Getting hacked is like having your computer turn traitor on you, spying on everything you do and shipping your secrets to identity thieves.
Victims don’t see where their stolen data end up. But sometimes security researchers do, stumbling across stolen-data troves that offer a glimpse of what identity theft looks like from criminals’ perspective.
Researchers from UK-based security firm Prevx found one such trove, a Web site used as a stash house for data from 160,000 infected computers before it was shut down this month.
The find offers a case study on just how much data criminals are stealing every day, from the utterly inconsequential to the alarmingly private.
It also shows the difficulty in shuttering criminals’ ID-theft beachheads: The Web site Prevx found, which was operating on a server in Ukraine, was still online for nearly a month after security researchers alerted the Internet service provider and law-enforcement authorities. The site was sucking up data from 5,000 newly infected computers each day.
The victims in the Prevx find are mostly everyday people handing over their passwords for Facebook and banking sites, along with their love notes and other e-mails. But more dangerous personal information is there, too, including Social Security numbers and other account information from one bank’s infected computer.
Caches of stolen data like these are hidden throughout the Internet, usually locked away inside password-protected Web sites or heavily fortified servers. Prevx’s researchers were able to infiltrate this site because it was protected with poor encryption.
In that sense, the find illustrates how even sloppy crooks can vacuum up enormous amounts of information through massive “botnets” — armies of infected computers formed by spreading a computer virus that orders compromised machines to phone home for further instructions, such as sending out spam or relaying passwords.
The botnet Prevx found was only harvesting data, though Prevx said it could have been upgraded to do other things.
Ordinary Internet sessions are logged in great detail. One 22-year-old southern Californian could be seen registering a domain name with GoDaddy.com, changing his Yahoo e-mail password and ordering a meal online from Pizza Hut. His credit card number, birth date, telephone number, address and passwords are now all in criminal hands, though it’s unclear what, if anything, criminals have done with the information yet.
Some victims are gold mines for sensitive data. An infected computer at a Georgia bank exposed customer details and credentials for the bank’s wire-transfer system. Bank employees were checking e-mail, looking up BMWs and Infinitis and working with customers’ accounts on the same infected machine.
Government computers were also hit, including one in Texas that coughed up Web site logins for one of the government’s health care providers, and another in North Carolina that revealed access to an agency’s human resources system.
“This is giving criminals the keys to the castle,” said Jacques Erasmus, Prevx’s director of malware research. “Once they’re into this system, it might not seem at this point like it’s the biggest data heist ever, but this is how they get into a network. This is their game — they do this every day.”
In other words, criminals start small, then use their first point of attack as a way to jump onto more sensitive computers.
Researchers who discover these stolen-data caches then have to figure out what to do with them. Notifying victims is time-consuming and difficult, and researchers tend to focus on trying to get service providers to deactivate the servers before criminals get to the data on them.
Prevx said it alerted the site’s Internet provider, the FBI and UK authorities about the breach it discovered. The company also talked to the affected bank, Doraville, Georgia-based Metro City Bank, a community bank whose Web site lists four locations, and Prevx said the bank has removed the infected computer.
One customer — Yoon-Kee Hong, a 22-year-old college student from Suwanee, Georgia — had signed up for an account with Metro City Bank just a month before learning about the breach. He said he had not been alerted by the bank that his Social Security number and other personal details were stolen.
After being told about the breach by The Associated Press, which picked his name from the files provided by Prevx, the student said he planned to cancel his account.
“I cannot trust them any more,” he said. “They’re not doing what they’re supposed to do. They didn’t even notify me. It’s like they’re trying to hide it from their customers.”
He later relented and decided to stay with the bank after he was offered a new account and promises of fraud alerts.
The bank said in a statement that it was notifying customers and investigating the breach, refusing to comment further. State officials in North Carolina and Texas didn’t return calls on the breaches there. The FBI didn’t return a call about the breaches.
Such finds are becoming more common as the barrier lowers for crooks to jump into the online identity theft racket.
Top-of-the-line viruses, also known as Trojans, can be had for under US$1,000.
Joe Stewart, a SecureWorks Inc. botnet expert who was not involved in Prevx’s research, said that last year, he helped shut down a command-and-control server for a huge botnet that had infected more than 378,000 machines and had stolen more than 460,000 usernames and passwords.
There are countless other smaller botnets, set up by less sophisticated criminals who steal as much data as they can and simply pull up stakes, and do it all over again, once their operation has been detected.
“The level of amateurness speaks to how widespread it is,” Stewart said. “Literally anybody with a little bit of computer knowledge at all, if they have the criminal bent, can get access to one of these Trojans and get it out there and start stealing people’s data.”
In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. “If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860. The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China
China has successfully held its Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, with 53 of 55 countries from the African Union (AU) participating. The two countries that did not participate were Eswatini and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which have no diplomatic relations with China. Twenty-four leaders were reported to have participated. Despite African countries complaining about summit fatigue, with recent summits held with Russia, Italy, South Korea, the US and Indonesia, as well as Japan next month, they still turned up in large numbers in Beijing. China’s ability to attract most of the African leaders to a summit demonstrates that it is still being
Trips to the Kenting Peninsula in Pingtung County have dredged up a lot of public debate and furor, with many complaints about how expensive and unreasonable lodging is. Some people even call it a tourist “butchering ground.” Many local business owners stake claims to beach areas by setting up parasols and driving away people who do not rent them. The managing authority for the area — Kenting National Park — has long ignored the issue. Ultimately, this has affected the willingness of domestic travelers to go there, causing tourist numbers to plummet. In 2008, Taiwan opened the door to Chinese tourists and in
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Thursday was handcuffed and escorted by police to the Taipei Detention Center, after the Taipei District Court ordered that he be detained and held incommunicado for suspected corruption during his tenure as Taipei mayor. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the same court on Monday last week that ordered Ko’s release without bail. That decision was appealed by prosecutors on Wednesday, leading the High Court to conclude that Ko had been “actively involved” in the alleged corruption and it ordered the district court to hold a second detention hearing. Video clips
RSS