Cybercriminals have long relied on compromised Web sites to host malicious software for use in drive-by download attacks, but at least one crime gang is taking it a step further: New research shows that crooks spreading the Dyre malware for use in cyberheists are leveraging hacked wireless routers to deliver their password-stealing crimeware.

Dyre (a.k.a. “Dyreza”) is generally installed by a downloader Trojan that is flagged by most tools under the name “Upatre.” The latter is most often delivered via malicious e-mails containing a link which directs unsuspecting users to servers hosting malicious javascript or a basic redirection to a malicious payload. If the user clicks the malicious link, it may serve a bogus file — such as an invoice or bank statement — that if extracted and opened reaches out to an Upatre control server to download Dyre.

According to a recent in-depth report from Symantec, Dyre is a highly developed piece of malware, capable of hijacking all three major web browsers and intercepting internet banking sessions in order to harvest the victim’s credentials and send them to the attackers. Dyre is often used to download additional malware on to the victim’s computer, and in many cases the victim machine is added to a botnet which is then used to send out thousands of spam emails in order to spread the threat.

Recently, researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center in Warrington, UK began tracking Upatre being served from hundreds of compromised home routers — particularly routers powered by MikroTik and Ubiquiti’s AirOS.

“We have seen literally hundreds of wireless access points, and routers connected in relation to this botnet, usually AirOS,” said Bryan Campbell, lead threat intelligence analyst at Fujitsu. “The consistency in which the botnet is communicating with compromised routers in relation to both distribution and communication leads us to believe known vulnerabilities are being exploited in the firmware which allows this to occur.”

Campbell said it’s not clear why so many routers appear to be implicated in the botnet. Perhaps the attackers are merely exploiting routers with default credentials (e.g., “ubnt” for both username and password on most Ubiquiti AirOS routers). Fujitsu also found a disturbing number of the systems in the botnet had the port for telnet connections wide open.

In January 2015, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the botnet used to attack and briefly knock offline Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony Playstation’s networks relied entirely on hacked routers, all of which appeared to have been compromised remotely via telnet.

Whether you use a router from Ubiquiti or any other manufacturer, if you haven’t changed the default credentials on the device, it’s time to take care of that. If you don’t know whether you’ve changed the default administrative credentials for your wired or wireless router, you probably haven’t. Pop on over to routerpasswords.com and look up the make and model of your router.

To see whether your credentials are the default, you’ll need to open up a browser and enter the numeric address of your router’s administration page. For most routers, this will be 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. This page lists the default internal address for most routers. If you have no luck there, here’s a decent tutorial that should help most users find this address. And check out my Tools for a Safer PC primer for more tips on how to beef up the security of your router and your Web browser.

We often hear about the impact of cybercrime, but too seldom do we read about the successes that law enforcement officials have in apprehending those responsible and bringing them to justice. Last week was an especially busy time for cybercrime justice, with authorities across the globe bringing arrests, prosecutions and some cases stiff sentences in connection with a broad range of cyber crimes, including ATM and bank account cashouts, malware distribution and “swatting” attacks.

Prosecutors in New York had a big week. Appearing in the U.S. court system for the first time last week was Ercan “Segate” Findikoglu, a 33-year-old Turkish man who investigators say was the mastermind behind a series of Oceans 11-type ATM heists between 2011 and 2013 that netted thieves more than $55 million.

According to prosecutors, Findikoglu organized the so-called “ATM cashouts” by hacking into networks of several credit and debit card payment processors. With each processor, the intruders were able to simultaneously lift the daily withdrawal limits on numerous prepaid accounts and dramatically increase the account balances on those cards to allow ATM withdrawals far in excess of the legitimate card balances.

The cards were then cloned and sent to dozens of co-conspirators around the globe, who used the cards at ATMs to withdraw millions in cash in the span of just a few hours. Investigators say these attacks are known in the cybercrime underground as “unlimited operations” because the manipulation of withdrawal limits lets the crooks steal literally unlimited amounts of cash until the operation is shut down.

Two of the attacks attributed to Findikoglu and his alleged associates were first reported on this blog, including a February 2011 attack against Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), and a $5 million heist in late 2012 involving a card network in India. The most brazen and lucrative heist, a nearly $40 million cashout against the Bank of Muscat in Oman, was covered in a May 2013 New York Times piece, which concludes with a vignette about the violent murder of alleged accomplice in the scheme.

Also in New York, a Manhattan federal judge sentenced the co-creator of the “Blackshades” Trojan to nearly five years in prison after pleading guilty to helping hundreds of people use and spread the malware. Twenty-five year old Swedish national Alexander Yucel was ordered to forfeit $200,000 and relinquish all of the computer equipment he used in commission of his crimes.

As detailed in this May 2014 piece, Blackshades Users Had It Coming, the malware was sophisticated but marketed mainly on English language cybecrime forums to young men who probably would have a hard time hacking their way out of a paper bag, let alone into someone’s computer. Initially sold via PayPal for just $40, Blackshades offered users a way to remotely spy on victims, and even included tools and tutorials to help users infect victim PCs. Many of Yucel’s customers also have been rounded up by law enforcement here in the U.S. an abroad.

In a small victory for people fed up with so-called “swatting” — the act of calling in a fake hostage or bomb threat to emergency services with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to a specific address — 22-year-old Connecticut resident Matthew Tollis pleaded guilty last week to multiple swatting incidents. (In an unrelated incident in 2013, this reporter was the victim of swatting, which resulted in our home being surrounded by a dozen or so police and Yours Truly being handcuffed in front of the whole neighborhood).

Tollis admitted belonging to a group that called itself “TeAM CrucifiX or Die,” a loose-knit cadre of young Microsoft XBox and swatting enthusiasts which later renamed itself the “ISIS Gang.” Interestingly, these past few weeks have seen the prosecution of another alleged ISIS Gang member — 17-year-old Finnish miscreant who goes by the nicknames “Ryan” and “Zeekill.” Ryan, whose real name is Julius Kivimaki, was one of several individuals who claimed to be involved in the Lizard Squad attacks that brought down the XBox and Sony Playstation networks in December 2014.

Kivimaki is being prosecuted in Finland for multiple alleged offenses, including payment fraud, money laundering and telecommunications harassment. Under Finnish law, Kivimaki cannot be extradited, but prosecutors there are seeking at least two to three years of jail time for the young man, who will turn 18 in August.

Finally, investigators with Europol announced the arrest of five individuals in Ukraine who are suspected of developing, exploiting and distributing the ZeuS and SpyEye malware — well known banking Trojans that have been used to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from consumers and small businesses.

According to Europol, each cybercriminal in the group had their specialty, but that the group as a whole specialized in creating malware, infecting machines, harvesting bank credentials and laundering the money through so-called money mule networks.

“On the digital underground forums, they actively traded stolen credentials, compromised bank account information and malware, while selling their hacking ‘services’ and looking for new cooperation partners in other cybercriminal activities,” Europol said. “This was a very active criminal group that worked in countries across all continents, infecting tens of thousands of users’ computers with banking Trojans, and subsequently targeted many major banks

The Europol statement on the action is otherwise light on details, but says the group is suspected of using Zeus and SpyEye malware to steal at least EUR 2 million from banks and their customers.

Hershey Park, a popular resort and amusement park in Hershey, Pa. has hired a security firm to investigate reports from multiple financial institutions about a possible credit card breach, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Contacted after reports by several financial institutions about a pattern of fraudulent charges on customer cards that trace back to Hershey properties, the company says it is investigating.

“We have received reports from some of our guests that fraud charges appeared on their payment cards after they visited our property,” said Kathleen McGraw, director of communications for Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company.

“We take reports like this very seriously,” McGraw continued. “While our company does have security measures in place designed to prevent unauthorized access to our network, we immediately began to investigate our system for signs of an issue and engaged an external computer security firm to assist us. The investigation is ongoing.”

Sources at three financial institutions say they have detected a pattern of fraudulent activity on customer cards that were used at Hershey properties in Pennsylvania between mid-March and late May 2015. According to the banks, the cards were used at a variety of Hershey locations, including food and beverage outlets, ticketing stations and the Hershey Lodge.

Adobe Systems Inc. today released an emergency update to fix a dangerous security hole in its widely-installed Flash Player browser plugin. The company warned that the vulnerability is already being exploited in targeted attacks, and urged users to update the program as quickly as possible.

In an advisory issued Tuesday morning, Adobe said the latest version of Flash — v. 18.0.0.194 on Windows and Mac OS X — fixes a critical flaw (CVE-2015-3113) that is being actively exploited in “limited, targeted attacks.” The company said systems running Internet Explorer for Windows 7 and below, as well as Firefox on Windows XP, are known targets of these exploits.

If you’re unsure whether your browser has Flash installed or what version it may be running, browse to this link. Adobe Flash Player installed with Google Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer on Windows 8.x, should automatically update to the latest version. To force the installation of an available update on Chrome, click the triple bar icon to the right of the address bar, select “About Google” Chrome, click the apply update button and restart the browser.

The most recent versions of Flash should be available from the Flash home page, but beware potentially unwanted add-ons, like McAfee Security Scan. To avoid this, uncheck the pre-checked box before downloading, or grab your OS-specific Flash download from here. 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.)

In lieu of patching Flash Player yet again, it might be worth considering whether you really need to keep Flash Player installed at all. In a happy coincidence, earlier today I published a piece about my experience going a month without having Flash Player installed. The result? I hardly missed it at all.

I’ve spent the better part of the last month running a little experiment to see how much I would miss Adobe‘s buggy and insecure Flash Player software if I removed it from my systems altogether. Turns out, not so much.

Browser plugins are favorite targets for malware and miscreants because they are generally full of unpatched or undocumented security holes that cybercrooks can use to seize complete control over vulnerable systems. The Flash Player plugin is a stellar example of this: It is among the most widely used browser plugins, and it requires monthly patching (if not more frequently).

It’s also not uncommon for Adobe to release emergency fixes for the software to patch flaws that bad guys started exploiting before Adobe even knew about the bugs. This happened most recently in February 2015, and twice the month prior. Adobe also shipped out-of-band Flash fixes in December and November 2014.

Update, 11:30 a.m. ET: Oddly enough, Adobe just minutes ago released an out-of-band patch to fix a zero-day flaw in Flash.

Original story:

Time was, Oracle’s Java plugin was the favorite target of exploit kits, software tools made to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and foist on visiting browsers a kitchen sink of exploits for various plugin vulnerabilities. Lately, however, it seems to pendulum has swung back in favor of exploits for Flash Player. A popular exploit kit known as Angler, for example, bundled a new exploit for a Flash vulnerability just three days after Adobe fixed it in April 2015.

So, rather than continue the patch madness and keep this insecure software installed, I decided to the pull the…er…plugin. I tend to (ab)use different browsers for different tasks, and so uninstalling the plugin was almost as simple as uninstalling Flash, except with Chrome, which bundles its own version of Flash Player. Fear not: disabling Flash in Chrome is simple enough. On a Windows, Mac, Linux or Chrome OS installation of Chrome, type “chrome:plugins” into the address bar, and on the Plug-ins page look for the “Flash” listing: To disable Flash, click the disable link (to re-enable it, click “enable”).

In almost 30 days, I only ran into just two instances where I encountered a site hosting a video that I absolutely needed to watch and that required Flash (an instructional video for a home gym that I could find nowhere else, and a live-streamed legislative hearing). For these, I opted to cheat and load the content into a Flash-enabled browser inside of a Linux virtual machine I have running inside of VirtualBox. In hindsight, it probably would have been easier simply to temporarily re-enable Flash in Chrome, and then disable it again until the need arose.

If you decide that removing Flash altogether or disabling it until needed is impractical, there are in-between solutions. Script-blocking applications like Noscript and ScriptSafe are useful in blocking Flash content, but script blockers can be challenging for many users to handle.

Another approach is click-to-play, which is a feature available for most browsers (except IE, sadly) that blocks Flash content from loading by default, replacing the content on Web sites with a blank box. With click-to-play, users who wish to view the blocked content need only click the boxes to enable Flash content inside of them (click-to-play also blocks Java applets from loading by default).

Windows users who decide to keep Flash installed and/or enabled also should take full advantage of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a free tool from Microsoft that can help Windows users beef up the security of third-party applications.