A hacker serving a 20-year sentence for stealing personal data on 1,300 U.S. military and government employees and giving it to an Islamic State hacker group in 2015 has been charged once again with fraud and identity theft. The new charges have derailed plans to deport him under compassionate release because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ardit Ferizi, a 25-year-old citizen of Kosovo, was slated to be sent home earlier this month after a federal judge signed an order commuting his sentence to time served. The release was granted in part due to Ferizi’s 2018 diagnosis if asthma, as well as a COVID outbreak at the facility where he was housed in 2020.

But while Ferizi was in quarantine awaiting deportation the Justice Department unsealed new charges against him, saying he’d conspired from prison with associates on the outside to access stolen data and launder the bitcoin proceeds of his previous crimes.

In the years leading up to his arrest, Ferizi was the administrator of a cybercrime forum called Pentagon Crew. He also served as the leader of an ethnic Albanian group of hackers from Kosovo known as Kosova Hacker’s Security (KHS), which focused on compromising government and private websites in Israel, Serbia, Greece, Ukraine and the United States.

In December 2015, Ferizi was apprehended in Malaysia and extradited to the United States. In January 2016, Ferizi pleaded guilty to providing material support to a terrorist group and to unauthorized access. He admitted to hacking a U.S.-based e-commerce company, stealing personal and financial data on 1,300 government employees, and providing the data to an Islamic State hacking group.

Ferizi give the purloined data to Junaid “Trick” Hussain, a 21-year-old hacker and recruiter for ISIS who published it in August 2015 as part of a directive that ISIS supporters kill the named U.S. military members and government employees. Later that month, Hussain was reportedly killed by a drone strike in Syria.

The government says Ferizi and his associates made money by hacking PayPal and other financial accounts, and through pornography sites he allegedly set up mainly to steal personal and financial data from visitors.

Between 2015 and 2019, Ferizi was imprisoned at a facility in Illinois that housed several other notable convicts. For example, prosecutors allege that Ferizi was an associate of Mahmud “Red” Abouhalima, who was serving a 240 year sentence at the prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Another inmate incarcerated at the same facility was Shawn Bridges, a former U.S. Secret Service agent serving almost eight years for stealing $820,000 worth of bitcoin from online drug dealers while investigating the hidden underground website Silk Road. Prosecutors say Ferizi and Bridges discussed ways to hide their bitcoin.

The information about Ferizi’s inmate friends came via a tip from another convict, who told the FBI that Ferizi was allegedly using his access to the prison’s email system to share email and bitcoin account passwords with family members back home.

The Justice Department said subpoenas served on Ferizi’s email accounts and interviews with his associates show Ferizi’s brother in Kosovo used the information to “liquidate the proceeds of Ferizi’s previous criminal hacking activities.”

[Side note: It may be little more than a coincidence, but my PayPal account was hacked in Dec. 2015 by criminals who social engineered PayPal employees over the phone into changing my password and bypassing multi-factor authentication. The hackers attempted to send my balance to an account tied to Hussain, but the transfer never went through.]

Ferizi is being tried in California, but has not yet had an initial appearance in court. He’s charged with one count of aggravated identity theft and one count of wire fraud. If convicted of wire fraud, he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. If convicted of aggravated identity theft, he faces a mandatory penalty of 2 years in prison in addition to the punishment imposed for a wire fraud conviction.

Joker’s Stash, by some accounts the largest underground shop for selling stolen credit card and identity data, says it’s closing up shop effective mid-February 2021. The announcement came on the heels of a turbulent year for the major cybercrime store, and just weeks after U.S. and European authorities seized a number of its servers.

The Russian and English language carding store first opened in October 2014, and quickly became a major source of “dumps” — information stolen from compromised payment cards that thieves can buy and use to create physical counterfeit copies of the cards.

But 2020 turned out to be a tough year for Joker’s Stash. As cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 notes, the curator of the store announced in October that he’d contracted COVID-19, spending a week in the hospital. Around that time, Intel 471 says many of Joker’s loyal customers started complaining that the shop’s payment card data quality was increasingly poor.

“The condition impacted the site’s forums, inventory replenishments and other operations,” Intel 471 said.

That COVID diagnosis may have affected the shop owner’s ability to maintain fresh and valid inventory on his site. Gemini Advisory, a New York City-based company that monitors underground carding shops, tracked a “severe decline” in the volume of compromised payment card accounts for sale on Joker’s Stash over the past six months.

“Joker’s Stash has received numerous user complaints alleging that card data validity is low, which even prompted the administrator to upload proof of validity through a card-testing service,” Gemini wrote in a blog post about the planned shutdown.

Then on Dec. 16, 2020, several of Joker’s long-held domains began displaying notices that the sites had been seized by the U.S. Department of Justice and Interpol. The crime shop quickly recovered, moving to new infrastructure and assuring the underground community that it would continue to operate normally.

Gemini estimates that Joker’s Stash generated more than a billion dollars in revenue over the past several years. Much of that revenue came from high-profile breaches, including tens of millions of payment card records stolen from major merchants including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Bebe Stores, Hilton Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Wawa, Sonic Drive-In, the Hy-Vee supermarket chain, Buca Di Beppo, and Dickey’s BBQ.

Joker’s Stash routinely teased big breaches days or weeks in advance of selling payment card records stolen from those companies, and periodically linked to this site and other media outlets as proof of his shop’s prowess and authenticity.

Like many other top cybercrime bazaars, Joker’s Stash was a frequent target of phishers looking to rip off unwary or unsophisticated thieves. In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity detailed a vast network of fake Joker’s Stash sites set up to steal login credentials and bitcoin. The phony sites all traced back to the owners of a Pakistani web site design firm. Many of those fake sites are still active (e.g. jokersstash[.]su).

As noted here in 2016, Joker’s Stash attracted an impressive number of customers who kept five and six-digit balances at the shop, and who were granted early access to new breaches as well as steep discounts for bulk buys. Those “partner” customers will be given the opportunity to cash out their accounts. But the majority of Stash customers do not enjoy this status, and will have to spend their balances by Feb. 15 or forfeit those funds.

Gemini said another event that may have contributed to this threat actor shutting down their marketplace is the recent spike in the value of Bitcoin. A year ago, one bitcoin was worth about $9,000. Today a single bitcoin is valued at more than $35,000.

“JokerStash was an early advocate of Bitcoin and claims to keep all proceeds in this cryptocurrency,” Gemini observed in a blog post. “This actor was already likely to be among the wealthiest cybercriminals, and the spike may have multiplied their fortune, earning them enough money to retire. However, the true reason behind this shutdown remains unclear.”

If the bitcoin price theory holds, that would be fairly rich considering the parting lines in the closure notice posted to Joker’s Stash.

“We are also want to wish all young and mature ones cyber-gangsters not to lose themselves in the pursuit of easy money,” the site administrator(s) advised. “Remember, that even all the money in the world will never make you happy and that all the most truly valuable things in this life are free.”

Regardless, the impending shutdown is unlikely to have much of an impact on the overall underground carding industry, Gemini notes.

“Given Joker’s Stash’s high profile, it relied on a robust network of criminal vendors who offered their stolen records on this marketplace, among others,” the company wrote. “Gemini assesses with a high level of confidence that these vendors are very likely to fully transition to other large, top-tier dark web marketplaces.”

Microsoft today released updates to plug more than 80 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including one that is actively being exploited and another which was disclosed prior to today. Ten of the flaws earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be exploited by malware or miscreants to seize remote control over unpatched systems with little or no interaction from Windows users.

Most concerning of this month’s batch is probably a critical bug (CVE-2021-1647) in Microsoft’s default anti-malware suite — Windows Defender — that is seeing active exploitation. Microsoft recently stopped providing a great deal of detail in their vulnerability advisories, so it’s not entirely clear how this is being exploited.

But Kevin Breen, director of research at Immersive Labs, says depending on the vector the flaw could be trivial to exploit.

“It could be as simple as sending a file,” he said. “The user doesn’t need to interact with anything, as Defender will access it as soon as it is placed on the system.”

Fortunately, this bug is probably already patched by Microsoft on end-user systems, as the company continuously updates Defender outside of the normal monthly patch cycle.

Breen called attention to another critical vulnerability this month — CVE-2020-1660 — which is a remote code execution flaw in nearly every version of Windows that earned a CVSS score of 8.8 (10 is the most dangerous).

“They classify this vulnerability as ‘low’ in complexity, meaning an attack could be easy to reproduce,” Breen said. “However, they also note that it’s ‘less likely’ to be exploited, which seems counterintuitive. Without full context of this vulnerability, we have to rely on Microsoft to make the decision for us.”

CVE-2020-1660 is actually just one of five bugs in a core Microsoft service called Remote Procedure Call (RPC), which is responsible for a lot of heavy lifting in Windows. Some of the more memorable computer worms of the last decade spread automatically by exploiting RPC vulnerabilities.

Allan Liska, senior security architect at Recorded Future, said while it is concerning that so many vulnerabilities around the same component were released simultaneously, two previous vulnerabilities in RPC — CVE-2019-1409 and CVE-2018-8514 — were not widely exploited.

The remaining 70 or so flaws patched this month earned Microsoft’s less-dire “important” ratings, which is not to say they’re much less of a security concern. Case in point: CVE-2021-1709, which is an “elevation of privilege” flaw in Windows 8 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2019.

“Unfortunately, this type of vulnerability is often quickly exploited by attackers,” Liska said. “For example, CVE-2019-1458 was announced on December 10th of 2019, and by December 19th an attacker was seen selling an exploit for the vulnerability on underground markets. So, while CVE-2021-1709 is only rated as [an information exposure flaw] by Microsoft it should be prioritized for patching.”

Trend Micro’s ZDI Initiative pointed out another flaw marked “important” — CVE-2021-1648, an elevation of privilege bug in Windows 8, 10 and some Windows Server 2012 and 2019 that was publicly disclosed by ZDI prior to today.

“It was also discovered by Google likely because this patch corrects a bug introduced by a previous patch,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs said. “The previous CVE was being exploited in the wild, so it’s within reason to think this CVE will be actively exploited as well.”

Separately, Adobe released security updates to tackle at least eight vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. There are no Flash Player updates because Adobe retired the browser plugin in December (hallelujah!), and Microsoft’s update cycle from last month removed the program from Microsoft’s browsers.

Windows 10 users should be aware that the operating system will download updates and install them all at once on its own schedule, closing out active programs and rebooting the system. If you wish to ensure Windows has been set to pause updating so you have ample opportunity to back up your files and/or system, see this guide.

Please back up your system before applying any of these updates. Windows 10 even has some built-in tools to help you do that, either on a per-file/folder basis or by making a complete and bootable copy of your hard drive all at once. You never know when a patch roll-up will bork your system or possibly damage important files. For those seeking more flexible and full-featured backup options (including incremental backups), Acronis and Macrium are two that I’ve used previously and are worth a look.

That said, there don’t appear to be any major issues cropping up yet with this month’s update batch. But before you apply updates consider paying a visit to AskWoody.com, which usually has the skinny on any reports about problematic patches.

As always, if you experience glitches or issues installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a better-than-even chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with some helpful tips.

New research into the malware that set the stage for the megabreach at IT vendor SolarWinds shows the perpetrators spent months inside the company’s software development labs honing their attack before inserting malicious code into updates that SolarWinds then shipped to thousands of customers. More worrisome, the research suggests the insidious methods used by the intruders to subvert the company’s software development pipeline could be repurposed against many other major software providers.

In a blog post published Jan. 11, SolarWinds said the attackers first compromised its development environment on Sept. 4, 2019. Soon after, the attackers began testing code designed to surreptitiously inject backdoors into Orion, a suite of tools used by many Fortune 500 firms and a broad swath of the federal government to manage their internal networks.

According to SolarWinds and a technical analysis from CrowdStrike, the intruders were trying to work out whether their “Sunspot” malware — designed specifically for use in undermining SolarWinds’ software development process — could successfully insert their malicious “Sunburst” backdoor into Orion products without tripping any alarms or alerting Orion developers.

In October 2019, SolarWinds pushed an update to their Orion customers that contained the modified test code. By February 2020, the intruders had used Sunspot to inject the Sunburst backdoor into the Orion source code, which was then digitally signed by the company and propagated to customers via SolarWinds’ software update process.

Crowdstrike said Sunspot was written to be able to detect when it was installed on a SolarWinds developer system, and to lie in wait until specific Orion source code files were accessed by developers. This allowed the intruders to “replace source code files during the build process, before compilation,” Crowdstrike wrote.

The attackers also included safeguards to prevent the backdoor code lines from appearing in Orion software build logs, and checks to ensure that such tampering wouldn’t cause build errors.

“The design of SUNSPOT suggests [the malware] developers invested a lot of effort to ensure the code was properly inserted and remained undetected, and prioritized operational security to avoid revealing their presence in the build environment to SolarWinds developers,” CrowdStrike wrote.

A third malware strain — dubbed “Teardrop” by FireEye, the company that first disclosed the SolarWinds attack in December — was installed via the backdoored Orion updates on networks that the SolarWinds attackers wanted to plunder more deeply.

So far, the Teardrop malware has been found on several government networks, including the Commerce, Energy and Treasury departments, the Department of Justice and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

SolarWinds emphasized that while the Sunspot code was specifically designed to compromise the integrity of its software development process, that same process is likely common across the software industry.

“Our concern is that right now similar processes may exist in software development environments at other companies throughout the world,” said SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna. “The severity and complexity of this attack has taught us that more effectively combatting similar attacks in the future will require an industry-wide approach as well as public-private partnerships that leverage the skills, insight, knowledge, and resources of all constituents.”

Ubiquiti, a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, network video recorders, security cameras and access control systems, is urging customers to change their passwords and enable multi-factor authentication. The company says an incident at a third-party cloud provider may have exposed customer account information and credentials used to remotely manage Ubiquiti gear.

In an email sent to customers today, Ubiquiti Inc. [NYSE: UI] said it recently became aware of “unauthorized access to certain of our information technology systems hosted by a third party cloud provider,” although it declined to name that provider.

The statement continues:

“We are not currently aware of evidence of access to any databases that host user data, but we cannot be certain that user data has not been exposed. This data may include your name, email address, and the one-way encrypted password to your account (in technical terms, the passwords are hashed and salted). The data may also include your address and phone number if you have provided that to us.”

Ubiquiti has not yet responded to requests for more information, but the notice was confirmed as official in a post on the company’s user support forum.

The warning from Ubiquiti carries particular significance because the company has made it fairly difficult for customers using the latest Ubiquiti firmware to interact with their devices without first authenticating through the company’s cloud-based systems.

This has become a sticking point for many Ubiquiti customers, as evidenced by numerous threads on the topic in the company’s user support forums over the past few months.

“While I and others do appreciate the convenience and option of using hosted accounts, this incident clearly highlights the problem with relying on your infrastructure for authenticating access to our devices,” wrote one Ubiquiti customer today whose sentiment was immediately echoed by other users. “A lot us cannot take your process for granted and need to keep our devices offline during setup and make direct connections by IP/Hostname using our Mobile Apps.”

To manage your security settings on a Ubiquiti device, visit https://account.ui.com and log in. Click on ‘Security’ from the left-hand menu.

1. Change your password
2. Set a session timeout value
3. Enable 2FA

According to Ubiquiti’s investment literature, the company has shipped more than 85 million devices that play a key role in networking infrastructure in over 200 countries and territories worldwide.

This is a developing story that may be updated throughout the day.