Categories
Scams Spam

Latest spear phishing: your password plus extortion

Intro
Three users that I know at a certain company have all received spear phishing emails worded very much like this one:

Spear Phishing shows you your password and extorts you

The details
I don’t really have many more details. One user described it to me as follows. He got this email at work. It displayed to him a password which he uses for some of his personal accounts and maybe for a few work-related logins. He said the wording was very similar to the one I showed in the above screenshot.

This one comes from IP 40.92.6.45, which is a legitimate Microsoft-owned IP. So it has an air of legitimacy to traditoinal spam filters.

I htikn all the users are reluctant to pursue the normal methods o reporting phishing, which involve sending the entire email to some unknown group of analysts because the email does in fatc contain a legitimate password of theirs. This makes it that much harder for an incident repsonse team to kick into gear and start a detailed analysis.

I mentioned three users – those are just the ones brought to my attention, and I’m not even in the business any more. So by extrapolation, this has probably occurred to many more users at just this one company. It’s disturbing…

November update
Another one came in to a different user. I have the text of this one and have only changed the recipient information.

From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2018 11:55 AM
To: Dr J <[email protected]>
Subject: [email protected] has been hacked! Change your password immediately!
 
Hello!
 
I have very bad news for you.                                                                                                                                 03/08/2018 - on this day I hacked your OS and got full access to your account [email protected] On this day your account [email protected] has password: drj1234
 
So, you can change the password, yes.. But my malware intercepts it every time.
 
How I made it:
In the software of the router, through which you went online, was a vulnerability.
I just hacked this router and placed my malicious code on it.
When you went online, my trojan was installed on the OS of your device.
 
After that, I made a full dump of your disk (I have all your address book, history of viewing sites, all files, phone numbers and addresses of all your contacts).
 
A month ago, I wanted to lock your device and ask for a not big amount of btc to unlock.
But I looked at the sites that you regularly visit, and I was shocked by what I saw!!!
I'm talk you about sites for adults.
 
I want to say - you are a BIG pervert. Your fantasy is shifted far away from the normal course!
 
And I got an idea....
I made a screenshot of the adult sites where you have fun (do you understand what it is about, huh?).
After that, I made a screenshot of your joys (using the camera of your device) and glued them together.
Turned out amazing! You are so spectacular!
 
I'm know that you would not like to show these screenshots to your friends, relatives or colleagues.
I think $709 is a very, very small amount for my silence.
Besides, I have been spying on you for so long, having spent a lot of time!
 
Pay ONLY in Bitcoins!
My BTC wallet: 1FgfdebSqbXRciP2DXKJyqPSffX3Sx57RF
 
You do not know how to use bitcoins?
Enter a query in any search engine: "how to replenish btc wallet".
It's extremely easy
 
For this payment I give you two days (48 hours).
As soon as this letter is opened, the timer will work.
 
After payment, my virus and dirty screenshots with your enjoys will be self-destruct automatically.
If I do not receive from you the specified amount, then your device will be locked, and all your contacts will receive a screenshots with your "enjoys".
 
I hope you understand your situation.
- Do not try to find and destroy my virus! (All your data, files and screenshots is already uploaded to a remote server)
- Do not try to contact me (you yourself will see that this is impossible, the sender address is automatically generated)
- Various security services will not help you; formatting a disk or destroying a device will not help, since your data is already on a remote server.
 
P.S. You are not my single victim. so, I guarantee you that I will not disturb you again after payment!
 This is the word of honor hacker
 
I also ask you to regularly update your antiviruses in the future. This way you will no longer fall into a similar situation.
 
Do not hold evil! I just do my job.
Good luck.

Conclusion
A new disturbing type of spear phishing campaign is presented. The email presents an actual password (no hint as to how the hacker obtained it) and then tries to extort the user for quite a bit of money to avoid reputation-damaging disclosures to their close associates.

References and related
This is a useful site, albeit a little frightening, that shows you the many sites that have leaked your Email address due to a data breach: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Categories
Admin Internet Mail Scams

The latest trend – Google search engine spam

Intro
I’ve been seeing an uptick in brief spams which provide links to a very legitimate site: the Google search engine!

The details
I’ve been getting a lot – several per day – that look like this one:

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Legal drugs forum
 
Legalize!!! Read about strongest legal drugs in the world, and buy it online: https://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2F%77%77%77.le%67a%6C%69z%65r%2EDRJinfo%2F&sa=D&usg=AFQjCNG0coaOvXJMkOn0nEMvP-dl11XKnQ
 
Attention: MDMB(N)-BZ-F is not allowed now!

Here’s another example which appears to be a different spam campaign using the same technique which I received several weeks after initially posting this article:

From: [email protected]
Subject: Turn your bedroom into paradise of satisfaction
 
https://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2F%73lip.h%65al%69DRJn%67%73%65%63%75re%65%73hop.%65%75%2F&sa=D&usg=AFQjCNFeP_XevUiXV-m-DtxAJVi3SMRtVQ

I’ve changed the links slightly so no one gets in trouble by actually following it.

The link is changed each time and so is the sender.

How to report this?
I have been reporting these to Google directly on their page to Report malicious software, https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/.

I have reported five to then of these and have never received a response from Google. It seems the best we can hope for is that Google engineers are sufficiently annoyed by my reports that they begin to agree hey there’s a problem here and maybe people will think less of us if we continue to do nothing.

Why this is particularly devastating
Because the malware link uses this combination:

– https (which encrypts everything)
– a very legitimate web site, www.google.com
– malware

It is very tricky to defeat. Many URL filters, e.g., those used on explicit proxies, cannot peer into https traffic and so have to make a single judgment for a whole site, even one as complicated as www.google.com. Either it is all good, or it is all bad. Who would have the courage to categorize Google as a source of malware and hence block all users from it?

So these perpetrators have engaged in what amounts to link laundering. Some of the URI is encoded in hex, I suppose to help avoid detection and create many valid patterns that are hard for Google to stamp out.

This started over a month ago and is stronger than ever today, so we know at press time Google, in spite of all its advanced technology, does not have a handle on it.

If you see something similar I suggest to report it directly to Google. They may need a little more motivation than I can single-handedly provide them.

Conclusion
Link laundering is now an avenue to sneak spam through. It uses links that point to the Google search engine itself. It seems to have eluded them or been under their radar in spite of many reports. Let’s hope the bad guys don’t have the upper hand permanently.

Appendix
If you are interested in how the URL looks decoded I figured there would be decoders available on the Internet and indeed there are. For instance at http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/

So the URL mentioned above decodes as (again just slightly obfuscated to not make good people do bad things by mistake:

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.legalizerDRJ.info/&sa=D&usg=AFQjCNG0coaOvXJMkOn0nEMvP-dl11XKnQ

References
enom-originated spam is discussed here.

Categories
DNS Scams

What if someone approaches you offering a domain?

Intro
As a domain owner you will sooner or later get an unsolicited email like the following one I received March 28th:

Hello,
 
We are promoting the sale of the domain name johnstechtalk.com that is being returned back to the open market very soon.
You own a very similar domain and we wanted to give you a first chance to secure johnstechtalk.com. If this offer is of any 
interest to you, the link below will lead you to our website where you can leave an early offer:
 
http://baselane.net/acquire/c00bsn1ub/J8jIGPiguH
 
Alternatively you can simply reply to this e-mail with your offer and we will manually process your order.
 
Here are a few quick notes about the offer:
-You are leaving an offer for full ownership and control over the domain. 
-You do not have to use our hosting or any other service, you are bidding only for the domain.
-This is a single transaction, no hidden surprises. 
-We will not give away your personal information to anybody.
-You will not need a new website or hosting you can easily redirect your existing website to point to this one.
-Our technical team stands at your disposal for any transfer/redirect issue you may have.
 
Thank you for considering our domain name service!
Please feel free to call us any time we would be really happy to hear from you!
 
Kind regards,
Domain Team

The thing is, this is not complete spam. After all, it is kind of interesting to pick up a shorter domain.

But is this a legitimate business proposition? What can we do to check it? Read on…

The details
The first reaction is “forget it.” Then you think about it and think, hmm, it might be nice to have that domain, too. It’s shorter than my current one and yet very similar, thus potentially enhancing my “brand.”

To check it out without tipping your hat use Whois. I use Network Solutions Whois.

Doesn’t the offer above make it sound like they have control over the domain and are offering you a piece of it? Quite often that’s not at all the case. For them to control the domain to the point where they are selling it would require an upfront investment. So instead what they do in many cases I have encountered is to try to prey on your ignorance.

When I received their offer the Whois lookup showed the domain to be in status

RedemptionPeriod

Form what I have read the redemption period should last 75 days. Its a time when the original owner can reclaim the domain without any penalties. No one else can register it.

If they actually owned the domain and were trying to auction it off, it would have had the standard Lock Status of

clientTransferProhibited

or

clientDeleteProhibited

Furthermore, domains being auctioned usually have special nameservers like these:

Nameservers:
  ns2.sedoparking.com
  ns1.sedoparking.com

Sedo is a legitimate auction site for domains.

johnstechtalk.com, having entered the redemption period, will become up for grabs unless the owner reclaims it.

If I had expressed interest in it I’m sure they would have obtained it, just like I could for myself, at the end of the redemption period and then sold it to me at a highly inflated price.

Not wanting to encourage such unsavory behaviour I made no reply to the offer and checked the status almost every day.

New status – it’s looking good

Last week sometime it entered a new status:

pendingDelete

I think this status persists for three days or so (I forget). Then, when that period is over it shows up as available. I bought it using my GoDaddy account for $9.99 last night – actually $11.00 because there’s an ICANN fee of $0.18 and I rounded up for charity.

And this is not the only domain I have bought this way. I bought vmanswer.com because I was annoyed by the number of unsolicited offers to “buy” it! That purpose was achieved…

But I am watching another domain that was offered to me and really did go to the auction house Sedo, where it is currently sitting (which means no one else is all that interested). I am curious to see what happens when it expires later this year.

Save the labor
How could I have avoided the trouble of those daily whois lookups? Well, on my Linux server there is the ever-handy whois, as in

$ whois johnstechtalk.com

But sometimes it gives fairly complete information and for other domains not so much. It depends on the registrar. For GoDaddy domains you get next to no information:

[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.godaddy.com]
[Querying whois.godaddy.com]
[whois.godaddy.com]

I suspect it is a measure GoDaddy takes to avoid programmatic use of WhoIs. Because if it answered with complete information it would be easy for a modest scripter like me to write a program that runs all kinds of queries, which of course would mostly be used by the scammers I suppose. In particular since I wasn’t seeing the domain Lock Status from command-line whois I didn’t bother to write an program to automate my daily query. Otherwise I probably would have.

What about cybersquatters?
In the case mentioned above there is no trademark at stake. Often there is. what should you do if you receive an offer to sell you a domain name which is based on one of your own trademarks? I get lots of those as well. My approach is, of course, to not be extorted. So at first I was ignoring such solicitations. If I want to really go after the domain, I will sic my legal team on them and invoke UDRP (ICANN’s Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Policy). UDRP comes down heavily in favor of the trademark holder.

But lately I wanted to do something more. Since this is illicit activity at the end of the day, I look at where the email comes from. Often a Gmail account is used. I gather the headers of the message and file a formal complaint with Google’s Gmail abuse form, which I hope leads to their account being shut down. I want to at least inconvenience them without wasting too much of my own resources. Well, I don’t actually know that it works, but it makes me feel better in any case 🙂 .

This is the Gmail abuse page. Yahoo and MSN also have similar forms.

Conclusion
Unsolicited, sound-similar domains is one of the many scams rampant on the Internet. But with the background I’ve provided hopefully you’ll be better at separating the scams from the genuine domain owners seeking to do business through auctions or private sales.

Interested in reading about other scams? Try Spam and Scams – What to Expect When You Start a Blog

Categories
Scams

Spam and Scams – What to Expect When You Start a Blog

In my case – not much! It appears that despite providing top-notch content the only “readers” are those trying to profit from me. To use the word “scam” may be a bit strong, but any outfit that demands money upfront to supposedly help you make money is highly suspect in my playbook.

So I’ve heard from Tina. It goes like this:
Admin – I’ve checked out http://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2011/06/grep-is-slow-as-a-snail-in-sles-11/ and I really like your writing style like in your post Grep is Slow as a Snail in SLES 11 | Dr John’s Tech Talk. I am looking for blog authors who would like to write articles as either a full time job or part time job (for some extra money). I think your writing style would work very well. You receive pay per article, anywhere from $5 to $50 per article depending on the topic, article length, etc… If interested you can find more information at www.onlinehomewriter.net.

Please do me a favor and do not follow that link. It redirects you secure.signup-way.com, some strange-looking URL that McAfee categorizes as Malicious Sites, High Risk. So I don’t think I’ll be going there.

Then there’s Tony:
Blog Admin – If your blog isn’t bringing in as much money as you would like it to check out my site www.QuickCashBlogging.com. We show blog owners how to maximize their blogs earnings potential. Tony

McAfee verdict: Spam site, medium risk. That’s just great.

The McAfee URL checker I use is http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url.

Clearly these people have program trolling the Internet for new domains and new blogs, trying to squeeze some $$ from them. Unfortunately I’m not sure any person who could benefit from the information has read my blogs. So I feel I am making negative progress – instead of elevating the level of discourse on the Internet helping it to be used for more spam and scams.

I just feel bad for humanity. Is this the best we can do? A well-meaning person embarks on a quixotic journey to provide better technical information on some topics, and the average response from my fellow human beings is to try to take advantage of a hopefully vulnerable and naive newbie? I am literally concerned for us as a race.

August 16th Update
The spam and scam started as a trickle. Now it’s raining spam in my inbox. I continue to be disappointed. In email the ratio of spam to “ham” may be about five to one, so not knowing any better you could expect a similar ratio with WordPress blogs. Not so! Of my fifty comments, not counting the ones from myself, the legit comments number about two-and-half, more like a twenty to one ratio. I will probably use a WordPress plugin to cut them off, but since I started on this public service mission, here are some more scams.

This one is spam as it was posted to my Sample page:
HTC is a well known name in the smartphone segment. The company has come up with smartphones boasting of exquisite features and HTC EVO 4G is one of the most potent… It came from an address ending in @mail.ru . One of many hats is as spam fighter. Let me tell you you see an a sender address mail.ru and you’re talking pure spam. The IP resolves to Latvia, however, and that fact hardly inspires confidence either.

To my post WordPress, Apache2, Permalinks and mod_rewrite under Ubuntu I got a comment The Best Way To Fix Acid Reflux. Now that’s a closely related topic!

Another one claims to help if I’m looking for information about babies (very relevant for a tech blog. yeah, right!).

Very many fall into the generic flattery category. Like this one:
Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is a very well written article. I will be sure to bookmark it and come back to read more of your useful information. Thanks for the post. I’ll definitely return.

Or this:
I agree with your Gnu Parallel Really Helps With Zcat | Dr John's Tech Talk, great post.

I had to investigate those a little bit as I almost fell for one the first time. Then you realize that it’s so generic – except for the one where he obviously just pasted in the title of my post programatically – that it could be used for any blog post.

An equally popular scam are the SEO scams – Search Engine Optimization. I think the point of those scams is to shake a little money from you for supposed help to improve your blog’s ranking in the search engines.

Returning to the flattery scams, how do I know for sure this isn’t real, genuine flattery of my wonderful posts? I’ll tell you. There are a couple unambiguous clues and another strong hint.

Let’s start with the strong hint. Since I haven’t told anyone about my blog, pretty much the only way someone’s going to find it who has legitimate interest in its content is through Google or another search engine. So, in the web server access log, where I am recording the HTTP_REFERER (what URL the browser visited just before hitting my blog post), I should expect to see one of the search engines. I should not see some random web site mentioned because there is simply no good reason for browser controlled by a human being to go from someone else’s web site directly to my web site. And yet that is precisely what I am seeing. I would give examples but it would only serve to promote their web sites, so i will refrain from even an example.

But even more damning is to examine how long the poster has spent on my site. A human being has to read the post, contemplate its meaning, then type in a comment to finally post, right? It could rarely be done in under a minute. WordPress tells me the IP of the poster of the comment. I take that IP and search for it in the access log using grep. I am seeing that these comments are being made in one second after the web page was first downloaded. One second. It is not humanly possible. But for a program, piece of cake.

Here’s a real example (some of this may be cut off, depending on your browser):

109.169.61.16 - - [12/Aug/2011:06:31:51 -0400] "GET /blog/2011/06/gnu-parallel-really-helps-with-zcat/ HTTP/1.0" 200 22757 "http://blahblah.net/invest/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)"
109.169.61.16 - - [12/Aug/2011:06:31:51 -0400] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.0" 301 340 "http://blahblah.net/invest/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.221.7 Safari/532.2"
109.169.61.16 - - [12/Aug/2011:06:31:51 -0400] "POST /blog/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.0" 302 902 "http://drjohnstechtalk.com" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)"
109.169.61.16 - - [12/Aug/2011:06:31:52 -0400] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.0" 200 110806 "http://blahblah.net/invest/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.221.7 Safari/532.2"

Also this example illustrates the other damning evidence of lack of human involvement in the comment. A real browser run by a real human being has to pull in a lot of objects to display a single WordPress page. You’ve got stylesheets, external javascript pages and even the image at the top. They should all be requested, and be recorded in the access log. But a programmatically controlled browser needs far less! It needs the HTML of the blog page, and then the page it POSTS the comment to. Perhaps a third page after the POST to show it the POST was successful or not. And that’s exactly what I’ve seen in all the spam/scam comments I’ve checked out by hand, not just the flattery scams. They are all using the absolute minimum page accesses and that simply screams non-human access! I am, unfortunately, not really so special as they would have me believe! And the SEO scams are just annoying advertising. Most of the rest is what I’d call link laundering, where they’re using the legitimacy of my site to try to get links to their shady sites included, by trickery, carelessness or any means. And some are just using it as pure spam to my inbox since that’s where the comments go for review and they don’t even care if I approve their spam for public viewing or not.

Possible Explanation
My hypothesis is that there are specially constructed advanced searches in Google you can do to find new WordPress blogs. You can download the results and programatically loop through them and attempt to post your spam and scams. It’s pretty easy to program a browser like curl using PERL to post to a WordPress blog. Even I could do it! And that low barrier to entry jibes with the level of professionalism I perceive in these scams, which is to say, pretty low, like something I would cook up by my lonesome! Misspellings, poor English, blatant calls-to-action are par for the course, as well as source IPs from remote regions of the world that have no possible interest in my arcane technical postings.

Now you could argue that a real browser could have cached some of those objects and so upon a return visit it might only access a minimum set of objects and hence look a bit like a program. To that I say that it is rarely the case that all objects get cached. And even if they did, you still have to take time to type in your comment, right? No one can do that in a second. The access lines above span the time from 6:31:51 to 6:31:52!!

The Final solution
I think I’ve made my point about the spam. I have followed Ryan’s advice and activated a plugin called Akismet. Their site looks fairly professional – like they know what they are doing. An API key is required to activate the plugin, but that is available for free for personal blogs. I’ll append to this blog whether or not it works!

Feb 28th update
600 spam comments later, 20 in the last few hours alone, I am sooo tired of rotten apples abusing the leave a comment feature, even though I am protected from approving the comments, it is still filling up my database. So I have taken an additional step today and implemented a Captcha plugin. This supposedly requires some human intelligence to answer a simple math problem before the post is allowed. I’ll post here about how well it is or isn’t working.

September update
Well, the captcha plugin has stopped virtually all spam, except one random comment. A user wishing to post a comment has to solve a very simple math/language problem. I recommend this approach. I suppose eventually the scammers will catch up with this defense, but in the meantime I am now enjoying peace and tranquility in my seldom-visited but formerly frequently spammed blog!