Analyst Calls Russian Teen Author of Target Malware 107
Nerval's Lobster writes "A digital-activity data analytics firm called IntelCrawler, Inc. claims to have identified the author of the BlackPOS malware used in attacks against Target and Neiman Marcus, and spotted similar attacks that are still in progress against six other retailers. Andrey Komarov, CEO of the Los Angeles-based IntelCrawler, told Reuters Jan. 17 that his company had spotted the six ongoing attacks while analyzing Web traffic in search of the specific entry points and origin of the malware infection behind the Target data breach, which allowed hackers to steak magnetic card-strip data on 40 million debit- and credit cards and demographic data on 70 million additional customers. According to Komarov, BlackPOS was developed by a 17-year-old Russian who goes by the username Ree4 and lives in St. Petersburg. Ree4 probably did not participate in the attack on Target, but did sell the malware to the actual attackers, according to Komarov, who refused to identify the source of his information other than to say he had been monitoring forums on which he said Ree4 sells malware. In a series of chat clips Komarov said are exchanges between buyer and seller, Ree4 tells a potential customer that the price for the software is US$2,000 and that the malware grabs credit-card numbers from system memory as they're scanned, dumps them into a file called time.txt that is sent back to the controller. Ree4 also said the app works only on standalone point-of-sale terminals with a separate monitor that also runs Windows, but not on Verifone systems, which can be attached to PCs but secure credit-card data before it can be scraped by BlackPOS."
Rumour has Walmart also (Score:2)
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That's not the point. The point is...Russia exudes apathy towards cybercrimes in the form of lax internal laws, which forces the rest of the civilized world to pay (literarily).
So? That may well be of value to Russia. What's in it for them? It is a form of economic warfare - Russia right now can't compete with the US / China / Europe on a number of levels. They may see this sort of thing as a tactical advantage.
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Similar to how the English Crown supported piracy against the Spanish in the 17th and 18th centuries?
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Alas, it is Alas, it is a sirens trap. At the end of the USSR their engineers were great at reverse engineering technology but not so good at inviting stuff.
Today why build something good, solid, legitimate that can take on the west? Because of the kleptocracy of the state. I mean yes, it is a form of economic warfare, and it may win battles but it is destine to lose the war.
Re:Russia needs to pass better laws (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't throw too many stones. In the U.S. you can go to jail for plugging your EV in to the wall for 20 minutes but crash the global economy and we'll write you a bonus check.
Every theft perpetrated by every malware writer behind the former iron curtain put together is peanuts compared to the Wall Street bandits.
Values vs cash (Score:2)
Teenagers (Score:5, Insightful)
I love teenagers. Only they would ask $2,000 to sell software that, if he got caught, would net him decades in prison. He may be a good programmer, but he's an idiot businessman -- risk versus reward.
russan prison and then what? (Score:2)
Russian prison and then what? unlike to be able to work in the usa
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Teenagers (Score:5, Funny)
That's so evolution can weed out all the really stupid ones before they get to procreate.
It doesn't seem to be working these days...
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Except that until fairly recently procreation tended to happen in the early to mid teens, pretty much as soon as girls became fertile. The period of maximum risk taking stupidity coincides with the child's early life, which I suppose might have the same effect in that the offspring of stupid people would have died with them.
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He's a teen!!! The brain of a teen has been demonstrated time and time again to have an underdeveloped sense of risk.
Which begs the question... how is he hiding all that money from his parents? Surely they must know something is up. They should join him in jail... for a much longer time.
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There is a difference in having a adventurous youth, making a poor judgment on occasion, and a deliberate plan that too months to execute.
On one had we have things like the “ILOVEYOU” virus – that I am somewhat lenient on and would fall into what you are suggesting. This Russian teen seemed to have a more thought out plan.
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why would that net him decades in prison? He's guilty of writing a virus program, not stealing 60 million credit cards.
Like if I sold a gun to Guido, and later Guido murders 5 people with it, am I going to prison for life? No, I am just going to get charged with selling a gun to a felon.
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Re: Teenagers (Score:1)
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And then birds, cows, and a slug maybe.
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Bad analogy. His programs are designed to be used maliciously. Guns aren't.
who would make such a choice? (Score:1, Interesting)
Windows "security" has been well know to be a joke since the very beginning. Why would any sane person run it on POS systems or other important infrastructure, and then proceed to tie those systems to the open internet? Unix would only have been a little better, if it was used in the same way.
That seems ....... insane. Sure, the hackers are responsible for hacking in, but if you leave the door of your house wide open with a sign in the front yard saying, "I have an expensive TV!", maybe you also bear som
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It wasn't a shill post, it got modded down by Microsoft shills, who have been known to mod any post critical of Microsoft down on here.
The post itself made the point that Linux wouldn't have been much better.
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Who is better: IntelCrawler or NSA? (Score:1)
IntelCrawler uncovers six active attacks on U.S. merchants and traced the Target attacks back to a specific person in Russia. How come IntelCrawler can figure it out? Is the NSA asleep at the wheel?
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To be fair, all this guy has done is claim to know who the programmer is. He doesn't have any proof. He is, however, making himself famous for a few minutes.....
And, for all we know, the NSA wrote the damned thing themselves in order to infiltrate the Russian mafia. It's not like they tell us what they're doing.
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Who do you think GAVE IntelCrawler their data?
That's right, there is No Such Agency!
Enquring minds want to know... (Score:5, Interesting)
How did they get the malware deployed onto thousands of POS terminals without anyone noticing?
After the malware collected the data, how did the POS terminals report the stolen data back to the controller?
Are these POS terminals just directly connected to the internet?
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did they hack the system on what an new image was being build on?
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Yeah, no second network for internet access at target.
The distribution method is not publicly known at this time. It is safe to assume a distributed update.
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Yes, they are connected to the internet. It depends on the system, some have a server in the store which they talk to and it has a VPN connection back to head office. Some just connect directly to the internet via the store's router. They use encryption to secure the connection, of course.
It appears that the deployment was simply a case of adding the malware to the POS terminal firmware and rolling it out as an update. Data was reported back to servers at head office, which they had also compromised.
mmmm (Score:5, Funny)
publicity stunt (Score:1)
How much did Verifone pay for this sparkling review?!?
Steak (Score:3)
" which allowed hackers to steak magnetic card-strip data on 40 million debit- and credit cards"
Of course steak is very much a luxury food in Russia
two simple questions (Score:1)
Why to use Windows?
Why to have network connection to outside?
Re:two simple questions (Score:5, Interesting)
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I work for a company who deals with verifone pinpads and no internet, no pinpads...
This company lets a guy with the nic 'gangadude' work on Internet enabled POS terminals?
They must be smoking something.
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Well, maybe they're selling the thing they're smoking.
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Name Names Or STFU! (Score:2)
spotted similar attacks that are still in progress against six other retailers. Andrey Komarov, CEO of the Los Angeles-based IntelCrawler, told Reuters Jan. 17 that his company had spotted the six ongoing attacks while analyzing Web traffic in search of the specific entry points and origin of the malware infection behind the Target data breach
I call bullshit! He claims to have spotted ongoing attacks on six other retails which he conveniently fails to name.
Name names or STFU!
Another needlessly ambiguous Slashdot headline... (Score:4, Insightful)
Analyst Calls Russian Teen Author of Target Malware
"Calls" as in calls him on the phone? Or "calls" in the more casual sense of "identifies"? Because there's a word for that - "identifies."
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Well, you'd be wrong, about the autistic part at least, with that sweeping piece of false equivalence. Still, call me that if you wish - it's an adjective and as such is not ambiguous the way this headline is.
Analyst calls Russian teen "author of Target malware"
Analyst calls "Russian teen author of Target malware"
Two different meanings from the same words. Sorry if you don't feel this is important in a news headline, but I'm not sure why it annoys you so much that I do feel it's important that you had to be a dick about it.
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Please, tell me more, Internet psychologist!
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Sorry, unlike you I'm actually capable of understanding what is implied in human speech based on context.
Well, aren't you awesome. Unlike you, I actually consider how others might have trouble with things and strive to improve them for all.
Maybe one day there will be a cure and you will no longer have to live with a defective brain.
Maybe one day there'll be a cure for being a dick for no reason.
Credibility? (Score:4, Interesting)
IntelCrawler was registered late last year, and its address is a mailbox in a UPS store.
Has anyone heard of Andrey Komarov before this? Does he have any kind of track record? Or is he just another fame whore with a dubious story?
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Like most Russian "security experts" he's really just the protection angle of the shakedown. His crew develops the malware and then he "discovers" it and sells you a solution. The Russians have been doing this shit for decades.
In Soviet Russia, you infect virus! (Score:2)
IN 17 years? (Score:5, Informative)
How in the world does a 17 year old get intimate detailed knowledge of the internal workings of POS systems??
Was I the only child who grew up in a home devoid of POS terminals to tinker with or something?
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It was running Windows, which was part of the problem.
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How in the world does a 17 year old get intimate detailed knowledge of the internal workings of POS systems??
They're the only ones that Target hires to run it's systems. Anybody older would be too expensive.
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Target has outlets in Russia?
I had no idea... well you learn something new every day, I suppose.
Re:IN 17 years? (Score:4, Informative)
What makes you think he has " intimate detailed knowledge of the internal workings of POS systems"? Sorry, that was a trick question. He doesn't care how POS systems work, or how sophisticated they may be. He only cares what credit card mag stripe data looks like. His malware scrapes the RAM of the process looking for the tell-tale patterns of mag stripe data, and grabs it. See http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-002A [us-cert.gov] , which says "There are several types of POS malware in use, many of which use a memory scraping technique to locate specific card data. Dexter, for example, parses memory dumps of specific POS software related processes looking for Track 1 and Track 2 data. "
The track data just has to be in the RAM of the process, and this software finds it and logs it.
So now we know: Russia is responsible for crap tha (Score:1)
Why mention the age (Score:2)
Re: Typical pothead (Score:1)
Weed has nothing to do with it. Dick.
I worked on Target POS systems in ‘99 (Score:4, Interesting)
Just before the dreaded Y2K doomsday event everyone, everywhere (well lots anyway) I was subcontracted to upgrade all the motherboards in area Target stores.
The motherboards were very simple, very basic units with pretty much everything integrated IE video, ethernet, etc.. They are diskless. Nothing plugged into the slots.
The cases were small, low profile and of course there is one at every register and several at the customer service desks.
At that time they were booting XP from LAN with PXE/TFTP.
ALL the POS terminals load the same, single image from a server. Infect the server and all terminals become infected.
Because everything is diskless, everything is piped back to backend servers in real time.
I did not go into the back of the store or see any hardware other than the POS terminals, I whored myself out as a screwdriver grunt for some easy cash.
I would assume that the OS image the terminals boot is standardized across all their stores and is sent down from corporate hive.
This leads me to believe that they somehow got to THAT image and compromised it, thus infecting all terminals nationwide.
So they didn't have to hack thousands of terminals, they just had to hack one boot image at corporate and they owned the nation.
A national shame on our government and capitalism (Score:1)
Re:What we should do (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What we should do (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though what this AC said isn't very helpful, it expresses frustration with what happened. I think it deserves a better response.
Lots of posts here say we should punish the malware author very severely. I say punish him like a small town vandal. Give him a talking to, maybe make him give up his earnings, tell his parents, and then leave him alone.
You're missing the actual criminals here:
1. The people who installed this malware.
2. The people who sold the credit card records.
These guys deserve the full brunt of the law for damages done.
But even those guys don't deserve the strongest of punishment. The harshest criminal proceedings should be meted out to the CIO and CEO of Target (and Needless Markup et al :-). They should be held criminally liable for not securing customer credit card information. Surely with the myriad of laws that congress has passed there has to be some law or statute around storage and transmission of financial records that would stick. Sadly I feel like I'm deluding myself with that hope.
I imagine even one single CIO going to jail or merely facing a judge during criminal proceedings would make a much bigger change in how financial information is treated by officers of companies in the US.
This situation avoidable. We have technology that mitigates these risks enormously. What keeps theft of credit card information from ending is that the people who make decisions don't need to care. Make that change and the network effects might do the rest.
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Yeah, so people who are not even remotely security experts should go to jail but the people who intentionally perpetrated a crime really aren't that bad? Nice logic you have there. If you're going to go after executives, why don't you go after the ones that have dragged their feet on chipping our credit cards? That would have prevented this hack.
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I can't wait for the day you forget to click the check-mark by "Post Anonymously" before submitting your comment.