KrebsOnSecurity recently featured a story about a New Mexico man who stands accused of using the now-defunct vDOS attack-for-hire service to hobble the Web sites of several former employers. That piece stated that I wasn’t aware of any other prosecutions related to vDOS customers, but as it happens there was a prosecution in the United Kingdom earlier this year of a man who’s admitted to both using and helping to administer vDOS. Here’s a look at some open-source clues that may have led to the U.K. man’s arrest.

In early July 2017, the West Midlands Police in the U.K. arrested 19-year-old Stockport resident Jack Chappell and charged him with aiding the vDOS co-founders — two Israeli men who were arrested late year and charged with running the service.

Until its demise in September 2016, vDOS was by far the most popular and powerful attack-for-hire service, allowing even completely unskilled Internet users to launch crippling assaults capable of knocking most Web sites offline. vDOS made more than $600,000 in just two of the four years it was in operation, launching more than 150,000 attacks against thousands of victims (including this site).

For his part, Chappell was charged with assisting in attacks against Web sites for some of the world’s largest companies, including Amazon, BBC, BT, Netflix, T-Mobile, Virgin Media, and Vodafone, between May 1, 2015 and April 30, 2016.

At the end of July 2017, Chappell pleaded guilty to those allegations, as well as charges of helping vDOS launder money from customers wishing to pay for attacks with PayPal accounts.

A big factor in that plea was the leak of the vDOS attacks, customer support and payments databases to this author and to U.S. law enforcement officials in the fall of 2016. Those databases provided extremely detailed information about co-conspirators, paying customers and victims.

But as with many other cybercrime investigations, the perpetrator in this case appears to have been caught thanks to a combination of several all-too-common factors, including password re-use, an active presence on the sprawling English-language hacking community Hackforums, and domain names registered in his real name. In combination, these clues provide a crucial bridge between Chappell’s online and real-world identities.

A simple search at domaintools.com for the name Jack Chappell and “UK” returns a handful of results, including the domain fractal[dot]hf. That domain was registered in June 2015 to a Jack Chappell in Stockport, using the email address me@jackchappell.co[dot]uk [full disclosure: Domaintools is an advertiser on this site].

Neither domain is online anymore, but a Google search on fractal[dot]hf reveals several mentions of this site on Hackforums — a sprawling English-language forum that until very recently hosted the most bustling open-air market for competing attack-for-hire services.

According to a review of those Hackforums postings, fractal[dot]hf was a free service that allowed users to test the size and impact of any DDoS attack tool — displaying detailed graphs showing how much data a given attack tool could hurl at an intended target. Multiple forum members told interested users that fractal[dot]hf was owned and operated by a friendly and helpful Hackforums user named Fractal.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a very active user on vDOS who went by the same Fractal nickname, using the password “HelloWorld1998” and email address smellyjelly01@gmail.com.

The above-mentioned domain Jackchappell.co[dot]uk appears in the leaked vDOS payments database, which states that a PayPal account tied to the email address “paypal@jackchappell.co[dot]uk” was one of several PayPal accounts used to launder customer payments for online attacks.

As noted in my June 2017 piece Following the Money Hobbled vDOS Attack-for-Hire Service, vDOS was forced to round-robin customer PayPal payments through a series of accounts after academic researchers began signing up for a variety of attack-for-hire services (including vDOS) and then reporting to PayPal the email addresses tied to accounts being used to receive payments.

The paypal@jackchappell.co[dot]uk address was linked to a vDOS user account called “portalKiller” which used the password “HelloWorld8991.” Note that this password is very similar to the one used by the vDOS user Fractal — only the numbers at the end of the password have been reversed (1998/8991).

Portalkiller changed his password several times during his time on vDOS, and one of the passwords he used was “Smith8991.” An Internet search on this password turns up an account in the user database that was hacked and posted online from a similar attack-for-hire service previously run by a hacker group known as the Lizard Squad. The email address tied to that account? Smellyjelly01@gmail.com.

From reviewing Fractal’s posts and reputation on Hackforums it appears that on Dec. 28, 2015 his account received praise and positive reputation points (similar to eBay’s user “feedback” system) from M30w and AppleJ4ck, the nicknames used by the alleged co-founders of vDOS.

Comments in the leaked vDOS databases also suggest Chappell was for a time one of several trusted administrators and/or support personnel of the service. vDOS routinely banned accounts for members who shared their logins, or who logged on via virtual private network (VPN) services to anonymize their connections, but many members ignored this advice.

For example, in one support ticket dated March 13, 2016, a vDOS subscriber named “Bears” who had his account banned pleaded with the administrators to reactivate (or “unban”) his account.

“Hi jeremy pls unban hi p1st i love you hi AJ i love you hi fractal i love you hi whoever else is support is swagdaddy still support?” Bears pleads.

Ironically, both of Chappell’s accounts on vDOS — Fractal and portalKiller — were ultimately banned, the latter supposedly for flouting vDOS’s no-VPN restrictions. In one customer support ticket, portalKiller explains the reason for his use of a VPN: He routinely used a VPN so that he could tunnel his connection to the United States and watch the U.S. catalog of Netflix videos.

“Account Banned’,85801,’portalKiller’,’Hi, My account was banned a couple of days ago for logging in from a VPN. Let me explain, the 82.132.234.244 IP is not a VPN it is my mobile provider (O2), which is not a proxy/VPN. The second IP was a mistake I made, I logged out and logged back in from my normal IP (81.103.71.50) after I noticed my VPN was on (I use it for Netflix). I really want you to re-consider my ban. Thanks, portalKiller.”

Fractal also was eventually banned from using vDOS, although it’s less clear why that account was banished. Perhaps Chappell no longer offered the ability to help the other vDOS administrators launder funds, or maybe he had a falling out with M30W/p1st and AppleJ4ck.

Chappell did not respond to requests for comment. His sentencing has been delayed several times since his guilty plea; it is currently slated for December 2017.

Chappell’s guilty plea reminds me that there are many others who helped launder funds for vDOS that are in all likelihood similarly exposed. Stay tuned for more updates on that front.

If you, a friend or loved one lost money in a scam involving Western Union, some or all of those funds may be recoverable thanks to a more than half-billion dollar program set up by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

In January 2017, Englewood, Colo.-based Western Union settled a case with the FTC and the Department of Justice wherein it admitted to multiple criminal violations, including willfully failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program and aiding and abetting wire fraud. As part of the settlement, the global money transfer business agreed to forfeit $586 million.

Last week, the FTC announced that individuals who lost money to scammers who told them to pay via Western Union’s money transfer system between January 1, 2004 and January 19, 2017 can now file a claim to get their money back by going to FTC.gov/WU before February 12, 2018.

Scammers tend to rely on money transfer businesses like Western Union and MoneyGram because once the money is sent and picked up by the recipient the transaction is generally irreversible. Such scams include transfers made for fraudulent lottery and prizes, family emergencies, advance-fee loans, and online dating, among others.

Affected consumers can visit FTC.gov/WU to file claims, learn more, or get updates on the claims process, which could take up to a year. The graphic below seeks to aid victims in filing claims.

The FTC says some people who have already reported their losses to Western Union, the FTC, or another government agency will receive a form in the mail from the claims administrator, Gilardi & Co., which has been hired by the DOJ to return victims’ money as part of the settlement. The form will have a Claim ID and a PIN number to use when filing a claim online via FTC.gov/WU.

The agency emphasized that filing a claim is free, so consumers should not pay anyone to file a claim on their behalf. “No one associated with the claims process will call to ask for consumers’ bank account or credit card number,” the FTC advised.

This isn’t the first time a major money transfer business admitted to criminally facilitating wire fraud. In November 2012, MoneyGram International agreed to pay a $100 million fine and admit to criminally aiding and abetting wire fraud and failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.

root9B Holdings, a company that many in the security industry consider little more than a big-name startup aimed at cashing in on the stock market’s insatiable appetite for cybersecurity firms, surprised no one this week when it announced it was ceasing operations at the end of the year.

Founded in 2011 as root9B Technologies, the company touted itself as an IT security training firm staffed by an impressive list of ex-military leaders with many years of cybersecurity experience at the Department of Defense and National Security Agency (NSA). As it began to attract more attention from investors, root9B’s focus shifted to helping organizations hunt for cyber intruders within their networks.

By 2015, root9B was announcing lucrative cybersecurity contracts with government agencies and the infusion of millions from investors. The company’s stock was ballooning in price, reaching an all-time high in mid-May 2015.

That was just days after root9B issued a headline-grabbing report about how its cyber intelligence had single-handedly derailed a planned Russian cyber attack on several U.S. financial institutions.

The report, released May 12, 2015, claimed root9B had uncovered plans by an infamous Russian hacking group to target several banks. The company said the thwarted operation was orchestrated by Fancy Bear/Sofacy, a so-called “advanced persistent threat” (APT) hacking group known for launching sophisticated phishing attacks aimed at infiltrating some of the world’s biggest corporations.  root9B released its Q1 2015 earnings two days later, reporting record revenues.

On May 20, 2015, KrebsOnSecurity published a rather visceral dissection of that root9B report: Security Firm Redefines APT; African Phishing Threat. The story highlighted the thinness of the report’s claims, pointing to multiple contradictory findings by other security firms which suggested the company had merely detected several new phishing domains being erected by a comparatively low-skilled African phishing gang that was well-known to investigators and U.S. banks.

In mid-June 2015, an anonymous researcher who’d apparently done a rather detailed investigation into root9B’s finances said the company was “a worthless reverse-merger created by insiders with [a] long history of penny-stock wipeouts, fraud allegations, and disaster.”

That report, published by the crowd-sourced financial market research site SeekingAlpha.com, sought to debunk claims by root9B that it possessed “proprietary” cybersecurity hardware and software, noting that the company mainly acts as a reseller of a training module produced by a third party.

root9B’s stock price never recovered from those reports, and began a slow but steady decline after mid-2015. In Dec. 2016, root9B Technologies announced a reverse split of its issued and outstanding common stock, saying it would be moving to the NASDAQ market with the trading symbol RTNB and a new name — root9B Holdings. On January 18, 2017, a reshuffled root9B rang the market opening bell at NASDAQ, and got a bounce when it said it’d been awarded a five-year training contract to support the U.S. Defense Department.

The company’s founders remained upbeat even into mid-2017. On June 6, 2017 it announced that Michael Hayden, the four-star general who until recently served as director of the U.S. National Security Agency, had joined the company’s board.

On June 23, 2017, root9B issued a press release reminding everyone that the company had remained #1 on the Cybersecurity 500 for the 6th consecutive quarter. The Cybersecurity 500, by the way, rates cybersecurity firms based on their “branding and marketing.”

Nobody ever accused root9B of bad marketing. But all the press releases in the world couldn’t hide the fact that the company had never turned a profit. It lost more than $18.3 million in 2016, more than doubling a $8.03 million loss in 2015.

Since August 2017, shares of the company’s stock have fallen more than 90 percent. On Sept. 28, 2017, all of root9B Holdings’ assets were acquired by venture investment firm Tracker Capital Management LLC, and then sold at auction.

On Nov. 13, root9B Holdings issued a press release saying NASDAQ was de-listing the firm on Nov. 15 and that it was ceasing operations at the end of this year.

“With the absence of any operating assets remaining after the Foreclosure, the Company will cease any and all operations effective, December 31, 2017,” the (final?) root9B press release concludes.

Several followers on Twitter say it’s too soon to sound the death knell for root9B as a whole, pointing out that while root9B Holdings may have been gutted and sold, for now it appears the security company root9B LLC is intact and is merely going back to being a private concern.

In any case, the demise of root9B Holdings resonates loudly with that of Norse Corp., another flashy, imploded cybersecurity startup that banked heavily on attracting and touting top talent, while managing to produce very little that was useful to or actionable by anybody.

Companies like these are a reminder that your success or failure in business as in life is directly tied to what you produce — not what you promise or represent. There is no shortcut to knowledge, success or mastery, and this goes for infosec students as well as active practitioners of the craft. Focus on consistently producing quality, unique content and/or services that are of real value to others, and the rest will take care of itself.

Update, 10:30 a.m.: Added perspective from Twitter readers.

It’s Nov. 14 — the second Tuesday of the month (a.k.a. “Patch Tuesday) — and Adobe and Microsoft have issued gobs of security updates for their software. Microsoft’s 11 patch bundles fix more than four-dozen security holes in various Windows versions and Office products — including at least four serious flaws that were publicly disclosed prior to today. Meanwhile, Adobe’s got security updates available for a slew of titles, including Flash Player, Photoshop, Reader and Shockwave.

Four of the vulnerabilities Microsoft fixed today have public exploits, but they do not appear to be used in any active malware campaigns, according to Gill Langston at security vendor Qualys. Perhaps the two most serious flaws likely to impact Windows end users involve vulnerabilities in Microsoft browsers Internet Explorer and Edge.

Qualys’ Langston reminds us that on last Patch Tuesday, Microsoft quietly released the fix for CVE-2017-13080, widely known as the KRACK vulnerability in WPA2 wireless protocol, but did not make it known until a week later, when the vulnerability was publicly disclosed. Check out the Qualys blog and this post from Ivanti for more on this month’s patches from Redmond. Otherwise, visit Windows Update sometime soon (click the Start/Windows button, then type Windows Update).

Adobe issued patches to fix at least 62 security vulnerabilities in its products, including several critical bugs in Adobe Flash Player and Reader/Acrobat.  The Flash Player update brings the browser plugin to v. 27.0.0.187 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS.

Windows users who browse the Web with anything other than Internet Explorer may need to apply the Flash patch twice, once with IE and again using the alternative browser (Firefox, Opera, e.g.).

Chrome and IE should auto-install the latest Flash version on browser restart (users may need to manually check for updates and/or restart the browser to get the latest Flash version). Chrome users may need to restart the browser to install or automatically download the latest version.

When in doubt, click the vertical three dot icon to the right of the URL bar, select “Help,” then “About Chrome”: If there is an update available, Chrome should install it then. Chrome will replace that three dot icon with an up-arrow inside of a circle when updates are waiting to be installed.

Standard disclaimer: Because Flash remains such a security risk, I continue to encourage readers to remove or hobble Flash Player unless and until it is needed for a specific site or purpose. More on that approach (as well as slightly less radical solutions ) can be found in A Month Without Adobe Flash Player. The short version is that you can probably get by without Flash installed and not miss it at all.

For readers still unwilling to cut the cord, there are half-measures that work almost as well. Fortunately, disabling Flash in Chrome is simple enough. Paste “chrome://settings/content” into a Chrome browser bar and then select “Flash” from the list of items. By default it should be set to “Ask first” before running Flash, although users also can disable Flash entirely here or whitelist and blacklist specific sites.

Another, perhaps less elegant, solution is to keep Flash installed in a browser that you don’t normally use, and then to only use that browser on sites that require it.

A KrebsOnSecurity series on how easy big-three credit bureau Equifax makes it to get detailed salary history data on tens of millions of Americans apparently inspired a deeper dive on the subject by Fast Company, which examined how this Equifax division has been one of the company’s best investments. In this post, I’ll show you how to opt out of yet another Equifax service that makes money at the expense of your privacy.

My original report showed how the salary history for tens of millions of employees at some of the world’s largest corporations was available to anyone armed with an employee’s Social Security number and date of birth — information that was stolen on 145.5 million Americans in the recent breach at Equifax.

Equifax took down their salary portal — a service from the company’s Workforce Solutions division known as The Work Number (formerly “TALX“) — just a few hours after my story went live on Oct. 8. The company explained that the site was being disabled for routine maintenance, but Equifax didn’t fully reopen the portal until Nov. 2, following the addition of unspecified “security improvements.”

Fast Company writer Joel Winston’s story examines how some 70,000 companies — including Amazon, AT&T, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter and Wal-Mart — actually pay Equifax to collect, organize, and re-sell their employees’ personal income information and work history.

“A typical employee at Facebook (which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) may require verification of his employment through TALX when he leases an apartment, updates his immigration status, applies for a loan or public aid, or applies for a new job,” Winston writes. “If his new prospective employer is among the 70,000 approved entities in Equifax’s verifier network with a “permissible purpose,” that company can purchase his employment and income information for about $20.”

While this may sound like a nice and legitimate use of salary data, the point of my original report was that this salary data is also available to anyone who has the Social Security number and date of birth on virtually any person who once worked at a company that uses this Equifax service.

In May 2017, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story of how this same Equifax Workforce portal was abused for an entire year by identity thieves involved in tax refund fraud with the Internal Revenue Service. Fraudsters used SSN and DOB data to reset the 4-digit PINs given to customer employees as a password, and then steal W-2 tax data after successfully answering personal questions about those employees.

Curiously, Equifax claims they have no evidence that anyone was harmed as a result of the year-long pattern of tax fraud related to how easy it was to coax salary and payroll data out of its systems.

“We do not know of any specific fraud incidents linked with the Work Number,” Equifax spokeswoman Marisa Salcines told Fast Company.

This statement sounds suspiciously like what big-three credit bureau Experian told lawmakers in 2014 after they were hauled up to Capitol Hill to explain another breach that was scooped by KrebsOnSecurity: That a Vietnamese man who ran an identity theft service which catered to tax refund fraudsters had access for nine months to more than 200 million consumer records maintained by Experian.

Experian’s suits told lawmakers that no consumers were harmed even as the U.S. Secret Service was busy arresting customers of this identity theft service — nearly all of whom were involved in tax refund fraud and other forms of consumer ID theft.

Loyal readers here will know I have long urged consumers to opt out of letting the big credit bureaus resell your credit file to potential lenders (and, by proxy, to ID thieves), by placing a freeze on their credit files with the Equifax, Experian, Trans Union and Innovis.

In the wake of the Equifax breach, one thing I’ve heard from so many readers that was a big factor in their decision to finally freeze their credit was that the bureaus would no longer be able to profit by selling their credit files.

As it happens, it is possible to opt out of having your salary data sold through Equifax. According to Equifax, this involves placing a free “freeze” on your file with the Work Number. These instructions on how to do that come verbatim from Equifax:

To place a security freeze on your The Work Number employment report, send
your request via mail to:

TALX Corporation
ATTN: Employment Data Report Dept 19-10
11432 Lackland Road
St. Louis, Missouri 63146

Or, you may contact us on the web at http://www.theworknumber.com or call 800-996-7566.

It’s not clear what may be the potential consequences of freezing your file with The Work Number. Fast Company explains the service and its giant database “helps streamline various processes for employers and other agencies, and it helps employees too, Equifax wrote in an emailed statement. The Work Number provides prospective landlords a way to verify an applicant’s income, for instance, or makes it cheaper for human resources departments to examine an applicant’s background.”

Here’s Equifax explaining why consumers might want to leave their files alone:

“Without the Work Number, a lender, property manager or pre-employment screener will call an employer and explain why they need to check on an employee or former employee’s employment or income. That individual has no control over who picks up the phone, whether the right information is actually given out, or if his or her privacy will be respected.”

Neither does the consumer have any control over to whom Equifax gives this data. I for one am taking my chances and freezing my salary data at Equifax. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Before you opt out, you may wish to see which lenders, credit agencies and other entities may have received or attempted to pull your Work Number salary history.

To request a free Employment Data Report, you’ll need to fill out a form at the Work Number website, or make a request by mail, or through a toll-free phone number (1-866-222-5880).