Fighting Online Extortion

prostoalex writes "Information Week talks about those mornings, when an owner of an online business receives an e-mail message with his customer accounts and other personal information quoted, and extortionist asking for certain amount of money to be transferred to a foreign bank. Although 70% of the businesses surveyed for the article claim they never had to deal with extortion on the Internet, the article claims those small businesses who think they are not interesting for extortionists, are in for a surprise."

Comments

Sounds like a business opportunity.

[lecithin]

Seems to me that a person could make a buck advertising and selling security services with this niche alone.

Who would a person call if they had some problems like this?

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[cwebb1977]

Call? Police, and hope you get someone on the phone who knows how to handle a mouse. And probably a private IT security company to get better results and safety.

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[Zocalo]

Who would a person call if they had some problems like this?

In the US? The FBI I think; it's wire fraud which is a very serious offence and the foreign bank account angle takes it out of the jurisdiction of local/state police. I've been peripherally involved with something like this in the UK where the National High Tech Crime Unit got involved; the important things are not to panic and to contact the authorities immediately so they can do their thing.

In my instance, the NHTCU took care of contacting the banks responsible for the various credit cards and everything, or at least passed the information along to the relevent organisation(s). I gather most of the banks simply issued a new credit card without making a fuss or the customer aware of the real reason for that matter. And yes, the perps got busted - or more accurately got stung due to the combination of information recovered from the compromised box and a few "creative" emails written by the NHTCU.

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[Tablizer]

Seems to me that a person could make a buck advertising and selling security services with this niche alone.

I was thinking of a high-security service that stored most of the customer information. The only customer information on the e-store's server would be a customer number, and perhaps first name to serve as a greeting. The interface between the two servers would not allow open-ended queries. Only the type of queries needed would be allowed, which usually would only be verification that a customer is paid up. When a customer signs on or pays, they actually sign up at "customer server" service's site rather than the e-store site, and the customer number and payment status is sent back to the store site. The payment status may just be a confirmation that a requested amount can be covered and not the total amount in the account.

An extortionist would have to bust into this customer server system/service, which would be carefully written to avoid such, perhaps with a guarentee of some kind.

Thus, if a theif busted into the e-store, they would only find product information and perhaps a list of customer numbers with little else. Maybe even customer numbers don't have to be at the e-store.

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are only a small business owner of a small shop the chance of getting FBI to prioritize your case is close to zero.

In many cases the FBI won't touch the case unles you can document $5000 in damgages or loss.

I worry for my employer

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...

My employer has a large site done in PHP that grew over the years, and is rife with opportunities for SQL injection.

They know what needs to change, and there is a plan to get from here to there over the next year, including a new in-house white-box security testing team. In the mean time, we are standing around with our pants down.

The thing that keeps me awake nights is: What happens if some disgruntled ex-employee (there are two floating around out there) decides to seek vengeance against us by targetting us in an extortion scheme?

Re:I worry for my employer

[ilsa]

Management only needs to make sure that there are no ex-disgruntled employees

There it is, the most important thing to remember.

And the easiest way to do that is not to hire nutcases that are apt to become disgruntled former employees. This involves better checking of applications than many people are really interested in doing. Take this guy for example: mental health counselor takes pit bulls to office in hurricane, orders them to attack others (coworkers?), goes out to his car. He has previously been arrested for almost every type of assault you can think of. It should not have been too difficult to filter this guy's resumé out of the applicant pool. Preventing disgruntled employees is about more than data security, it's about plain old fashioned general security.

Of course there is also a lot to be said for terminating passwords and accounts immediately when terminating an employee, even a really nice one.

Re:I worry for my employer

[justins]

They know what needs to change, and there is a plan to get from here to there over the next year, including a new in-house white-box security testing team. In the mean time, we are standing around with our pants down.

The thing that keeps me awake nights is: What happens if some disgruntled ex-employee (there are two floating around out there) decides to seek vengeance against us by targetting us in an extortion scheme?

The only "quick fix" in that scenario is to implement some kind of screening of incoming HTTP requests at the edge of the network, or perhaps on the web servers, to catch malformed requests. Definitely not a perfect solution, but still, it might save you until things are fixed.

So who are the extortionists?

[mindaktiviti]

"WagerWeb was knocked offline for about a day, says Dan Johnson, senior VP and senior oddsmaker at the site. Rather than pay off the attackers, the company called on its technical forces to build a defense and enlisted the help of Internet security-services provider Prolexic Technologies Inc. The vendor's services, at about $100,000 a year, aren't cheap. But, "I'd rather pay the $100,000 than pay the extortionists," Johnson says. The gamble paid off. "As soon as we got the service running, the attack stopped," technology manager Burns says."

THAT is really freaky.

Re:So who are the extortionists?

[lukewarmfusion]

Well, depending on the vendor's services I might call that a pretty unreasonable price. On the other hand, a large company might spend a lot more than that on hardware, software, audits, staff, etc. All to prevent such extortion...

--anecdote time--
If you're a small business, $100,000 might not be feasible. But then again, most small businesses won't need that kind of service. I've seen far too many sites ready to be discovered and attacked. One of my selling methods when I'm talking to a potential client is to visit their existing site and point out security holes. In one instance, I did a real quick SQL injection method to gain access to the "secure client login" area. Right in front of the client, we're staring at their largest client's account details.

"Can you fix it for me?"
--end anecdote--

I generally charge $75/hour; that's 1,333 hours and 20 minutes of work before they'd pay $100k. Even with failover servers, load distributing, etc., getting out of the extortionists' crosshairs doesn't have to be so expensive.

Re:So who are the extortionists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the followup posts to this are missing the point. What's freaky is that the attack stopped as soon as he paid Prolexic $100,000 a year. Makes one wonder how he heard about Prolexic.

Certainly different from legal forms of extortion

[The I Shing]

A legal extortionist, say, a patent troll or industry trade group, has to consider how much they can actually get out of a victim, since there are legal costs involved in filing the suit in the first place. These organized criminal enterprises, on the other hand, only have to do some hacking, and then fling their crap in every direction to see what sticks. Just as street criminals drive small businesses out of neighborhoods, leaving nothing but blight and boarded-up, rat-infested buildings, these online criminals could drive all the small e-commerce sites off the web and essentially cripple the web as a business method for all but the largest, wealthiest companies. So don't look for the authorities to step up efforts to combat this anytime soon.

Trace the money

[dealsites]

Can anyone explain how this actually works? Same with spammers too. If you transfer money, I'd think there would be an electronic trail of the money being transferred. After 9/11 they traced bank account of suspects, why can't they do it all the time? A lot of spam also generates sales, but why can't the money trail be followed to catch the bad guys?
--
Live deals online with a new server, can withstand a Slashdotting now.

Re:Trace the money

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Easy -- extortionist has the victim cable the money to some country full of corrupt officials. Extortionist gives corrupt officials a cut of the proceeds. In return, corrupt officials deny or delay any attempt to trace the transfer.

Or simpler yet, extortionists tell victim "if anything stops us from getting the money undetected, the attack will go ahead".

Re:Trace the money

[mabhatter654]

The Trouble is that many of the busineses targeted are "fringe" businesses. In the example given of online-betting, they neglected to mention that such businesses are ILLEGAL in the US... even if you're a US citizen with the hosting off-shore you can't do anything Legally about it. The same with many of the businesses they would target...

Think Sex-toys, porn, "grey" software, Xbox hacks, etc... depending on where you're at the local authourities may not even know you're in business....heck they may see the "blackmailer" as performing a community service because your a "malcontent" selling "naughty" stuff.

businesses like Best Buy are stupid to blackmail...they're above board, tax-paying, legal corporations [and they can pay Laywers to protect their backs FROM the cops too!]...They are "out in the open" businesses...holding them up is akin to holding up the store itself. it's easy for them to get FBI sympathy for the case. Your local OSS project may have much more hassle getting stuff in order... Police lately seem to "victimize" small business that report crimes nearly worse than the criminals!!! You're lible to find your small business sued by the locality for "petty" violations like building codes, accounting errors, zoning [if it's out of your house] etc. Hence the "right thing" is often worse than finding another way to deal with the attacker.

Victim does online gambling; shady = vulnerable

[Nova Express]

It seems that just like in the real world, extortionists like to target operations of dubious legality. I suspect the low-hanging fruit for people looking to carry out this kind of spam are businesses in the gray area of legality and respectability (online gambling, porn sites, "Mexican Drug Stores," etc.). Though profitable, these sites might have more to fear with going to the police than paying the extortionist. This is why, here in the real, non-virtual world, criminals often pray on illegal immigrant businesses for "protection" money. I also wonder whether the firms being targeted are also vulnerable because they're too shady to deal with firms like Akamai.

Now if only cyber-extortionists would target well-known spammers...

insurance coverage

[coklat]

isnt there already an insurance policy for this kind of event... "business interruption policy"?

Re:You are so stupid if you pay!

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Anecdotes in the security community say that what you predict is already happening. A bank will pay an extortionist to keep quiet, congratulate itself on cheaply avoiding a scandal, and then they're marked as a Target Which Pays and more extortion demands come in from other crooks.