A California man who pleaded guilty Tuesday to causing dozens of swatting attacks — including a deadly incident in Kansas last year — now faces 20 or more years in prison.

Tyler Barriss, 25, went by the nickname SWAuTistic on Twitter, and reveled in perpetrating “swatting” attacks. These dangerous hoaxes involve making false claims to emergency responders about phony hostage situations or bomb threats, with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to the location of the claimed incident.

On Dec. 28, 2017, Barriss placed a call from California to police in Wichita, Kansas, claiming that he was a local resident who’d just shot his father and was holding other family members hostage.

When Wichita officers responded to the address given by the caller — 1033 W. McCormick — they shot and killed 28-year-old Andrew Finch, a father of two who had done nothing wrong.

Barriss admitted setting that fatal swatting attack in motion after getting in the middle of a dispute between two Call of Duty gamers, 18-year-old Casey Viner from Ohio and Shane Gaskill, 20, from Wichita.

Viner allegedly asked Barriss to swat Gaskill. But when Gaskill noticed Barriss’ Twitter account (@swattingaccount) suddenly following him online, he tried to deflect the attack. Barriss says Gaskill allegedly dared him to go ahead with the swat, but then gave Barriss an old home address — 1033 W. McCormick — which was then being occupied by Finch’s family.

Viner and Gaskill are awaiting trial. A more detailed account of their alleged dispute is told here.

According to the Justice Department, Barriss pleaded guilty to making hoax bomb threats in phone calls to the headquarters of the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. He also made bomb threat and swatting calls from Los Angeles to emergency numbers in Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, Utah, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, Maine, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New York, Michigan, Florida and Canada.

U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister said Barriss faces 20 years or more in prison. Barriss is due to be sentenced Jan. 30, 2019.

Many readers following this story over the past year have commented here that the officer who fired the shot which killed Andrew Finch should also face prosecution. However, the district attorney for the county that encompasses Wichita decided in April that the officer will not face charges, and will not be named because he isn’t being charged with a crime.

As the victim of a swatting attack in 2013 and two other attempted swattings, I’m glad to finally see a swatting prosecution that may actually serve as a deterrent to this idiotic and extremely dangerous crime going forward.

It’s also great to see police departments like Seattle’s taking steps to help head off swatting incidents before they happen. Last month, the Seattle Police 911 Center launched a new program that lets residents register their address and corresponding concerns if they feel they may be the target of swatting.

But it would also be nice if more police forces around the country received additional training on exercising restraint in the use of deadly force, particularly in responding to hostage or bomb threat scenarios that have hallmarks of a swatting hoax.

For example, perpetrators of swatting often call non-emergency numbers at state and local police departments to carry out their crimes precisely because they are not local to the region and cannot reach the target’s police department by calling 911. This is exactly what Tyler Barriss did in the Wichita case and others. Swatters also often use text-to-speech (TTY) services for the hearing impaired to relay hoax swat calls, as was the case with my 2013 swatting.

Microsoft on Tuesday released 16 software updates to fix more than 60 security holes in various flavors of Windows and other Microsoft products. Adobe also has security patches available for Flash Player, Acrobat and Reader users.

As per usual, most of the critical flaws — those that can be exploited by malware or miscreants without any help from users — reside in Microsoft’s Web browsers Edge and Internet Explorer.

This week’s patch batch addresses two flaws of particular urgency: One is a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-8589) that is already being exploited to compromise Windows 7 and Server 2008 systems.

The other is a publicly disclosed bug in Microsoft’s Bitlocker encryption technology (CVE-2018-8566) that could allow an attacker to get access to encrypted data. One mitigating factor with both security holes is that the attacker would need to be already logged in to the targeted system to exploit them.

Of course, if the target has Adobe Reader or Acrobat installed, it might be easier for attackers to achieve that log in. According to analysis from security vendor Qualys, there is now code publicly available that could force these two products to leak a hash of the user’s Windows password (which could then be cracked with open-source tools). A new update for Acrobat/Reader fixes this bug, and Adobe has published some mitigation suggestions as well.

In addition, Adobe pushed out a security update for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome versions of Flash Player. The update fixes just one vulnerability in Flash, but I’m sure most of us would rather Flash died off completely already. Adobe said it plans to end support for the plugin in 2020. Google Chrome is now making users explicitly enable Flash every time they want to use it, and by the summer of 2019 it will make users go into their settings to enable it every time they want to run it.

KrebsOnSecurity has frequently suggested that Windows users wait a day or two after Microsoft releases monthly security updates before installing the fixes, with the rationale that occasionally buggy patches can cause serious headaches for users who install them before all the kinks are worked out.

Windows 10 likes to install patches all in one go and reboot your computer on its own schedule. Microsoft doesn’t make it easy for Windows 10 users to change this setting, but it is possible. For all other Windows OS users, if you’d rather be alerted to new updates when they’re available so you can choose when to install them, there’s a setting for that in Windows Update.

In either case, it’s a good idea to get in the habit of backing up your data before installing Windows updates. Unlike last month, when many Windows users saw the contents of their “My Documents” folder erased by a buggy update, I’m not aware of any major issues this time around.

If you experience any problems installing any of these patches this month, please feel free to leave a comment about it below; there’s a good chance other readers have experienced the same and may even chime in here with some helpful tips.

If you own a domain name that gets decent traffic and you fail to pay its annual renewal fee, chances are this mistake will be costly for you and for others. Lately, neglected domains have been getting scooped up by crooks who use them to set up fake e-commerce sites that steal credit card details from unwary shoppers.

For nearly 10 years, Portland, Ore. resident Julie Randall posted pictures for her photography business at julierandallphotos-dot-com, and used an email address at that domain to communicate with clients. The domain was on auto-renew for most of that time, but a change in her credit card details required her to update her records at the domain registrar — a task Randall says she now regrets putting off.

That’s because in June of this year the domain expired, and control over her site went to someone who purchased it soon after. Randall said she didn’t notice at the time because she was in the middle of switching careers, didn’t have any active photography clients, and had gotten out of the habit of checking that email account.

Randall said she only realized she’d lost her domain after failing repeatedly to log in to her Instagram account, which was registered to an email address at julierandallphoto-dot-com.

“When I tried to reset the account password through Instagram’s procedure, I could see that the email address on the account had been changed to a .ru email,” Randall told KrebsOnSecurity. “I still don’t have access to it because I don’t have access to the email account tied to my old domain. It feels a little bit like the last ten years of my life have kind of been taken away.”

Visit julierandallphoto.com today and you’ll see a Spanish language site selling Reebok shoes (screenshot above). The site certainly looks like a real e-commerce shop; it has plenty of product pages and images, and of course a shopping cart. But the site is noticeably devoid of any SSL certificate (the entire site is http://, not https://), and the products for sale are all advertised for roughly half their normal cost.

A review of the neighboring domains that reside at Internet addresses adjacent to julierandallphoto-dot-com (196.196.152/153.x, etc.) shows hundreds of other domains that were apparently registered upon expiration over the past few months and which now feature similar http-only online shops in various languages pimping low-priced, name brand shoes and other clothing.

Until earlier this year, wildcatgroomers-dot-com belonged to a company in Wisconsin that sold equipment for grooming snowmobile trails. It’s now advertising running shoes. Likewise, kavanaghsirishpub-dot-com corresponded to a pub and restaurant in Tennessee until mid-2018; now it’s pretending to sell cheap Nike shoes.

So what’s going here?

According to an in-depth report jointly released today by security firms Flashpoint and RiskIQ, the sites are almost certainly set up simply to siphon payment card data from unwary shoppers looking for specific designer footwear and other clothing at bargain basement prices.

“We have observed more than 800 sites hosting these brand impersonation/skimming stores since June 2018,” the report notes.

“This group’s strategy appears rather simple: the perpetrators set up a large number of stores impersonating as many popular brands as possible and drive traffic to these fake stores with a variety of methods,” the report continues. “Some visitors will attempt to make purchases, entering their payment information into the payment form where the skimmer copies it and sends it to a drop server. The payment page even displays badges from various security companies in order to appear more legitimate.”

The report tracks the work of Magecart — the name given to a collective of at least seven cybercrime groups involved in hacking Web sites to steal payment card data. On Nov. 4, KrebsOnSecurity published Who’s in Your Online Shopping Cart?, which looked at a network of hacked sites that fit the Magecart profile.

Credit card data stolen by these various Magecart groups invariably gets put up for sale at online cybercrime shops, the security firms found. In addition, some Magecart actors will sell access to hacked online stores, allowing crooks who buy this access to receive a live feed of freshly-stolen payment card details for as long as the site remains compromised.

Flashpoint and RiskIQ say they have been working with two other non-commercial anti-abuse organizations, Abuse.ch and Shadowserver to “sinkhole” or quietly assume control over hacked domains that are used for Magecart activities. These latter two organizations provide automated reporting to affected organizations. Anyone responsible for managing a range of Internet addresses can sign up at Shadowserver.org to have those ranges monitored for domains compromised by Magecart tools.

Meanwhile, as Julie Randall’s experience shows, it pays to stay on top of any domain registrations you may have. Giving up on a long-held domain name — particularly one tied to your name — is always a tough call, because you simply never know what it will be used for when it falls into someone else’s hands.

If you’re on the fence about whether to renew a domain and it’s one of several you own, it may make sense to hold onto it and simply forward any incoming traffic to a domain you do want people to visit. In the event you decide to relinquish a domain, make sure you take stock of any online accounts you created with email addresses tied to that domain and move those to another email address, as those accounts will likely come under someone else’s control when the domain expires.

A Connecticut man who’s earned bug bounty rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their Web sites secretly operated a service that leveraged these same flaws to sell their customers’ personal data, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

In May 2018, ZDNet ran a story about the discovery of a glaring vulnerability in the Web site for wireless provider T-Mobile that let anyone look up customer home addresses and account PINs. The story noted that T-Mobile disabled the feature in early April after being alerted by a 22-year-old “security researcher” named Ryan Stevenson, and that the mobile giant had awarded Stevenson $1,000 for reporting the discovery under its bug bounty program.

Likewise, AT&T has recognized Stevenson for reporting security holes in its services. AT&T’s bug bounty site lets contributors share a social media account or Web address where they can be contacted, and in Stevenson’s case he gave the now-defunct Twitter handle “@Phoobia.”

Stevenson’s Linkedin profile — named “Phobias” — says he specializes in finding exploits in numerous Web sites, including hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, paypal.com and ebay.com. Under the “contact info” tab of Stevenson’s profile it lists the youtube.com account of “Ryan” and the Facebook account “Phobia” (also now deleted).

Coincidentally, I came across multiple variations on this Phobia nickname as I was researching a story published this week on the epidemic of fraudulent SIM swaps, a complex form of mobile phone fraud that is being used to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies.

Unauthorized SIM swaps also are often used to hijack so-called “OG” user accounts — usually short usernames on top social network and gaming Web sites that are highly prized by many hackers because they can make the account holder appear to have been a savvy, early adopter of the service before it became popular and before all of the short usernames were taken. Some OG usernames can be sold for thousands of dollars in underground markets.

This week’s SIM swapping story quoted one recent victim who lost $100,000 after his mobile phone number was briefly stolen in a fraudulent SIM swap. The victim said he was told by investigators in Santa Clara, Calif. that the perpetrators of his attack were able to access his T-Mobile account information using a specialized piece of software that gave them backdoor access to T-Mobile’s customer database.

Both the Santa Clara investigators and T-Mobile declined to confirm or deny the existence of this software. But their non-denials prompted me to start looking for it on my own. So naturally I began searching at ogusers-dot-com, a forum dedicated to the hacking, trading and sale of OG accounts. Unsurprisingly, ogusers-dot-net also has traditionally been the main stomping grounds for many individuals involved in SIM swapping attacks.

It didn’t take long to discover an account on ogusers-dot-com named “Ryan,” who for much of 2018 has advertised a number of different “doxing” services — specifically those aimed at finding the personal information of customers at major broadband and telecom companies.

In some of Ryan’s sales threads, fellow forum members refer to him as “Phob” or “Phobs.” In a post on May 27, Ryan says he’s willing to pay or trade for OG accounts under the name “Ryan,” “Ryans”, “RS,” “RMS” or “Stevenson” on any decent sized popular Web site. “hmu [hit me up] in a pm [private message] to talk,” Ryan urged fellow forum members.

I found that as late as June 2018 Ryan was offering a service that he claimed was capable of “doxing any usa carrier,” including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, MetroPCS and Boost Mobile.

“All I need is the number,” Ryan said of his customer data lookup service, which he sold for $25 per record. “Payment BTC [bitcoin] only.”

Very similar offerings were made by Phobia’s alter ego “AOLer” on the sprawling English language online hacking community Hackforums.

I first encountered Stevenson several years back while trying to work out who was responsible for calling in a phony hostage situation and sending a heavily armed police force to our Northern Virginia home in 2013. In a follow-up to that story, Stevenson admitted that he was responsible for the high-profile hack against Wired reporter Mat Honan, who documented how a hacker named Phobia had deleted his Google account and remotely erased all data from his iPhone, iPad and MacBook.

Going by the nickname “Phobiathegod” at the time, Stevenson was then part of a group of young men who routinely hijacked OG account names on Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform, often using methods that involved tricking customer service people at the target’s mobile provider into transferring the victim’s calls to a number they controlled.

Fast forward to today, and Phobia’s main Twitter account (pictured at the top of this post) includes the phrase “the plug” next to his profile. In SIM swapping circles, a “plug” is hacker slang for an employee at a mobile phone store who can be bribed, tricked or blackmailed into assisting with an unauthorized SIM swap.

Reached via instant message on LinkedIn, Stevenson acknowledged running the ISP doxing services, but said his account on the OGusers forum was since banned and that hardly anyone took him up on his offer anyway.

“I shouldn’t have made the threads even though no one really asked for anything,” he said. “I’m on the good side. But its almost 2019 and I need to find a new hobby I can’t be bothered to look for breaches/vulns, haven’t got 1 job offer or recommendation yet.”

Asked about “the plug” reference in his Twitter profile, Stevenson suddenly stopped replying. Not long after that, the @Phobia Twitter account was deactivated.

Stevenson denied being involved in SIM swapping attacks, but it is clear Phobia was fairly tight with many people who are or until recently were at the center of this scene. In July 2018, authorities in California arrested 20-year-old Boston resident Joel Ortiz for allegedly conducting dozens of fraudulent SIM swaps and stealing at least $5 million worth of cryptocurrency from victims.

Like Phobia, Ortiz had a presence on OGusers and had acquired some of the most OG social media accounts available, including the Twitter and Instagram account names with the number zero (@0), and the OG Youtube accounts “Joel” and “X”.

On Oct 27, 2017, the Youtube account “Joel” published a 4-minute video of Stevenson dancing to a popular rap song in front of the camera. On July 5, 2018, just days before Ortiz was arrested, the Twitter account “0” gave a shout out to @Phobia on Twitter suggesting Phobia was actually tweeting using Ortiz’s “0” account.

A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that “Informed Delivery,” a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and made it easier for people to opt out. This week, the U.S. Secret Service issued an internal alert warning that many of its field offices have reported crooks are indeed using Informed Delivery to commit various identity theft and credit card fraud schemes.

The internal alert — sent by the Secret Service on Nov. 6 to its law enforcement partners nationwide — references a recent case in Michigan in which seven people were arrested for allegedly stealing credit cards from resident mailboxes after signing up as those victims at the USPS’s Web site.

According to the Secret Service alert, the accused used the Informed Delivery feature “to identify and intercept mail, and to further their identity theft fraud schemes.”

“Fraudsters were also observed on criminal forums discussing using the Informed Delivery service to surveil potential identity theft victims,” the Secret Service memo reads.

The USPS did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the past six days.

The Michigan incident in the Secret Service alert refers to the September 2018 arrest of seven people accused of running up nearly $400,000 in unauthorized charges on credit cards they ordered in the names of residents. According to a copy of the complaint in that case (PDF), the defendants allegedly stole the new cards out of resident mailboxes, and then used them to fraudulently purchase gift cards and merchandise from department stores.

KrebsOnSecurity took the USPS to task last year in part for not using its own unique communications method — the U.S. Mail — to validate and notify residents when someone at their address signs up for Informed Delivery. The USPS addressed that shortcoming earlier this year, announcing it had started alerting all households by mail whenever anyone signs up to receive scanned notifications of mail delivered to their address.

However, it appears that ID thieves have figured out ways to hijack identities and order new credit cards in victims’ names before the USPS can send their notification — possibly by waiting until the cards are already approved and ordered before signing up for Informed Delivery in the victim’s name.

Last month, WKMG’s Clickorlando.com wrote that a number of Belle Isle, Fla. residents reported receiving hefty bills for credit cards they never knew they had. One resident was quoted as saying she received a bill for $2,000 in charges on a card she’d never seen before, and only after that did she get a notice from the USPS saying someone at her address had signed up for Informed Delivery. The only problem was she’d never signed up for the USPS program.

“According to a police report, someone opened fraudulent credit card accounts and charged more than $14,000 and signed her neighbors up for Informed Delivery, too,” Clickorlando’s Louis Bolden explained. “Photos of what would be in their mail were going to someone else.”

Residents in Texas have reported similar experiences. Dave Lieber, author of The Watchdog column for The Dallas Morning News, said he heard from victim Chris Torraca, 58, a retired federal bank regulator from Grapevine, a town between Dallas and Ft. Worth.

“Chris discovered it after someone created an account in his name at usps.com,” Lieber wrote in a post published Nov. 2. “The thief began receiving photos of Chris’ mail and also opened a bank credit card in Chris’ wife’s name. Postal officials promote the program as a great way to prevent ID theft, but for Chris, that’s what led to it.”

As noted in last year’s story, the major weakness with Informed Delivery lies in the method the USPS uses to validate new accounts. Signing up requires an eligible resident to create a free user account at USPS.com, which asks for the resident’s name, address and an email address. The final step in validating residents involves answering four so-called “knowledge-based authentication” or KBA questions.

KrebsOnSecurity has relentlessly assailed KBA as an unreliable authentication method because so many answers to the multiple-guess questions are available on sites like Spokeo and Zillow, or via social networking profiles.

I’ve previously advised that having a security freeze on your credit file should be enough to prevent someone from registering an Informed Delivery account in your name. That’s because the USPS validates new users by asking them a series of multiple-guess questions chosen by big-three credit bureau Equifax.

But numerous readers have responded that they were still able to sign up for the service even though they had security freezes in place with Equfiax and the two other major consumer credit bureaus (Experian and TransUnion).

Normally in these cases, I’d urge readers to simply plant their flag by registering an account to claim their address. However, the USPS allows new account creations for anyone currently able to receive mail at your address, which means that claiming your address may involve registering an account with every adult present at your address.

The Dallas Morning News piece referenced earlier says Americans can opt-out of Informed Delivery by emailing the “eSafe Team” at USPS at eSafe@usps.gov. However, emails sent to this address by KrebsOnSecurity elicited no response over the past four days.

Yet, one reader received a curious response by emailing the customer service address advertised by USPS’s Informed Delivery service — informeddelivery@custhelp.com. That reader requested that USPS remove her address from eligibility for Informed Delivery, and asked the Postal Service to let her know if anyone had previously signed up for the service at her address.

According to an email shared with this author, the USPS’s customer help team responded by asking the resident to answer some of her KBA questions in plain text via email.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that the USPS is now processing some 20,000 new Informed Delivery account registrations each day, and that the USPS is continuously deleting new account registrations that it believes may be fraudulent.

There is also a potentially new security wrinkle in the USPS’s Informed Delivery service. The USPS is now generating revenue by allowing third-party companies to advertise interactive content in Informed Delivery communications (PDF) sent to email subscribers.

The program allows the USPS to automatically match scanned mail images to specific advertising campaigns. According to a review of its mailer delivery user guide (PDF), this initiative allows advertisers to publicize content that contains interactive links, which could be abused by malefactors posing as legitimate advertisers.