Spies In the Phishing Underground 87
An anonymous reader sends us to Net-Security.org for an interview with security researchers Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios, who recently managed to infiltrate the phishing underground. What started as a simple examination of phishing sites turned into an extraordinary tour through the ecosystem that supports the business of phishing. In the interview they expose the tactics and tools that phishers use, illustrate what happens when your confidential information gets stolen, and discuss how phishers communicate and how they phish each other.
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Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
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Business software engineers have been having a hard time to get reuse to work decently, but ironically
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The underground (and often illegal) enterprises push the envelope of what the technology is capable of (both technically and in terms of what it can do for people), and then the legitimate enterprises follow suit 5 years down the line.
For example: music distribution, film distribution, game downloads, VoIP, online porn; the list goes on and on...
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad it's not that way in government agencies. My impression is that their dominant mindsets are:
I would be surprised and delighted to learn that things are any different at all. Having served in the military, I retain a smug sense of superiority, even though I know that there must be intelligent life in government. It's frustrating to keep finding that we're being taxed and led by selfish, incompetent people.
It's like growing up in a home infested with vermin, where the parents just shrug and say that they can't do anything about it, when it's obvious that they're just spending their money and attention on something else. Their willful ignorance might allow me to get away with whatever I want. The trade-off is finding that my possessions have been gnawed by mice or encountering cockroaches that look at me defiantly when I turn on the light.
As long as they let me alone, I'm OK with it. When they step in and try to suddenly impose discipline, I want to say, "Where were you when I needed you?"
No, the government isn't my parents, but it's been getting closer to the asymptote. Public school has been mandatory since before I was born. Income tax is beyond mandatory. Laws have become more and more restrictive, and we are now being monitored without warrants. That's pretty close to what I remember of my own parents, except that in this case, I own all of the responsibility.
On a national level, it's not as simple as moving out. The analog to running away from home is participation in some underground economy.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
In a sea of phishers law enforcement is likely to catch those who have the least amount of skill simply because its easier for them. The time they spend on those cases is less time they have for people who really know what's going on.
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Any chance you'd post that hosts file? I could use it too.
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It's the journalistic equivalent of "Lost", a whole pile of bullshit spread out so very thinly even the retards can enjoy it.
Weak article (Score:5, Informative)
To summarize:
Six pages? I was hoping for at least the transcript of a chat with a phisher.
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Besides I don't know any security or even system admins here at a fortune 100 that even bother looking at blacklists. Well maybe the email guys do , but no one else I talked wi
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Re:Weak article (Score:5, Insightful)
It begs the question, in dealing with the phishing community, who are we dealing with -- the uneducated, the merely poor, the greedy, the antisocial, or worse? Is the phishing community an outlet for the antisocial/maladjusted/borderline mentally ill? I'd like to pose the following question: assuming that such people always have and always will exist in the world, is the tech community remiss in taking this into account? When we create a piece of hardware or software, do we need to ask the question, "what if someone with an 'LSD in the reservoir' mentality gets his hands on this?" In connecting the world via the Internet, we've also connected ourselves to every flavor of person we would rather avoid in real life. Does there need to be a shift in the way we view our responsibilities as tech authors/creators?
Re:Weak article (Score:5, Insightful)
This is very much like the "security through obscurity" argument. In security it's always assumed that the bad guys know or can learn the algorithms, weaknesses, etc., everything but the key. In the case of technology such as phishing kits, there may be no reason for a legitimate developer to write such a thing, but there's nothing stopping an unethical person from writing one.
Don't get me wrong: training software engineers in ethics is a good thing. Professionals need to understand their responsibilities. But bad people can't be stopped from writing malicious software. The bar for writing software is already too low, and is getting lower by the day.
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Re:Weak article (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you have the ones that want to try it just to see if they can. They're just as harmless. They just get your ID and then don't do anything about it. Except maybe bragging to their friends, which usually turns into them getting caught when one of their friends decides they don't want to be friends anymore.
And finally you have some well organized groups that actually cause the problem. And there you usually get to see the type of people that you expect from such groups. You have the ones that write the code, usually quite smart people who know their shit and who also get quite a bit of money for their work (I was honestly tempted to switch sides...). Imagine an unemployed top notch programmer in an east europe country and the chance to see 4-5 digits per month, and you know what I mean. Then you have the people who can provide the necessary "hardware", i.e. acquire servers and the necessary connections to keep them running for a few weeks. In smaller groups, this is often the same person who does the coding, but even in this shadow business you notice tendencies to 'outsource' work, i.e. buy kits or hire people to do the server shifting. These are usually not the people you will talk to, unless they have reason to contact you (i.e. when they consider you someone who can get them servers or provide code).
Then you have the people who hire the goons to grab the money and run, and fools with bank accounts. These are usually the ones you will talk to when they try to find someone gullible enough to provide their bank account for transfers. And finally you have the goons that go to Western Union to collect the loot. These are the ones you usually catch when you do a sting. They're much like the average street drug dealer, the lowest on the chain and the ones that are easy to replace. Usually some poor guy, homeless or asylum seeker, is hired for a few pennies to risk it.
So, in general, unless they have good reason to talk to you, you won't get to hear from anyone who is up far enough on the ladder to be interesting.
Re:Weak article (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm also afraid that bragging to their friends does not, in fact, usually get them caught. The number of hackers, crackers, phishers, and other people who poke around other's computers seems to consistently be much larger than the number arrested or even caught. Most companies don't bother to pursue such frauds: they just say "is it worth our time and money to track them down? will we get our money back, or will it stop the next round from trying the same stunt", decide it won't, and ignore it as a part of doing business.
Even getting the police involved against the worst crackers and phishers is difficult. Getting police to act across state lines, or worse international borders, is a nightmare of arcane turf wars among governmental security groups who frankly will not bother with small thefts. They can only be convinced to pursue it when the amount exceeds some threshold, which varies from agency to agency and from month to month, but a few thousand stolen from any individual is like losing your wallet on a bus. They just won't bother doing anything about it besides sending you a form letter to fill out, which is promptly ignored.
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For the better organized people, you're right. A server in Manila, phishing for banks in Denmark, with money withdrawn in London, all organized by some gro
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So, what it comes down to, unless you can claim without a shade of doubt that someone was doing something illegal, no agency
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In a sense though, this is a good thing. I'm arguing that complete worldwide social cohesion is required before the world's problems may be solved. If we have isolated (economically, socially) pockets of people who live outside the main body of society (whose members enjoy all the luxuries that the modern world has to offer), they are always going to send raiding parties of o
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It begs the question, in dealing with the phishing community, who are we dealing with -- the uneducated, the merely poor, the greedy, the antisocial, or worse? Is the phishing community an outlet for the antisocial/maladjusted/borderline mentally ill?
Wow, doesn't sound that much different from the fishing community!
Back when Jeff Foxworthy came out, my cousins were listening to one of his routines. One of them goes "Holy shit, I have been too drunk to fish!"
To my cousins' credit, none of their cars are on blocks in the front yard, they have them in sheds in the back of the property and they did a really good job of kitting them out, late 70's muscle cars.
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This one did better than most, I think we got at least ten sentences per page. The entire interview would probably have fit on one printable page. They make the column width for the actual text take up not even 1/2 the width of the page and start you out with a 1/2 page of banner to make you have to scroll by
Tag that mofo (Score:1)
I offer 'adFarming' for starters..
You know what's next, don't you? (Score:3, Funny)
3..
2..
1.
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And the news is...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Should I write a book now or something?
Gaining such information is actually not that hard. Many have done that, but the majority so far had the brains to keep their mouth shut about it. First of all, nobody in that scene likes a loudmouth, it makes your work incredibly hard if you talk too much. And second, the last thing we need is more people trying to get into the "market".
But then, as we've read last week, you probably get a trojaned kit anyway.
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Maybe I should just shut my mouth and even increase the mystique and magic that surrounds the "hackers", flash around my "security expert" tag and walk around like my farts don't stink, but bluntly, I get fed up by people who broadcast news that are none.
You know what would be news? When someone managed to hack into the P2P botnets. That would be stunning, that would be something the whole AV research community would nod their collective head and bow to. This is just a "be
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Obviously there's an audience for this kind of information, and your mom would be so proud to see your name at the top of a Slashdot article.
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What - Sony are selling Phishing Kits now?
PhS3 anyone?
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I think of Bj Franklin and Tesla, without one you wouldn't have gotten the other. Yet had Bj been the same as you, Tesla would never have had the possibility to review his work, and grow from there.
The only thing I thin
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The core problem of today's malware is that it does rarely rely on system shortcomings. Most malware today uses user "stupidity" as the entry point, tricking the user into executing some sort of program which contains the trojan. It's rarely anymore some sort of exploit, first of all because they require more work but also because even Windows slowly closes all those insane security holes.
And when it's down to the personal security consciousness and knowledge of the user, even the best s
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You mean I've been wasting all my time patching up buffer overflows, polishing up my input parsing routines, and all this other stuff for NOTHING?. If there are no system shortcomings, there's nothing to exploit.
Yes, it does ...... but if there are no (or
Nothing new (Score:2)
Besides the obvious hacker/cracker naming issue, the fact is that today's "hacking" community bears little resemblance to the real hacker heroes of the past. The hacking/cracking issue has been hashed out enough around here, so i'll leave that issue alone.
Of the people that call themselves hackers in the mod
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So hackers is it. Hey, sure I wanted to be one when I was 15. I just had no internet and thus no way to download some sor
The text (site has it spread of six damn pages) (Score:4, Informative)
They saw an extraordinary amount of sensitive customer account information, obtained the latest phishing kits, located and examined the tools used by phishers, trolled sites buying and selling identities, and even social engineered a few scammers.
In this interview, they expose the tactics and tools that phishers use, illustrate what happens when your confidential information gets stolen, discuss how phishers communicate and even how they phish each other.
What are phishing kits and how are they distributed?
Dhanjani: A phishing kit is the most important tool in a phisher's arsenal. Think of a popular company that executes financial transactions on the web. All the source code and static content such as images and logos needed to setup a phishing site for the company you just thought of is most likely to be present in a phishing kit. Let us suppose you get hold of such a kit and you want to deploy a phishing site. All you would have to do is the following: 1) Unzip the kit 2) Pick the directory corresponding the company you want to target 3) Edit a single file in the directory to input the email address you want the results emailed to 4) Deploy the directory onto a compromised host on the internet, and voila! - you have yourself a phishing site. If you take a look at the client side code (HTML and JavaScript) presented to your browser on a phishing site that targets a particular company, you will notice that other phishing sites that target the same company have similar characteristics. This is because, more often than not, the sites are deployed using popular phishing kits. The code within the kits is quite simple, mostly consisting of a web form that does the dirty work, along with image files and static content. The kits are often distributed amongst the phisher communities on message boards, and at times sold or traded for money or identities.
Rios: Phishing kits are the tip of the iceberg, they are the piece of the phishing eco system that everyone sees and knows about. The typical phishing kit consists of the HTML that makes up the forged site that the user sees and the backend logic that used to steal the victims information. Most phishing kits are probably created by a small number of individuals and typically sold on phishing forums. Although the various kits have different front ends and HTML content, the back end logic is surprisingly similar for most of the kits we've seen. These kits are used over and over again and most of the phishing sites you've seen are probably a variant of small set of phishing kits. Many think that phishing sites are all custom jobs that a particular phisher has developed and deployed. The reality is pre-made, ready-to-deploy, turnkey sites are already created for practically every major organization that you can think of. All a phisher has to do is purchase the latest kit and deploy, no technical expertise or coding skills are really required. All the phisher typically has to do is place their email address into one line of code and they have a ready to deploy phishing site.
Many have become victims of phishing and we see the attackers using new methods all the time. In your opinion, what is their skill level? Who are we dealing with?
Dhanjani: This is an important question, and I'm glad you asked it. When we think of phishers, we often guess that they are a group of highly skilled ninja hackers. They have collectively caused billions of dollars in losses, and ruined the lives of many citizens whose identities they have stolen and abused. These people have got to be pretty smart, right? Wrong. Just think about what a typical phisher is really doing: installing
Not Underground (Score:4, Insightful)
The implication in the title is that these "security experts" actually got in with one of the rings. As a matter of fact, they simply downloaded a phishing kit and signed up for a forum. They didn't talk to anyone who wrote one (not that much skill is required in that). They didn't gain access to any dark-nets. They didn't gain access to secure IRC channels. In short, they're just a couple of guys. Their agenda seems clear to me: push the IE anti-phishing UI. They make reference to it (though not by name) twice in TFA:
They also talk about the need for a system that works without static identifiers like credit card and social security numbers, though they don't postulate any such system. They claim that writing secure code is secondary to this as-yet unknown system that doesn't use personally identifiable information to identify you. My thoughts: until we figure out how to identify you without using identifiers, maybe we should concentrate on the secure code angle for a while.
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Static security. Your pin number, id, password, bank bar code, address, birthday, employer, maiden name, SSN, drivers license number. Anything static does not get changed often enough, and people "courts" stupidly trust them as unique ID's. Which is why it is so hard for individuals to clean up after id theft.
Non static,
- key sequence generators which use your initial pin to generate a new pin every few hours/mins/seconds
- challenge protocols, which ask an question and require an appropriate answer
- broadca
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So if you learn the original PIN, you can calculate the current PIN at any later point in time. Besides, how do you actually use this to identify anyone, short of telling the other party your original PIN ?
How does the other party know that the answer is correct ? Or are you talking about public-key cryptographic authenticat
All it took (Score:1)
Idea (Score:1)
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I haven't tried entering real info, so I don't know if the site simply bounces everything, or if it really logs into the real site to verify username/password.
This is asinine (Score:2)
The genius here [thebadboys.org], going by the name "Brain", provides first class phishing sites with a catch - he has encrypted his email address and integrated it into the pages he's written. When Script Kiddies like the one
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Y
Real Security Threat: You (Score:2)
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Now, I know a lot of people will claim th
Where's the FBI? (Score:2)
Of course, the banks are supposed to defend their trademarks from anyone, including phishers, who uses them to pretend to be the bank. But they're not bothering.
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As for banks, they are interested in money only. If it costs more to
What? (Score:2, Funny)
So the phishers are trying to phish the phishers who are phishing for... what? (That's some quality writing, right there.)
Seriously, the article seems like something you'd see featured on the evening news as a scare tactic.
Reporter: Is your identity safe? It could be at risk and you don't even know it. Top researchers say there are hacker communities out there that will likely only continue to grow! Are you stupid enough to stay tuned until the end of our worthless program and find out?
Wait... Is t
Simple partial solution: (Score:4, Interesting)
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Anything that relies on the end user doing or not doing something is bound to fail. You're dealing with idiots that can't prevent themselves in clicking on anything. For instance click here to see Britney Spears nude.
As a test send an email with the subject: clicking on this attachment will steal your bank details and render your computer unusable
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Can you repost that? Your link didn't work.
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I have the solution to phishing (Score:3)
net banking that requires sms verification of transfers.
public, televised floggings for anyone convicted of fraud or petty theft.
only the banks can make these happen (including option 3 as well i might add, polical lobbying ftw). hell i know i'd tune into watch some scammers take a beating.
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Sure, allow the rich fuckers to get away with it, white collar criminals, corporate executives etc.
But as soon as a poor kid steals a chocolate bar, public floggings!
Because, remember, we live in a society where there is only one law, but it is written to punish, not the rich, but only the poor. Any law isn't going to punish anyone who steals millions of dollars, only those who steal hundreds or less.
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Not everyone has cellphones.
Phishers infiltrated? (Score:1)
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Big deal, I did this too (Score:3, Funny)
Fill their inbox with crap (Score:2)
Only thing to worry about would be getting DDOS'ed by a less clueless phisher.
I am _not_ reading that article... (Score:2)
Why not flood the phishing sites with bogus data (Score:2)
the real story .. (Score:2)
The real story is who built such an 'ecosystem' that makes phishing such a sucessfull enterprise and what imdemnification does the maker of such systems offer the end user."
"They have collectively caused billions of dollars in losses, and ruined the lives of many citizens whose identities they ha
how do they register domain names? (Score:1)
Report Phishing (Score:1)