The U.S. Social Security Administration will soon require Americans to use stronger authentication when accessing their accounts at ssa.gov. As part of the change, SSA will require all users to enter a username and password in addition to a one-time security code sent their email or phone. In this post, we’ll parse this a bit more and look at some additional security options for SSA users.

The SSA recently updated its portal with the following message:

I read that to mean even though an email address is required to sign up at ssa.gov, the SSA also is treating email as a second authentication factor. But the above statement seemed open to interpretation, so I put my questions to the SSA: Here’s what SSA’s press office came back with:

“Beginning June 10, 2017, we will require all my Social Security account holders (both new and returning) to use a stronger authentication method to create an account or access their account. In addition to entering the username and password, people must select either of the following options to receive a one-time use security code:

A text message; or
An email.

During registration and each subsequent login, customers will receive a new, one-time use security code by text message or email – depending on their choice.

The combination of the username, password, and one-time use security code will provide access to their personal my Social Security account.”

ANALYSIS

The idea that one can reset the password using the same email account that will receive the one-time code seems to lessen the value of this requirement as a security measure.

Notice the SSA isn’t referring to its new security scheme as “two-factor authentication,” which requires user to supply something he knows and something he is or has.

The former is usually a password or PIN; “something he is” most often refers to biometric components (fingerprint, iris scan); whereas the “something he has” factor generally refers to the output of one-time code from a key-fob or mobile app like Google authenticator or Duo [full disclosure: Duo is a longtime advertiser on this blog].

The move comes almost a year after the SSA enacted and then rescinded a requirement that all Americans who wish to manage their retirement benefits at ssa.gov provide a mobile phone number.

Less than two weeks after that new requirement went into effect last year, the SSA reversed itself and did away with the requirement. The policy was reversed following a rollout marred by technical difficulties and criticism that the new requirement did little to prevent identity thieves from siphoning benefits from Americans who hadn’t yet created accounts at ssa.gov for themselves.

SIGN UP AT SSA BEFORE SOMEONE DOES IT FOR YOU

In September 2013, I warned that SSA and financial institutions were tracking a rise in cases wherein identity thieves register an account at the SSA’s portal using a retiree’s personal information and have the victim’s benefits diverted to prepaid debit cards that the crooks control.

Because it’s possible to create just one my Social Security account per Social Security number, registering an account on the portal is one basic way that Americans can avoid becoming victims of this scam.

So what else beyond the basic measures being enacted in June 2017 does the SSA offer Americans concerned about someone hijacking their SSA account online?

The SSA offers a set of options that it calls “extra security.” These extra options by the way include the sending users a special code via the U.S. Mail that has to be entered on the agency’s site to complete the signup process. If you choose to enable extra security, the SSA will then ask you for:

• The last eight digits of your Visa, MasterCard, or Discover credit card;
• Information from your W2 tax form;
• Information from a 1040 Schedule SE (self-employment) tax form; or
• Your direct deposit amount, if you receive Social Security benefits.

Sadly, crooks won’t go through the more rigorous signup process — they’ll choose the option that requires less information. That means it is still relatively easy for thieves to create an account in the name of Americans who have not already created one for themselves. All one would need is the target’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, residential address, and phone number. This personal data can be bought for roughly $3-$4 from a variety of cybercrime shops online.

What else does the SSA require to prove you’re you when creating a new account at my Social Security? Assuming you can buy or supply the above personal data, the agency relays four multiple-guess, so-called “knowledge-based authentication” or KBA questions from credit bureau Equifax.

In practice, many of these KBA questions — such as previous address, loan amounts and dates — can be successfully enumerated with random guessing.  What’s more, very often the answers to these questions can be found by consulting free online services, such as Zillow and Facebook.

In addition to the SSA’s optional security measures, Americans can further block ID thieves by placing a security freeze on their credit files with the major credit bureaus. Readers who have taken my ceaseless advice to freeze their credit will need to temporarily thaw the freeze in order to complete the process of creating an account at ssa.gov.

Looked at another way, having a freeze in place blocks ID thieves from fraudulently creating an account in your name and potentially diverting your government benefits.

Alternatively, citizens can block online access to their Social Security account. Instructions for doing that are here.

Adobe and Microsoft both issued updates today to fix critical security vulnerabilities in their software. Microsoft actually released an emergency update on Monday just hours ahead of today’s regularly scheduled “Patch Tuesday” (the 2nd Tuesday of each month) to fix a dangerous flaw present in most of Microsoft’s anti-malware technology that’s being called the worst Windows bug in recent memory. Separately, Adobe has a new version of its Flash Player software available that squashes at least seven nasty bugs.

Last week, Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy reported to Microsoft a flaw in its Malware Protection Engine, a technology that exists in most of Redmond’s malware protection offerings — including Microsoft Forefront, Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows Defender. Rather than worry about their malicious software making it past Microsoft’s anti-malware technology, attackers could simply exploit this flaw to run their malware automatically once their suspicious file is scanned.

“To exploit this vulnerability, a specially crafted file must be scanned by an affected version of the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine,” Microsoft warned. “If the affected antimalware software has real-time protection turned on, the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine will scan files automatically, leading to exploitation of the vulnerability when the specially crafted file scanned.”

On May 8, Microsoft released an out-of-band fix for the problem, demonstrating unusual swiftness in addressing a serious issue with its software.

“Still blown away at how quickly @msftsecurity responded to protect users, can’t give enough kudos.” Google’s Ormandy tweeted on Monday. “Amazing.”

In addition to the anti-malware product update, Microsoft today released fixes for dangerous security flaws in a range of products, from Internet Explorer and Edge to Windows, Microsoft Office, .NET, and of course Adobe Flash Player.

The latest Flash Player, v. 25.0.0.171 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, is available from this link. Adobe’s advisory for this update is here. If you have Flash installed, you should update, hobble or remove Flash as soon as possible. To see which version of Flash your browser may have installed, check out this page.

An extremely powerful and buggy program that binds itself to the browser, Flash is a favorite target of attackers and malware, and failing to keep up with its continuous security updates can leave users dangerously exposed. For some ideas about how to hobble or do without Flash (as well as slightly less radical solutions) check out A Month Without Adobe Flash Player.

If you choose to keep Flash, please update it today. Windows users who browse the Web with anything other than Internet Explorer may need to apply this 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 in 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.

Over the past two weeks readers have pointed KrebsOnSecurity to no fewer than three different healthcare providers that failed to provide the most basic care to protect their patients’ records online. Only one of the three companies — the subject of today’s story — required users to be logged in order to view all patient records.

A week ago I heard from Troy Mursch, an IT consultant based in Las Vegas. A big fan of proactive medical testing, Mursch said he’s been getting his various lab results reviewed annually for the past two years with the help of a company based in Frisco, Texas called True Health Diagnostics.

True Health is a privately held health services company specializing in “comprehensive testing for early detection of chronic diseases,” according to the company’s Web site.

The medical reports that True Health produces contain vast amounts of extremely personal information on patients, including indicators of genetic abnormalities as well as markers of potentially current and future diseases.

To demonstrate the flaw, Mursch logged into his account at True Health and right clicked on the PDF file for his latest health report. He showed how the site would readily cough up someone else’s detailed health records and blood tests if he modified a single digit in the link attached to that PDF record and then refreshed the page.

I alerted True Health Diagnostics immediately after verifying the flaw, and they responded by disabling the healthcare records data portal within minutes of our call. Over the weekend, True Health said it discovered and fixed the source of the problem.

“Upon discovering the potential for registered users of our patient portal to access data for individuals other than themselves, we immediately shut down the system in order to resolve any vulnerabilities,” the company said in a statement emailed to this author.  “True Health has total confidence that all patient records are fully secure at this time. We regret this situation and any harm it may have caused.”

The statement said True Health CEO Chris Grottenthaler has ordered an immediate investigation to determine which files, if any, were improperly accessed.

“It will be thorough, speedy and transparent,” the statement concludes. “Nothing is more important to us than the trust that doctors and patients put in our company.”

The company says it is still investigating how long this vulnerability may have existed. But Mursch said it appears his healthcare record was assigned by True Health a record number that was issued as part of a numerical sequence, and that the difference between the record numbers attached to a result he received recently and another set of test results produced two years ago indicate at least two million records may have been exposed in between.

“I would assume all patient records were exposed,” Mursch wrote in an email.

Alex Holden, founder of cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security, said he’s responded to a number of inquiries of late regarding clients who inadvertently published patient data online with little or no authentication needed to view sensitive health records.

Holden said he advises clients to add security components to their links to encrypt any portion of the link that contains data so that it can’t be easily reversed or manipulated. He also tells clients not to use sequential account numbers that can be discovered by simply increasing or decreasing an existing account number by a single digit.

“A lot of times the medical records are stored sequentially as PDF files and they all just sit in the same folder that patients can access with a Web browser,” Holden said. “And in many cases they are not even protected by a username and password.”

Finally, Holden said, companies should ensure their servers are always checking to see if the user is logged in before displaying records, and also checking to ensure the user has the right to view the requested record.

According to Verizon‘s newly released Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 15 percent of healthcare breaches now involve healthcare organizations. The 2017 DBIR found that healthcare organizations were tied with the retail and accommodations sector as the second-largest source of data breach victims last year.

Author’s note: After a year in which virtually every major hotel chain suffered at least one major breach, Verizon’s finding should be a sobering one for everyone concerned about the security of their healthcare records.

As I said at the outset of this story, I’m amazed that companies with so much on the line routinely fail to do basic checks to ensure customers or users can’t see beyond their own data.

Not long after I started this blog in 2010 I encountered a similar vulnerability after being approached by a security company that helps Web sites defend against online attacks. The vendor in this case offered to protect my site for free, but I was ultimately unwilling to give them any kind of control over my site.

However, the vendor did give me an account on their protection portal that was reserved for my site, and after logging in I could see my site’s sample “dashboard” even thought it hadn’t been officially set up yet. Then I had a look at the URL in my browser’s address field and noticed that it ended with a long string of numbers. On a whim, I changed the last digit in that long number to something else, refreshed the page and in an instant I was captain of some other site’s dashboard.

Needless to say, I notified them about that flaw and they fixed it quickly at the time, but that was the end of our trial for me.

Stay tuned for another installment in this series on how not to store medical records online.

Breaches involving major players in the hospitality industry continue to pile up. Today, travel industry giant Sabre Corp. disclosed what could be a significant breach of payment and customer data tied to bookings processed through a reservations system that serves more than 32,000 hotels and other lodging establishments.

In a quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today, Southlake, Texas-based Sabre said it was “investigating an incident of unauthorized access to payment information contained in a subset of hotel reservations processed through our Hospitality Solutions SynXis Central Reservations system.”

According to Sabre’s marketing literature, more than 32,000 properties use Sabre’s SynXis reservations system, described as an inventory management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that “enables hoteliers to support a multitude of rate, inventory and distribution strategies to achieve their business goals.”

Sabre said it has engaged security forensics firm Mandiant to support its investigation, and that it has notified law enforcement.

“The unauthorized access has been shut off and there is no evidence of continued unauthorized activity,” reads a brief statement that Sabre sent to affected properties today. “There is no reason to believe that any other Sabre systems beyond SynXis Central Reservations have been affected.”

Sabre’s software, data, mobile and distribution solutions are used by hundreds of airlines and thousands of hotel properties to manage critical operations, including passenger and guest reservations, revenue management, flight, network and crew management. Sabre also operates a leading global travel marketplace, which processes more than $110 billion of estimated travel spend annually by connecting travel buyers and suppliers.

Sabre told customers that it didn’t have any additional details about the breach to share at this time, so it remains unclear what the exact cause of the breach may be or for how long it may have persisted.

A card involving traveler transactions for even a small percentage of the 32,000 properties that are using Sabre’s impacted technology could jeopardize a significant number of customer credit cards in a short amount of time.

The news comes amid revelations about a blossoming breach at Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG), the parent company that manages some 5,000 hotels worldwide, including Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express.

KrebsOnSecurity first reported in December 2016 that cards used at IHG properties were being sold to fraudsters, but it took until February 2017 for IHG to announce it had found malicious software installed at front-desk systems at just a dozen of its properties. On April 18, IHG disclosed in an update on the investigation that more than 1,200 properties were affected, and that there could well be more added in the coming days.

According to Verizon‘s latest annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), malware attacks on point-of-sale systems used at front desk and hotel restaurant systems “are absolutely rampant” in the hospitality sector. Accommodation was the top industry for point-of-sale intrusions in this year’s data, with 87% of breaches within that pattern.

“Apparently, it is not only The Eagles that are destined for a long stay at the hotel,” Verizon mused in its report. “The hackers continue to be checked in indefinitely as well. Breach timelines continue to paint a rather dismal picture—with time-to-compromise being only seconds, time-to-exfiltration taking days, and times to discovery and containment staying firmly in the months camp.”

Card-stealing cyber thieves have broken into some of the largest hotel chains over the past few years. Hotel brands that have acknowledged card breaches over the last year after prompting by KrebsOnSecurity include Kimpton Hotels, Trump Hotels (twice), Hilton, Mandarin Oriental, and White Lodging (twice). Card breaches also have hit hospitality chains Starwood Hotels and Hyatt. 

In many of those incidents, thieves planted malicious software on the point-of-sale devices at restaurants and bars inside of the hotel chains. Point-of-sale based malware has driven most of the credit card breaches over the past two years, including intrusions at Target and Home Depot, as well as breaches at a slew of point-of-sale vendors. The malicious code usually is installed via hacked remote administration tools. Once the attackers have their malware loaded onto the point-of-sale devices, they can remotely capture data from each card swiped at that cash register.

Thieves can then sell that data to crooks who specialize in encoding the stolen data onto any card with a magnetic stripe, and using the cards to purchase high-priced electronics and gift cards from big-box stores like Target and Best Buy.

Readers should remember that they’re not liable for fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards, but they still have to report the unauthorized transactions. There is no substitute for keeping a close eye on your card statements. Also, consider using credit cards instead of debit cards; having your checking account emptied of cash while your bank sorts out the situation can be a hassle and lead to secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance).

The process of buying or selling a home can be extremely stressful and complex, but imagine the stress that would boil up if — at settlement — your money was wired to scammers in another country instead of to the settlement firm or escrow company. Here’s the story about a phishing email that cost a couple their home and left them scrambling for months to recover hundreds of thousands in cash that went missing.

It was late November 2016, and Jon and Dorothy Little were all set to close on a $200,000 home in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Just prior to the closing date on Dec. 2 their realtor sent an email to the Little’s and to the law firm handling the closing, asking the settlement firm for instructions on wiring the money to an escrow account.

An attorney with the closing firm responded with wiring instructions as requested, attaching a document that had the law firm’s logo and some bank account information that was represented as the seller’s account number. The Little’s realtor sent the wire on Thursday morning, the day before settlement.

“We went to closing at 1 p.m. on Friday, and after we signed all the papers, we asked the lawyers if we were going to get back the extra money we had sent them, because they hadn’t be able to give us an exact amount in the wiring instructions. At that point they told us they had never gotten the money.”

After some disagreement, both legitimate parties to the transaction agreed that someone’s email had been hacked by the fraudsters, and was used to divert the wired funds to an account the criminals controlled. The hackers had forged a copy of the law firm’s letterhead, and beneath it placed their own Bank of America account information (see screen shot above).

The owner of the Bank of America account appears to have been a willing or unwitting accomplice — also know as a “money mule” — recruited through work-at-home job schemes to receive and forward funds stolen from hacked business accounts. In this case, the money mule wired all but 10 percent of the money (a typical money mule commission) to an account at TD Bank.

Fortunately for the Littles, the FBI succeeded in having the resulting $180,000 wire transfer frozen once it hit the TD Bank account. However, efforts to recover the stolen funds were stymied immediately when the Littles’ credit union refused to give Bank of America a so-called “hold harmless” agreement that the bigger bank wanted as a legal guarantee before agreeing to help.

Charisse Castagnoli, an adjunct professor of law at the John Marshall Law School, said banks have a fiduciary duty to their customers to honor their requests in good faith, and as such they tend to be very nervous legally about colluding with another bank to reverse payment instructions by one of their own customers. The “hold harmless” agreement is usually sought by the bank which received a fraudulent wire transfer, Castagnoli said, and it requires the responding bank to assume any and all liability for costs that the requesting bank may later incur should the owner of account which received the fraudulent wire decide to dispute the payment reversal.

“When it comes to wire fraud cases the banks have to move very quickly because once the wires make it outside the U.S. to foreign banks, the money is usually as good as gone,” Castagnoli said. “The receiver or transferee usually insists on a hold harmless agreement because they’re moving the money on behalf of their own account holder, kind of going against their own client which is a big ‘no-no’ when you’re a fiduciary.”

But in this case, the credit union in which the Littles had invested virtually all of their money for more than 40 years decided it could not in good faith provide that hold harmless agreement, because doing so would stipulate that the credit union affirms the victim (the Littles) hadn’t willingly and knowing initiated the wire, when in fact they had.

“I talked to the wire dept multiple times,” Mr. Little said of the folks at his financial institution, Atlanta, Ga.-based Delta Community Credit Union (DCCU). “They finally put me through to the vice president of loss prevention at the credit union. I’m not sure they even believed all that was going on. They finally came back and told me they couldn’t do it. Their rules would not allow them to send a hold harmless letter because I had asked them to do something and they had done it. They had a big meeting last week with apparently the CEO of the credit union and several other people. Then they called me on Monday again and told me they would not could not do it.”

The Littles had to cancel the contract on the house they were prepared to occupy in December. Most of their cash was tied up in this account that the banks were haggling over, and so they opted to get a heavily mortgaged small townhome instead, with the intention of paying off the mortgage when their stolen funds are returned.

“We canceled the contract on the house because the sellers really needed to sell it,” Jon Little said.

The DCCU has yet to respond to my requests for comment. But less than a day after KrebsOnSecurity reached out to the credit union for comment about the Littles’ story, the bank informed the Littles that the other bank would soon have its hold harmless letter — freeing up their $180,000 after more than four months in legal limbo.

The Littles’ story has a fairly happy ending, however most of the other few dozens stories previously featured on this blog about wayward mortgage, escrow and payroll payments wound up with the victim losing six figures at least.

One of the more recent advertisers on this blog — Ninjio — specializes in developing custom, “gamified” security awareness training videos for clients. “The Homeless Homebuyer,” one of the videos Ninjio produced for a government client seems appropriate here: It features an animated FBI agent breaking the bad news to some would-be homeowners that their money is gone and so are their dreams of a new home — all because everyone blindly trusted unsecured email for what is essentially a high-risk cash transaction.

I like the video because its message is fairly stark and real: You could get screwed if you don’t take this seriously and proceed carefully, because once the money’s gone it usually stays gone. Check it out here:

So here’s what you need to know if you or anyone you know, love or even like are about to buy or sell a home: Never wire money based on the say-so of one party to the transaction made via email. You simply don’t know if their account is hacked, so from a self-preservation standpoint it’s best to assume it is.

Agree in advance who will contact whom — preferably by phone — on settlement day to receive the wiring details, and who will manage the wiring process. Never trust bank account details and payment instructions sent via email. Always double or even triple check any instructions for wiring money at settlement. Confirm all wiring instructions in person if possible, or else over the phone.

By the way, these same precautions can help make organizations less susceptible to CEO fraud schemes, email scams in which the attacker spoofs the boss and tricks an employee at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudster.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been keeping a running tally of the financial devastation visited on companies via CEO fraud scams. In June 2016, the FBI estimated that crooks had stolen nearly $3.1 billion from more than 22,000 victims of these wire fraud schemes.

Castagnoli said many credit unions and small banks don’t have the legal staff with the clearance to make calls on whether to issue a hold harmless agreement, and so they usually try to punt on that when requested. Were she in The Littles’ position, Castagnoli said she would have called the head of the credit union and demanded assistance.

“If the head of the bank wouldn’t do it, I’d call my congressperson or a state banking regulator,” she said.

If you’re selling or buying the home yourself and somehow also in charge of wiring money, consider using a Live CD approach (all of these “live” Linux distributions will just as happily run on USB-based flash drives). I have long recommend Live Linux usage as a smart option for small businesses to avoid paying dearly when a Windows banking trojan snarfs their business banking credentials.