A 20-year-old man from the United Kingdom was sentenced to two years in prison today after admitting to operating and selling access to “Titanium Stresser,” a simple-to-use service that let paying customers launch crippling online attacks against Web sites and individual Internet users.

Adam Mudd of Herfordshire, U.K. admitted to three counts of computer misuse connected with his creating and operating the attack service, also known as a “stresser” or “booter” tool. Services like Titanium Stresser coordinate so-called “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks that hurl huge barrages of junk data at a site in a bid to make it crash or become otherwise unreachable to legitimate visitors.

According to U.K. prosecutors, Mudd’s Titanium Stresser service was used by others in more than 1.7 million denial-of-service attacks against victims worldwide, with most countries in the world affected at some point. He originally built the booter service at the age of 15, earning more than $300,000 in ill-gotten gains from it. Also during his interviews, he admitted security breaches against his own college while he was there studying computer science.

Mudd pleaded guilty to three offences under the U.K. Computer Misuse Act and a further offense of money laundering under the Proceeds of Crime Act in October 2016.

“Today, he was sentenced to 24 months imprisonment for his own DDoS attacks, nine months for running a titanium stressor service and 24 months for money laundering the proceeds made from the stressor service, all to run concurrently,” reads a press release issued by the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU), an anti-cybercrime unit that worked with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency to investigate Mudd.

Detective Chief Inspector Martin Peters of the ERSOU’s Regional Crime Unit recalled that at sentencing the judge said the defendant likely would have received six years if he’d been tried as an adult and if he had no medical issues. Mudd had been slated to be sentenced last week, but that hearing was delayed until today after the court heard medical testimony on Mudd’s apparent struggles with autism.

The Mudd case is the latest in a string of law enforcement actions in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere targeting booter service operators and their customers. In December 2016, federal investigators in the United States and Europe arrested nearly three-dozen people suspected of patronizing booter services. That crackdown was part of an effort by authorities to weaken demand for booter and stresser services and to impress upon customers that hiring someone to launch cyberattacks on your behalf can land you in jail.

In October 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged two 19-year-old men alleged to have run booter services tied to the “Lizard Squad” hacking group. That same month the sprawling discussion forum Hackforums — once the most bustling marketplace on the Internet where people could compare and purchase booter and stresser service subscriptions — announced that it was permanently banning the sale and advertising of booters. 

Last month, authorities in Israel said they were preparing a case against two 18-year-old Israeli men who investigators there say operated the wildly popular “vDOS” booter service. The proprietors of vDOS were in business for four years prior to being exposed by KrebsOnSecurity. During just two of those four years in operation vDOS made more than $600,000 helping paying customer coordinate hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of DDoS attacks.

The detail about Mudd having attacked the very same school he was attending as a computer science student seemed both interesting and familiar. Then I remembered: This same dynamic was at work with a young man approximately Mudd’s age who lives in New Jersey and recently was implicated by many of his close associates and a great deal of circumstantial evidence as a co-author of the Mirai botnet computer code.

Mirai is a network worm that enslaves poorly secured “Internet of Things” devices like security cameras and digital video recorders for use in extremely powerful DDoS attacks capable of knocking almost any target offline.

After Mirai took my site offline for several days last year, I spent many hours trying to figure out who was responsible for writing and unleashing the malware. All signs pointed to a computer science student at Rutgers University who used a large Mirai botnet to attack the university repeatedly — all the while using his hacker alter ego to taunt the university in online interviews.

The authorities in the U.K. say they are hoping to make an example of Mudd as part of a broader education effort to divert talented, smart kids away from malicious hacking and toward more productive endeavors.

“Adam Mudd’s case is a regrettable one, because this young man clearly has a lot of skill, but he has been utilising that talent for personal gain at the expense of others,” the ERSOU press release observes. “We want to make clear it is not our wish to unnecessarily criminalise young people, but want to harness those skills before they accelerate into crime. It is important that this case sends out a clear message to others who may be tempted by committing cybercrime or who are already engaging in cyber scams from the comfort of their own bedrooms, to consider what they are doing and it is for parents to know and understand what your children are doing online.”

Roman Seleznev, a 32-year-old Russian cybercriminal and prolific credit card thief, was sentenced Friday to 27 years in federal prison. That is a record punishment for hacking violations in the United States and by all accounts one designed to send a message to criminal hackers everywhere. But a close review of the case suggests that Seleznev’s record sentence was severe in large part because the evidence against him was substantial and yet he declined to cooperate with prosecutors prior to his trial.

The son of an influential Russian politician, Seleznev made international headlines in 2014 after he was captured while vacationing in The Maldives, a popular vacation spot for Russians and one that many Russian cybercriminals previously considered to be out of reach for western law enforcement agencies.

However, U.S. authorities were able to negotiate a secret deal with the Maldivian government to apprehend Seleznev. Following his capture, Seleznev was whisked away to Guam briefly before being transported to Washington state to stand trial for computer hacking charges.

The U.S. Justice Department says the laptop found with him when he was arrested contained more than 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers, and that evidence presented at trial showed that Seleznev earned tens of millions of dollars defrauding more than 3,400 financial institutions.

Investigators also reportedly found a smoking gun: a password cheat sheet that linked Seleznev to a decade’s worth of criminal hacking.

Seleznev was initially identified as a major cybercriminal by U.S. government investigators in 2011, when prosecutors in Nevada named him as part of a conspiracy involving more than three dozen popular merchants on carder[dot]su, a bustling fraud forum where he and other members openly marketed various cybercrime-oriented services.

Known by the hacker handle “nCux,” Seleznev operated multiple online shops that sold stolen credit and debit card data. According to Seleznev’s indictment in the Nevada case, he was part of a group that hacked into restaurants between 2009 and 2011 and planted malicious software to steal card data from store point-of-sale devices.

In Seattle on Aug. 25, 2016, Seleznev was convicted of 10 counts of wire fraud, eight counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, nine counts of obtaining information from a protected computer, nine counts of possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices and two counts of aggravated identity theft.

“Simply put, Roman Seleznev has harmed more victims and caused more financial loss than perhaps any other defendant that has appeared before the court,” federal prosecutors charged in their sentencing memorandum. “This prosecution is unprecedented.”

Seleznev’s lawyer Igor Litvak called his client’s sentence “draconian,” saying that Seleznev was gravely injured in a 2011 terrorist attack in Morocco, has Hepatitis B and is not well physically.

Litvak noted that his client also faces two more prosecutions — in Georgia and Nevada, and that his client is likely to be shipped off to Nevada soon.

“It’s unprecedented, yes, but it’s also a draconian sentence for a person who is very gravely ill,” Litvak said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “He’s not going to live that long. He’s going to die in jail. I’m certain of that.”

ANALYSIS

As for the severity of his sentence, Seleznev did himself no favors by rededicating himself to his carding empire after having been clearly marked by U.S. investigators in the 2011 indictment as a key figure in an online organized crime ring.

Many of the documents related to Seleznev’s prosecution and conviction in Washington state last week remain sealed, as he still faces federal criminal hacking charges in Nevada and Georgia. But former black hat Russian hacker turned political and cybersecurity blogger Andrey “Sporaw” Sporov published snippets from documents apparently related to Seleznev’s prosecution indicating that investigators with the U.S. Secret Service and FBI met with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2009 to discuss Seleznev’s activities, presenting “substantial” evidence that Seleznev was a bigtime cybercrook.

Seleznev’s online alter ego nCux reportedly got word of the meeting, and was soon after seen deleting his identities on hacker forums and saying he was closing up shop:

“As U.S. Probation noted, the information that U.S. law enforcement was investigating Seleznev ‘clearly got back to Mr. Seleznev,'” reads the document. “Indeed, Seleznev had his own contacts inside the FSB. In chat messages between Seleznev and an associate from 2008, Seleznev stated that he had obtained protection through the law enforcement contacts in the computer crime squad of the FSB. Later, in 2010, Seleznev told another associate that the FSB knew his identity and was working with the FBI.”.

But nCux didn’t go away, he merely reinvented himself as “Bulba,” operating a number of carding sites including track2[dot]name, bulba[dot]cc, and 2Pac[dot]cc. These sites sold tens of thousands of “dumps,” data that thieves encode onto new plastic cards and use to buy high-priced electronics and gift cards from big box retailers. Seleznev’s sites specialized in selling tens of thousands of dumps at a time to criminal groups and street gangs operating throughout the United States

Seleznev reportedly used this money to live an extravagant lifestyle, buying up properties in Bali, Indonesia. Photographs seized from Seleznev show his associates with large bundles of cash, at luxurious resorts, and posing for photographs next to flashy sports cars. Just before his capture, Seleznev reportedly spent over $20,000 to stay in a resort in the Maldives and boasting of having rented the most expensive accommodations there.

Sporov’s documents describe Seleznev’s years to evade law enforcement officials following his then-sealed indictment in Nevada:

“Seleznev remained at large for over three years. During this period, Seleznev carefully evaded apprehension, employing practices like buying last-minute plane tickets to avoid giving authorities advance notice of his travel plans. Seleznev obtained an account with the U.S. Court’s PACER system, which he monitored for criminal indictments naming him or his nicknames. He avoided travel to countries that had entered into extradition treaties with the United States. Indeed, when Seleznev was finally confronted by U.S. agents in the Maldives, his first words were to question whether the United States had an extradition treaty with the Maldives.”

The defendant also apparently burned through multiple lawyers, almost all of whom appear to have advised him to seek a plea deal with the U.S. government:

“Seleznev repeatedly attempted to manipulate and protract these proceedings, resulting in a cumulative delay of 26 months, and six sets of counsel, between his capture and trial….Transcripts of jail calls previously submitted to the Court reveal that, in the days leading up to the hearing, Seleznev and his father resolved to delay the hearing so that they could work on a secret strategy they elliptically referred to as ‘Uncle Andrey’s option.’ To manufacture the delay, Seleznev’s father suggested that Seleznev either ‘get sick’ or ‘completely stop the communication with the lawyers.'”

Seleznev is the son of Valery Seleznev, a prominent member of the Russian Duma (Russia’s parliament) and is considered an ally of President Vladimir Putin. As the Seattle Times wrote at Seleznev’s conviction in 2016, “federal prosecutors accused Seleznev and his father of plotting to tamper with witnesses and possibly discussing an escape from the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac. The assertions were based on recorded conversations, according to the government.”

Perhaps Mr. Seleznev thought his father’s influence and/or his own apparent connections with Russian law enforcement officials would rescue him. Maybe Seleznev believed he could prevail against the U.S. government in court.

But it seems clear that Seleznev’s record 27-year sentence had at least as much to do with the impact of his crimes as it did the enormity of the charges and evidence against him combined with his refusal to cooperate with investigators.

Seleznev’s lawyer Igor Litvak said his client declined a plea deal prior to his trial, and by the time Seleznev had changed his mind the trial was over and the government no longer needed the information he could offer. Prosecutors sought to put him away for 35 years: They got seven years shy of that request.

“The prosecution said if he would have cooperated this case would have turned out very differently,” Litvak said.

The docket for Seleznev’s case is available here and includes a number of unsealed documents related to this case.

Last month Yours Truly got snookered by a too-good-to-be-true online scam in which some dirtball hijacked an Amazon merchant’s account and used it to pimp steeply discounted electronics that he never intended to sell. Amazon refunded my money, and the legitimate seller never did figure out how his account was hacked. But such attacks are becoming more prevalent of late as crooks increasingly turn to online crimeware services that make it a cakewalk to cash out stolen passwords.

The item at Amazon that drew me to this should-have-known-better bargain was a Sonos wireless speaker that is very pricey and as a consequence has hung on my wish list for quite some time. Then I noticed an established seller with great feedback on Amazon was advertising a “new” model of the same speaker for 32 percent off. So on March 4, I purchased it straight away — paying for it with my credit card via Amazon’s one-click checkout.

A day later I received a nice notice from the seller stating that the item had shipped. Even Amazon’s site seemed to be fooled because for several days Amazon’s package tracking system updated its progress slider bar steadily from left to right.

Suddenly the package seemed to stall, as did any updates about where it was or when it might arrive. This went on for almost a week. On March 10, I received an email from the legitimate owner of the seller’s account stating that his account had been hacked.

Identifying myself as a reporter, I asked the seller to tell me what he knew about how it all went down. He agreed to talk if I left his name out of it.

“Our seller’s account email address was changed,” he wrote. “One night everything was fine and the next morning our seller account had a email address not associated with us. We could not access our account for a week. Fake electronic products were added to our storefront.”

He couldn’t quite explain the fake tracking number claim, but nevertheless the tactic does seem to be part of an overall effort to delay suspicion on the part of the buyer while the crook seeks to maximize the number of scam sales in a short period of time.

“The hacker then indicated they were shipped with fake tracking numbers on both the fake products they added and the products we actually sell,” the seller wrote. “They were only looking to get funds through Amazon. We are working with Amazon to refund all money that were spent buying these false products.”

As these things go, the entire ordeal wasn’t awful — aside maybe from the six days spent in great anticipation of audiophilic nirvana (alas, after my refund I thought better of the purchase and put the item back on my wish list.) But apparently I was in plenty of good (or bad?) company.

The Wall Street Journal notes that in recent weeks “attackers have changed the bank-deposit information on Amazon accounts of active sellers to steal tens of thousands of dollars from each, according to several sellers and advisers. Attackers also have hacked into the Amazon accounts of sellers who haven’t used them recently to post nonexistent merchandise for sale at steep discounts in an attempt to pocket the cash.”

Perhaps fraudsters are becoming more brazen of late with hacked Amazon accounts, but the same scams mentioned above happen every day on plenty of other large merchandising sites. The sad reality is that hacked Amazon seller accounts have been available for years at underground shops for about half the price of a coffee at Starbucks.

The majority of this commerce is made possible by one or two large account credential vendors in the cybercrime underground, and these vendors have been collecting, vetting and reselling hacked account credentials at major e-commerce sites for years.

I have no idea where the thieves got the credentials for the guy whose account was used to fake sell the Sonos speaker. But it’s likely to have been from a site like SLILPP, a crime shop which specializes in selling hacked Amazon accounts. Currently, the site advertises more than 340,000 Amazon account usernames and passwords for sale.

The price is about USD $2.50 per credential pair. Buyer scan select accounts by balance, country, associated credit/debit card type, card expiration date and last order date. Account credentials that also include the password to the victim’s associated email inbox can double the price.

If memory serves correctly, SLILPP started off years ago mainly as a PayPal and eBay accounts seller (hence the “PP”). “Slil” is transliterated Russian for “слил,” which in this context may mean “leaked,” “download” or “to steal,” as in password data that has leaked or been stolen in other breaches. SLILPP has vastly expanded his store in the years since: It currently advertises more than 7.1 million credentials for sale from hundreds of popular bank and e-commerce sites.

The site’s proprietor has been at this game so long he probably deserves a story of his own soon, but for now I’ll say only that he seems to do a brisk business buying up credentials being gathered by credential-testing crime crews — cyber thieves who spend a great deal of time harvesting and enriching credentials stolen and/or leaked from major data breaches at social networking and e-commerce providers in recent years.

Fraudsters can take a list of credentials stolen from, say, the Myspace.com breach (in which some 427 million credentials were posted online) and see how many of those email address and password pairs from the MySpace accounts also work at hundreds of other bank and e-commerce sites.

Password thieves often then turn to crimeware-as-a-service tools like Sentry MBA, which can vastly simplify the process of checking a list of account credentials at multiple sites. To make blocking their password-checking activities more challenging for retailers and banks to identify and block, these thieves often try to route the Internet traffic from their password-guessing tools through legions of open Web proxies, hacked PCs or even stolen/carded cloud computing instances.

PASSWORD RE-USE: THE ENGINE OF ALL ONLINE FRAUD

In response, many major retailers are being forced to alert customers when they see known account credential testing activity that results in a successful login (thus suggesting the user’s account credentials were replicated and compromised elsewhere). However, from the customer’s perspective, this is tantamount to the e-commerce provider experiencing a breach even though the user’s penchant for recycling their password across multiple sites is invariably the culprit.

There are a multitude of useful security lessons here, some of which bear repeating because their lack of general observance is the cause of most password woes today (aside from the fact that so many places still rely on passwords and stupid things like “secret questions” in the first place). First and foremost: Do not re-use the same password across multiple sites. Secondly, but equally important: Never re-use your email password anywhere else.

Also, with a few exceptions, password length is generally more important than password complexity, and complex passwords are difficult to remember anyway. I prefer to think in terms of “pass phrases,” which are more like sentences or verses that are easy to remember.

If you have difficult recalling even unique passphrases, a password manager can help you pick and remember strong, unique passwords for each site you interact with, requiring only one strong master password to unlock any of them. Oh, and if the online account in question allows 2-factor authentication, be sure to take advantage of that.

I hope it’s clear that Amazon is just one of the many platforms where fraudsters lurk. SLILPP currently is selling stolen credentials for nearly 500 other banks and e-commerce sites. The full list of merchants targeted by this particularly bustling fraud shop is here (.txt file).

As for the “buyer beware” aspect of this tale, in retrospect there were several warning signs that I either ignored or neglected to assign much weight. For starters, the deal that snookered me was for a luxury product on sale for 32 percent off without much explanation as to why the apparently otherwise pristine item was so steeply discounted.

Also, while the seller had a stellar history of selling products on Amazon for many years (with overwhelmingly positive feedback on virtually all of his transactions) he did not have a history of selling the type of product that thieves tried to sell through his account. The old adage “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is,” ages really well in cyberspace.

Reading junk spam messages isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but sometimes fun can be had when you take a moment to check who really sent the email. Here’s the simple story of how a recent spam email advertising celebrity “diet pills” was traced back to a Washington, D.C.-area defense contractor that builds tactical communications systems for the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

Your average spam email can contain a great deal of information about the systems used to blast junk email. If you’re lucky, it may even offer insight into the organization that owns the networked resources (computers, mobile devices) which have been hacked for use in sending or relaying junk messages.

Earlier this month, anti-spam activist and expert Ron Guilmette found himself poring over the “headers” for a spam message that set off a curious alert. “Headers” are the usually unseen addressing and routing details that accompany each message. They’re generally unseen because they’re hidden unless you know how and where to look for them.

Let’s take the headers from this particular email — from April 12, 2017 — as an example. To the uninitiated, email headers may seem like an overwhelming dump of information. But there really are only a few things we’re interested in here (Guilmette’s actual email address has been modified to “ronsdomain.example.com” in the otherwise unaltered spam message headers below):

Return-Path: <dan@gtacs.com>
X-Original-To: rfg-myspace@ronsdomain.example.com
Delivered-To: rfg-myspace@ronsdomain.example.com
Received: from host.psttsxserver.com (host.tracesystems.com [72.52.186.80])
by subdomain.ronsdomain.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FE083AE87
for <rfg-myspace@ronsdomain.example.com>; Wed, 12 Apr 2017 13:37:44 -0700 (PDT)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; q=dns/txt; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gtacs.com;
s=default; h=MIME-Version:Content-Type:Date:Message-ID:Subject:To:From:
Sender:Reply-To:Cc:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Content-ID:Content-Description:
Resent-Date:Resent-From:Resent-Sender:Resent-To:Resent-Cc:Resent-Message-ID:
In-Reply-To:References:List-Id:List-Help:List-Unsubscribe:List-Subscribe:
List-Post:List-Owner:List-Archive;
Received: from [186.226.237.238] (port=41986 helo=[127.0.0.1])
by host.psttsxserver.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:256)
(Exim 4.87)
(envelope-from <dan@gtacs.com>)
id 1cyP1J-0004K8-OR
for rfg-myspace@ronsdomain.example.com; Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:37:42 -0400
From: dan@gtacs.com
To: rfg-myspace@ronsdomain.example.com
Subject: Discover The Secret How Movies & Pop Stars Are Still In Shape
Message-ID: <F5E99999.A1F67C94585E5E2F@gtacs.com>
X-Priority: 3
Importance: Normal
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2017 22:37:39 +0200
X-Original-Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=”–InfrawareEmailBoundaryDepth1_FD5E8CC5–”
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Infraware POLARIS Mobile Mailer v2.5
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname – host.psttsxserver.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain – ronsdomain.example.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID – [47 12] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain – gtacs.com
X-Get-Message-Sender-Via: host.psttsxserver.com: authenticated_id: dan@gtacs.com
X-Authenticated-Sender: host.psttsxserver.com: dan@gtacs.com

Celebrities always have to look good and that’s as hard as you might
{… snipped…}

In this case, the return address is dan@gtacs.com. The other bit to notice is the Internet address and domain referenced in the fourth line, after “Received,” which reads: “from host.psttsxserver.com (host.tracesystems.com [72.52.186.80])”

Gtacs.com belongs to the Trace Systems GTACS Team Portal, a Web site explaining that GTACS is part of the Trace Systems Team, which contracts to provide “a full range of tactical communications systems, systems engineering, integration, installation and technical support services to the Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Intelligence Community customers.” The company lists some of its customers here.

Both Gtacs.com and tracesystems.com say the companies “provide Cybersecurity and Intelligence expertise in support of national security interests: “GTACS is a contract vehicle that will be used by a variety of customers within the scope of C3T systems, equipment, services and data,” the company’s site says. The “C3T” part is military speak for “Command, Control, Communications, and Tactical.”

Passive domain name system (DNS) records maintained by Farsight Security for the Internet address listed in the spam headers — 72.52.186.80 — show that gtacs.com was at one time on that same Internet address along with many domains and subdomains associated with Trace Systems.

It is true that some of an email’s header information can be forged. For example, spammers and their tools can falsify the email address in the “from:” line of the message, as well as in the “reply-to:” portion of the missive. But neither appears to have been forged in this particular piece of pharmacy spam.

I forwarded this spam message back to Dan@gtacs.com, the apparent sender. Receiving no response from Dan after several days, I grew concerned that cybercriminals might be rooting around inside the networks of this defense contractor that does communications for the U.S. military. Clumsy and not terribly bright spammers, but intruders to be sure. So I forwarded the spam message to a Linkedin contact at Trace Systems who does incident response contracting work for the company.

My Linkedin source forwarded the inquiry to a “task lead” at Trace who said he’d been informed gtacs.com wasn’t a Trace Systems domain. Seeking more information in the face of many different facts that support a different conclusion, I escalated the inquiry to Matthew Sodano, a vice president and chief information officer at Trace Systems Inc.

“The domain and site in question is hosted and maintained for us by an outside provider,” Sodano said. “We have alerted them to this issue and they are investigating. The account has been disabled.”

Presumably, the company’s “outside provider” was Power Storm Technologies, the company that apparently owns the servers which sent the unauthorized spam from Dan@gtacs.com. Power Storm did not return messages seeking comment.

According to Guilmette, whoever Dan is or was at Gtacs.com, he got his account compromised by some fairly inept spammers who evidently did not know or didn’t care that they were inside of a U.S. defense contractor which specializes in custom military-grade communications. Instead, the intruders chose to use those systems in a way almost guaranteed to call attention to the compromised account and hacked servers used to forward the junk email.

“Some…contractor who works for a Vienna, Va. based government/military ‘cybersecurity’ contractor company has apparently lost his outbound email credentials (which are probably useful also for remote login) to a spammer who, I believe, based on the available evidence, is most likely located in Romania,” Guilmette wrote in an email to this author.

Guilmette told KrebsOnSecurity that he’s been tracking this particular pill spammer since Sept. 2015. Asked why he’s so certain the same guy is responsible for this and other specific spams, Guilmette shared that the spammer composes his spam messages with the same telltale HTML “signature” in the hyperlink that forms the bulk of the message: An extremely old version of Microsoft Office.

This spammer apparently didn’t mind spamming Web-based discussion lists. For example, he even sent one of his celebrity diet pill scams to a list maintained by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional Internet registry for Canada and the United States. ARIN’s list scrubbed the HTML file that the spammer attached to the message. Clicking the included link to view the scrubbed attachment sent to the ARIN list turns up this page. And if you look near the top of that page, you’ll see something that says:

”  … xmlns:m=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml” …”

“Of course, there are a fair number of regular people who are also still using this ancient MS Office to compose emails, but as far as I can tell, this is the only big-time spammer who is using this at the moment,” Guilmette said. “I’ve got dozens and dozens of spams, all from this same guy, stretching back about 18 months.  They all have the same style and all were composed with “/office/2004/12/”.

Guilmette claims that the same spammers who’ve been sending that ancient Office spam from defense contractors also have been spamming from compromised “Internet of Things” devices, like a hacked video conferencing system based in China. Guilmette says the spammer has been known to send out malicious links in email that use malicious JavaScript exploits to snarf credentials stored on the compromised machine, and he guesses that Dan@gtacs.com probably opened one of the booby-trapped JavaScript links.

“When and if he finds any, he uses those stolen credentials to send out yet more spam via the mail server of the ‘legit’ company,” Guilmette said. “And because the spams are now coming out of ‘legit’ mail servers belonging to ‘legit’ companies, they never get blocked, by Spamhaus or by any other blacklists.”

We can only hope that the spammer who pulled this off doesn’t ever realize the probable value of this specific set of login credentials that he has managed to make off with, among many others, Guilmette said.

“If he did realize what he has in his hands, I feel sure that the Russians and/or the Chinese would be more than happy to buy those credentials from him, probably reimbursing him more for those than any amount he could hope to make in years of spamming.”

This isn’t the first time a small email oops may have created a big problem for a Washington-area cybersecurity defense contractor. Last month, Defense Point Security — which provides cyber contracting services to the security operations center for DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division — alerted some 200-300 current and former employees that their W-2 tax information was given away to scammers after an employee fell for a phishing scam that spoofed the boss.

Want to know more about how to find and read email headers? This site has a handy reference showing you how to reveal headers on more than two-dozen different email programs, including Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail. This primer from HowToGeek.com explains what kinds of information you can find in email headers and what they all mean.

In December 2016, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that fraud experts at various banks were seeing a pattern suggesting a widespread credit card breach across some 5,000 hotels worldwide owned by InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). In February, IHG acknowledged a breach but said it appeared to involve only a dozen properties. Now, IHG has released data showing that cash registers at more than 1,000 of its properties were compromised with malicious software designed to siphon customer debit and credit card data.

Headquartered in Denham, U.K., IHG operates more than 5,000 hotels across nearly 100 countries. The company’s dozen brands include Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, InterContinental, Kimpton Hotels, and Crowne Plaza.

According to a statement released by IHG, the investigation “identified signs of the operation of malware designed to access payment card data from cards used onsite at front desks at certain IHG-branded franchise hotel locations between September 29, 2016 and December 29, 2016.”

IHG didn’t say how many properties total were affected, although it has published a state-by-state lookup tool available here. I counted 28 in my hometown state of Virginia alone, California more than double that; Alabama almost the same number as Virginia. So north of 1,000 locations nationwide seems very likely.

IHG has been offering its franchised properties a free examination by an outside computer forensic team hired to look for signs of the same malware infestation known to have hit other properties. But not all property owners have been anxious to take the company up on that offer. As a consequence, there may be more breached hotel locations yet to be added to the state lookup tool.

IHG franchises who accepted the security inspections were told they would receive a consolidated report sharing information specific to the property, and that “your acquiring bank and/or processor may contact you regarding this investigation.”

IHG also has been trying to steer franchised properties toward adopting its “secure payment solution” (SPS) that ensures cardholder data remains encrypted at all times and at every “hop” across the electronic transaction. According to IHG, properties that used its solution prior to the initial intrusion on Sept. 29, 2016 were not affected.

“Many more properties implemented SPS after September 29, 2016, and the implementation of SPS ended the ability of the malware to find payment card data,” IHG wrote.

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.

It’s a good bet that none of the above-mentioned companies were running point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solutions before they started hemorrhaging customer credit cards. P2PE is an added cost for sure, but it can protect customer card data even on point-of-sale systems that are already compromised because the malware can no longer read the data going across the wire.

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).