought after by criminals looking to profit through cryptocurrency.

The FBI and other organizations like CISA advise ransomware victims against paying ransoms, as doing so encourages further criminal activity. It has been observed that attackers often return to target the same network multiple times within a year. Therefore, it is recommended to report data breaches to the SEC and the FBI and follow their guidance for handling such incidents.

The post National Public Data Leaks Social Security Numbers of about 2.7 billion populaces appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

A great many readers this month reported receiving alerts that their Social Security Number, name, address and other personal information were exposed in a breach at a little-known but aptly-named consumer data broker called NationalPublicData.com. This post examines what we know about a breach that has exposed hundreds of millions of consumer records. We’ll also take a closer look at the data broker that got hacked — a background check company founded by an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy from Florida.

On July 21, 2024, denizens of the cybercrime community Breachforums released more than 4 terabytes of data they claimed was stolen from nationalpublicdata.com, a Florida-based company that collects data on consumers and processes background checks.

The breach tracking service HaveIBeenPwned.com and the cybercrime-focused Twitter account vx-underground both concluded the leak is the same information first put up for sale in April 2024 by a prolific cybercriminal who goes by the name “USDoD.”

On April 7, USDoD posted a sales thread on Breachforums for four terabytes of data — 2.9 billion rows of records — they claimed was taken from nationalpublicdata.com. The snippets of stolen data that USDoD offered as teasers showed rows of names, addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security Numbers (SSNs). Their asking price? $3.5 million.

Many media outlets mistakenly reported that the National Public data breach affects 2.9 billion people (that figure actually refers to the number of rows in the leaked data sets). HaveIBeenOwned.com’s Troy Hunt analyzed the leaked data and found it is a somewhat disparate collection of consumer and business records, including the real names, addresses, phone numbers and SSNs of millions of Americans (both living and deceased), and 70 million rows from a database of U.S. criminal records.

Hunt said he found 137 million unique email addresses in the leaked data, but stressed that there were no email addresses in the files containing SSN records.

“If you find yourself in this data breach via HaveIBeenPwned.com, there’s no evidence your SSN was leaked, and if you’re in the same boat as me, the data next to your record may not even be correct.”

Nationalpublicdata.com publicly acknowledged a breach in a statement on Aug. 12, saying “there appears to have been a data security incident that may have involved some of your personal information. The incident appears to have involved a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.”

The company said the information “suspected of being breached” contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).

“We cooperated with law enforcement and governmental investigators and conducted a review of the potentially affected records and will try to notify you if there are further significant developments applicable to you,” the statement continues. “We have also implemented additional security measures in efforts to prevent the reoccurrence of such a breach and to protect our systems.”

Hunt’s analysis didn’t say how many unique SSNs were included in the leaked data. But according to researchers at Atlas Data Privacy Corp., there are 272 million unique SSNs in the entire records set.

Atlas found most records have a name, SSN, and home address, and that approximately 26 percent of those records included a phone number. Atlas said they verified 5,000 addresses and phone numbers, and found the records pertain to people born before Jan. 1, 2002 (with very few exceptions).

If there is a tiny silver lining to the breach it is this: Atlas discovered that many of the records related to people who are now almost certainly deceased. They found the average age of the consumer in these records is 70, and fully two million records are related to people whose date of birth would make them more than 120 years old today.

TWISTED HISTORY

Where did National Public Data get its consumer data? The company’s website doesn’t say, but it is operated by an entity in Coral Springs, Fla. called Jerico Pictures Inc. The website for Jerico Pictures is not currently responding. However, cached versions of it at archive.org show it is a film studio with offices in Los Angeles and South Florida.

The Florida Secretary of State says Jerico Pictures is owned by Salvatore (Sal) Verini Jr., a retired deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s office. The Secretary of State also says Mr. Verini is or was a founder of several other Florida companies, including National Criminal Data LLC, Twisted History LLC, Shadowglade LLC and Trinity Entertainment Inc., among others.

Mr. Verini did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Cached copies of Mr. Verini’s vanity domain salvatoreverini.com recount his experience in acting (e.g. a role in a 1980s detective drama with Burt Reynolds) and more recently producing dramas and documentaries for several streaming channels.

Sal Verini’s profile page at imdb.com.

Pivoting on the email address used to register that vanity domain, DomainTools.com finds several other domains whose history offers a clearer picture of the types of data sources relied upon by National Public Data.

One of those domains is recordscheck.net (formerly recordscheck.info), which advertises “instant background checks, SSN traces, employees screening and more.” Another now-defunct business tied to Mr. Verini’s email — publicrecordsunlimited.com — said it obtained consumer data from a variety of sources, including: birth, marriage and death records; voting records; professional licenses; state and federal criminal records.

The homepage for publicrecordsunlimited.com, per archive.org circa 2017.

It remains unclear how thieves originally obtained these records from National Public Data. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from USDoD, who is perhaps best known for hacking into Infragard, an FBI program that facilitates information sharing about cyber and physical threats with vetted people in the private sector.

USDoD said they indeed sold the same data set that was leaked on Breachforums this past month, but that the person who leaked the data did not obtain it from them. USDoD said the data stolen from National Public Data had traded hands several times since it was initially stolen in December 2023.

“The database has been floating around for a while,” USDoD said. “I was not the first one to get it.”

USDoD said the person who originally stole the data from NPD was a hacker who goes by the handle SXUL. That user appears to have deleted their Telegram account several days ago, presumably in response to intense media coverage of the breach.

ANALYSIS

Data brokers like National Public Data typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

Americans may believe they have the right to opt out of having these records collected and sold to anyone. But experts say these underlying sources of information — the above-mentioned “public” records — are carved out from every single state consumer privacy law. This includes California’s privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations.

You see, here in America, virtually anyone can become a consumer data broker. And with few exceptions, there aren’t any special requirements for brokers to show that they actually care about protecting the data they collect, store, repackage and sell so freely.

In February 2023, PeopleConnect, the owners of the background search services TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, acknowledged a breach affecting 20 million customers who paid the data brokers to run background checks. The data exposed included email addresses, hashed passwords, first and last names, and phone numbers.

In 2019, malicious hackers stole data on more than 1.5 billion people from People Data Labs, a San Francisco data broker whose people-search services linked hundreds of millions of email addresses, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles and more than 200 million valid cell phone numbers.

These data brokers are the digital equivalent of massive oil tankers wandering the coast without GPS or an anchor, because when they get hacked, the effect is very much akin to the ecological and economic fallout from a giant oil spill.

It’s an apt analogy because the dissemination of so much personal data all at once has ripple effects for months and years to come, as this information invariably feeds into a vast underground ocean of scammers who are already equipped and staffed to commit identity theft and account takeovers at scale.

It’s also apt because much like with real-life oil spills, the cleanup costs and effort from data spills — even just vast collections of technically “public” documents like the NPD corpus — can be enormous, and most of the costs associated with that fall to consumers, directly or indirectly.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Should you worry that your SSN and other personal data might be exposed in this breach? That isn’t necessary for people who’ve been following the advice here for years, which is to freeze one’s credit file at each of the major consumer reporting bureaus. Having a freeze on your files makes it much harder for identity thieves to create new accounts in your name, and it limits who can view your credit information.

The main reason I recommend the freeze is that all of the information ID thieves need to assume your identity is now broadly available from multiple sources, thanks to the multiplicity of data breaches we’ve seen involving SSN data and other key static data points about people.

But beyond that, there are numerous cybercriminal services that offer detailed background checks on consumers, including full SSNs. These services are powered by compromised accounts at data brokers that cater to private investigators and law enforcement officials, and some are now fully automated via Telegram instant message bots. Meaning, if you’re an American who hasn’t frozen their credit files and you haven’t yet experienced some form of new account fraud, the ID thieves probably just haven’t gotten around to you yet.

All Americans are also entitled to obtain a free copy of their credit report weekly from each of the three major credit bureaus, through the website annualcreditreport.com. It used to be that consumers were allowed one free report from each of the bureaus annually, but in October 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced the bureaus had permanently extended a program that lets you check your credit report once a week for free. If you haven’t done this in a while, now would be an excellent time to order your files.

Either way, review the reports and dispute any errors you may find. Identity theft and new account fraud is not a problem that gets easier to solve by letting it fester.

Mr. Verini probably didn’t respond to requests for comment because his company is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit (NB: the lawsuit also erroneously claims 3 billion people were affected). These lawsuits are practically inevitable now after a major breach, but they also have the unfortunate tendency to let regulators and lawmakers off the hook.

Almost every time there’s a major breach of SSN data, Americans are offered credit monitoring services. Most of the time, those services come from one of the three major consumer credit bureaus, the same companies that profit by compiling and selling incredibly detailed dossiers on consumers’ financial lives. The same companies that use dark patterns to trick people into paying for “credit lock” services that achieve a similar result as a freeze but still let the bureaus sell your data to their partners.

But class-actions alone will not drive us toward a national conversation about what needs to change. Americans currently have very few rights to opt out of the personal and financial surveillance, data collection and sale that is pervasive in today’s tech-based economy.

The breach at National Public Data may not be the worst data breach ever. But it does present yet another opportunity for this country’s leaders to acknowledge that the SSN has completely failed as a measure of authentication or authorization. It was never a good idea to use as an authenticator to begin with, and it is certainly no longer suitable for this purpose.

The truth is that these data brokers will continue to proliferate and thrive (and get hacked and relieved of their data) until Congress begins to realize it’s time for some consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century.

Update, Aug. 16, 8:00 a.m. ET: Corrected the story to note that consumers can now obtain a free credit report from each of the three consumer reporting bureaus weekly, instead of just annually.

In December 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that a cybercriminal using the handle “USDoD” had infiltrated the FBI‘s vetted information sharing network InfraGard, and was selling the contact information for all 80,000 members. The FBI responded by reverifying all InfraGard members and by seizing the cybercrime forum where the data was being sold. But on Sept. 11, 2023, USDoD resurfaced after a lengthy absence to leak sensitive employee data stolen from the aerospace giant Airbus, while promising to visit the same treatment on top U.S. defense contractors.

USDoD’s avatar used to be the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense. Now it’s a charming kitten.

In a post on the English language cybercrime forum BreachForums, USDoD leaked information on roughly 3,200 Airbus vendors, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. USDoD claimed they grabbed the data by using passwords stolen from a Turkish airline employee who had third-party access to Airbus’ systems.

USDoD didn’t say why they decided to leak the data on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but there was definitely an aircraft theme to the message that accompanied the leak, which concluded with the words, “Lockheed martin, Raytheon and the entire defense contractos [sic], I’m coming for you [expletive].”

Airbus has apparently confirmed the cybercriminal’s account to the cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock, which determined that the Airbus credentials were stolen after a Turkish airline employee infected their computer with a prevalent and powerful info-stealing trojan called RedLine.

Info-stealers like RedLine typically are deployed via opportunistic email malware campaigns, and by secretly bundling the trojans with cracked versions of popular software titles made available online. Credentials stolen by info-stealers often end up for sale on cybercrime shops that peddle purloined passwords and authentication cookies (these logs also often show up in the malware scanning service VirusTotal).

Hudson Rock said it recovered the log files created by a RedLine infection on the Turkish airline employee’s system, and found the employee likely infected their machine after downloading pirated and secretly backdoored software for Microsoft Windows.

Hudson Rock says info-stealer infections from RedLine and a host of similar trojans have surged in recent years, and that they remain “a primary initial attack vector used by threat actors to infiltrate organizations and execute cyberattacks, including ransomware, data breaches, account overtakes, and corporate espionage.”

The prevalence of RedLine and other info-stealers means that a great many consequential security breaches begin with cybercriminals abusing stolen employee credentials. In this scenario, the attacker temporarily assumes the identity and online privileges assigned to a hacked employee, and the onus is on the employer to tell the difference.

In addition to snarfing any passwords stored on or transmitted through an infected system, info-stealers also siphon authentication cookies or tokens that allow one to remain signed-in to online services for long periods of time without having to resupply one’s password and multi-factor authentication code. By stealing these tokens, attackers can often reuse them in their own web browser, and bypass any authentication normally required for that account.

Microsoft Corp. this week acknowledged that a China-backed hacking group was able to steal one of the keys to its email kingdom that granted near-unfettered access to U.S. government inboxes. Microsoft’s detailed post-mortem cum mea culpa explained that a secret signing key was stolen from an employee in an unlucky series of unfortunate events, and thanks to TechCrunch we now know that the culprit once again was “token-stealing malware” on the employee’s system.

In April 2023, the FBI seized Genesis Market, a bustling, fully automated cybercrime store that was continuously restocked with freshly hacked passwords and authentication tokens stolen by a network of contractors who deployed RedLine and other info-stealer malware.

In March 2023, the FBI arrested and charged the alleged administrator of BreachForums (aka Breached), the same cybercrime community where USDoD leaked the Airbus data. In June 2023, the FBI seized the BreachForums domain name, but the forum has since migrated to a new domain.

USDoD’s InfraGard sales thread on Breached.

Unsolicited email continues to be a huge vector for info-stealing malware, but lately the crooks behind these schemes have been gaming the search engines so that their malicious sites impersonating popular software vendors actually appear before the legitimate vendor’s website. So take special care when downloading software to ensure that you are in fact getting the program from the original, legitimate source whenever possible.

Also, unless you really know what you’re doing, please don’t download and install pirated software. Sure, the cracked program might do exactly what you expect it to do, but the chances are good that it is also laced with something nasty. And when all of your passwords are stolen and your important accounts have been hijacked or sold, you will wish you had simply paid for it.

Airbus, a renowned leader in the aerospace industry, has recently found itself at the center of a highly sophisticated cyber-attack, sending shockwaves through the cybersecurity landscape. This breach has exposed a trove of sensitive information, including the personal details of more than 3,200 vendors, such as names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

The incident has taken an intriguing turn, with a shadowy threat actor operating under the alias ‘USDoD’ emerging as the prime suspect. This mysterious entity claims to have sourced the pilfered data from the FBI database known as InfraGrad, raising serious concerns about the security of government systems.

According to insiders in the cybersecurity community, the same enigmatic ‘USDoD’ threat actor has issued ominous warnings of impending attacks on major defense industry giants, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, soon. The modus operandi behind the current breach involved the insidious insertion of the Redline info-stealer Malware into the Microsoft .NET Framework.

The saga began when ‘USDoD’ leaked the purloined information from InfraGrad onto a notorious breach forum in December 2022. In response, the FBI swiftly launched an investigation, eventually putting a halt to the illicit information peddling on a blog. The group responsible for this breach, rumored to be affiliated with the Ransomed Ransomware Group, has now escalated their threats, vowing to disclose even more sensitive data unless their demands are met with seriousness and urgency.

The unauthorized extraction of data from a database is not just a breach of law but also a glaring security risk, especially when it involves state-funded groups surreptitiously infiltrating corporate networks. In this case, the compromised entity specializes in manufacturing defense helicopters, fighter jets, commercial aircraft, and various other critical equipment. The potential consequences of this breach extend beyond a single company; they pose a significant national security risk if this information falls into the hands of hostile entities or terrorist organizations.

Considering this alarming incident, it becomes paramount for organizations to raise awareness among their staff about the ever-present cyber threats and to discourage the use of pirated software and illicit app downloads. Proactive measures, such as the implementation of robust threat monitoring solutions and leveraging the expertise of cybersecurity professionals, are vital safeguards that both large and small organizations should adopt to fortify their defenses against the myriad forms of cyber threats lurking in the digital realm.

The post Details of Airbus Cyber Attack and Implications appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up for sale on an English-language cybercrime forum. Meanwhile, the hackers responsible are communicating directly with members through the InfraGard portal online — using a new account under the assumed identity of a financial industry CEO that was vetted by the FBI itself.

On Dec. 10, 2022, the relatively new cybercrime forum Breached featured a bombshell new sales thread: The user database for InfraGard, including names and contact information for tens of thousands of InfraGard members.

The FBI’s InfraGard program is supposed to be a vetted Who’s Who of key people in private sector roles involving both cyber and physical security at companies that manage most of the nation’s critical infrastructures — including drinking water and power utilities, communications and financial services firms, transportation and manufacturing companies, healthcare providers, and nuclear energy firms.

“InfraGard connects critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders with the FBI to provide education, networking, and information-sharing on security threats and risks,” the FBI’s InfraGard fact sheet reads.

KrebsOnSecurity contacted the seller of the InfraGard database, a Breached forum member who uses the handle “USDoD” and whose avatar is the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense.

USDoD’s InfraGard sales thread on Breached.

USDoD said they gained access to the FBI’s InfraGard system by applying for a new account using the name, Social Security Number, date of birth  and other personal details of a chief executive officer at a company that was highly likely to be granted InfraGard membership.

The CEO in question — currently the head of a major U.S. financial corporation that has a direct impact on the creditworthiness of most Americans — did not respond to requests for comment.

USDoD told KrebsOnSecurity their phony application was submitted in November in the CEO’s name, and that the application included a contact email address that they controlled — but also the CEO’s real mobile phone number.

“When you register they said that to be approved can take at least three months,” USDoD said. “I wasn’t expected to be approve[d].”

But USDoD said that in early December, their email address in the name of the CEO received a reply saying the application had been approved (see redacted screenshot to the right). While the FBI’s InfraGard system requires multi-factor authentication by default, users can choose between receiving a one-time code via SMS or email.

“If it was only the phone I will be in [a] bad situation,” USDoD said. “Because I used the person[‘s] phone that I’m impersonating.”

USDoD said the InfraGard user data was made easily available via an Application Programming Interface (API) that is built into several key components of the website that help InfraGard members connect and communicate with each other.

USDoD said after their InfraGard membership was approved, they asked a friend to code a script in Python to query that API and retrieve all available InfraGard user data.

“InfraGard is a social media intelligence hub for high profile persons,” USDoD said. “They even got [a] forum to discuss things.”

KrebsOnSecurity shared with the FBI several screenshots and other data that may help isolate the imposter InfraGard account, but the agency declined to comment for this story.

To prove they still had access to InfraGard as of publication time Tuesday evening, USDoD sent a direct note through InfraGard’s messaging system to an InfraGard member whose personal details were initially published as a teaser on the database sales thread.

That InfraGard member, who is head of security at a major U.S. technology firm, confirmed receipt of USDoD’s message but asked to remain anonymous for this story.

USDoD acknowledged that their $50,000 asking price for the InfraGard database may be a tad high, given that it is a fairly basic list of people who are already very security-conscious. Also, only about half of the user accounts contain an email address, and most of the other database fields — like Social Security Number and Date of Birth — are completely empty.

“I don’t think someone will pay that price, but I have to [price it] a bit higher to [negotiate] the price that I want,” they explained.

While the data exposed by the infiltration at InfraGard may be minimal, the user data might not have been the true end game for the intruders.

USDoD said they were hoping the imposter account would last long enough for them to finish sending direct messages as the CEO to other executives using the InfraGuard messaging portal. USDoD shared the following redacted screenshot from what they claimed was one such message, although they provided no additional context about it.

A screenshot shared by USDoD showing a message thread in the FBI’s InfraGard system.

USDoD said in their sales thread that the guarantor for the transaction would be Pompompurin, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached. By purchasing the database through the forum administrator’s escrow service, would-be buyers can theoretically avoid getting ripped off and ensure the transaction will be consummated to the satisfaction of both parties before money exchanges hands.

Pompompurin has been a thorn in the side of the FBI for years. Their Breached forum is widely considered to be the second incarnation of RaidForums, a remarkably similar English-language cybercrime forum shuttered by the U.S. Department of Justice in April. Prior to its infiltration by the FBI, RaidForums sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches.

In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Pompompurin abused a vulnerability in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities, and how that access was used to blast out thousands of hoax email messages — all sent from an FBI email and Internet address.

This is a developing story. Updates will be noted here with timestamps.