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.

[Nakkel]

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

Ghostbusters?

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.

[evil_one666]

No kidding! Have you ever noticed how articles about "new IT security threats" ALWAYS come with an infomercial buried in them somewhere. In this case-

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.

Hmmm, but of course Prolexic Technologies Inc. has nothing to do with the publication of this article (ahem...)

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[operagost]

I think an email threatening damage unless $5000 is paid (according to this article, that amount is not uncommon) would constitute documentation.

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[DNS-and-BIND]

I thought it was $50,000. At least, that's what they said when we tried to turn in a cracker at my old ISP job.

As an aside, lie. Exaggerate the damages, get the FBI in. The worst that can happen is you revise the damage estimate downward later.

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

[Pig Hogger]

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?

That one is easy to fix. Management only needs to make sure that there are no ex-disgruntled employees...

Re:I worry for my employer

[ScrewMaster]

That only works when both sides are always reasonable.

Re:I worry for my employer

[YankeeInExile]

That one is easy to fix. Management only needs to make sure that there are no ex-disgruntled employees...

Here at Xyzzycorp, we never have to give out references for former employees, because 100% of our departed associates coincidentally fall into cranberry crushers.

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 Luddite]

I'd hope they are getting more than a "firewall + script" for 100G.

A quick look at Prolexic's web site make me think it's selling a distributed proxy service. Don't see why it wouldn't work.

As far as the reasonability of cost, I doubt 100G is a big number for them.. ..they're bookies.

Re:So who are the extortionists?

[GigsVT]

Yeah, but most companies are run by idiots. Seriously. They think nothing of dropping $100,000 on ISO9660 consultants, $100,000 on "efficiency experts", etc, etc.

When your revenue is several tens of million a year (for a mid sized company), 100,000 looks cheap, even if it is something that could be handled a lot cheaper.

One thing I've noticed, people are resistant to change generally. But if that change comes from highly overpaid consultants, people are more willing to change the way they do things. Of course that doesn't much address the problem of stagnant employees and managers.

Re:So who are the extortionists?

[Bios_Hakr]

We had a team come in to examine our NOC. The first thing they wanted when they came in was valid IPs and subnet listings. In front of my boss, I told them to get stuffed. If they want to do a test, let them come. But I'm not giving them any help at all.

In any event, they charged a lot and found little. In the outbrief, they made even the smallest problems seem huge. I guess they may have had a point.

IMHO, the team that came to see us charged a lot and did not really acomplish anything.

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.

Finally!

[Pig Hogger]

A clued-in story submitter who submits the print link.

Bravo!

* * *

There are plenty of ways of preventing DDOS attacks, most of which, unfortunately, call for SKILLED network operators.

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

[YankeeInExile]

1. Phish for some schmoes Citibank account.
2. Target BigWebsite.COM for extortion.
3. Use patsy's bank as a drop box.
4. Move as soon as the cash is in hand.

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.

You are so stupid if you pay!

[earthstar]

Atleast this extortion wont leave people in a dilemma whetehr to pay or not because there simply cannot be any question of paying, whatsoever may be the data!!

This extortion isnt like conventional extortions where in you get your thing back when you pay.

The extortionist obviously would have made copied of the data, and would hav given to so many of his friends.....If someones gonna pay,would he be paying to every one of the mails asking for the same data he had paid?

LOL

Sorry, but I think the website owner has already lost the battle - Unless the extortionist get caught - provided the duplicated data doesnt isnt with anyone!

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.

Re:You are so stupid if you pay!

[Nos.]

I don't doubt it, but as you say its a short term "victory". If they paid once, they'll probably pay again. Repeat until they finally get some security. This is another situation where some up front investment (in security) will pay off in the long run, not to mention that actually protecting your customers data is the "right thing to do".

This ocurred to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a small ecommerce site and this ocurred to me one time.
I received an email with my personal data and asking me to contact him.
I contacted host service and investigate for possible bugs and raw logs, but I never reply. Finally I think they get my data from whois services.

Once again, a bad summary.

[damiangerous]

Although 70% of the businesses surveyed for the article claim they never had to deal with extortion on the Internet,

No, it doesn't say that at all. It says:

"According to Carnegie Mellon's survey, 70% of those threatened with extortion say the attempts were unsuccessful."

It does talk about how many businesses have had to deal with 'cyberextortion', and that percentage is just over half of the submitter's claims:

"17% of the 100 companies surveyed say they've been the target of some form of cyberextortion."

Re:Once again, a bad summary.

[damiangerous]

Oh, and the other thing I forgot to mention about the summary is that the story isn't even about stealing customer data and using it for extortion. The story is about threatening random sites with DDoSing if they don't pay. Very different scenarios since it's far more difficult to protect against the later. Once again, good job submitter.

Re:Once again, a bad summary.

[dema]

If you look at the chart on the left side of the screen, you'll see the question: Has your company or any employee been the target of cyberextortion?. And, as indicated in the pie chart, 70% of those surveyed said No, just as the poster indicated. And in reference to the story only being about DDoSing, if you read the whole article you see:

Cyberextortion mostly travels under the radar, but not always. Earlier this year, Myron Tereshchuk, 42, of Maryland, pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to extort $17 million from intellectual-property company MicroPatent LLC. He faces up to 20 years in jail. Tereshchuk threatened to leak confidential information and launch denial-of-service attacks against intellectual-property attorneys worldwide if he wasn't paid.

In January, Thomas Ray, 25, of Mississippi, was indicted for allegedly claiming to have found a security flaw in Best Buy Co.'s systems and threatening to expose and exploit that flaw unless he was paid $2.5 million. A trial is expected this fall. And last year, Kazakhstan hacker Oleg Zezev was sentenced to 51 months for illegally entering Bloomberg L.P.'s systems and threatening to disclose the break-in if he wasn't paid $200,000.

The first one threatened DDoSing in addition to leaking info, and the other examples had nothing to do with DDoS.

International Banking

[xyote]

Without it, international extortion would be impossible. If you made the banks liable no matter how far the chain went, that kind of extortion would stop, just like that.

There are analogies with the telcos enabling dial out frauds by sticking it to the customer. If the telcos and banks were responsible, they'd be real careful who they gave other people's money to.

This story is part advertisement

[Cryofan]

Like most media "news" stories.....

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...

Re:Victim does online gambling; shady = vulnerable

[dougmc]

If everyone involved is a consenting adult, they shouldn't have anything to fear from using the legal system for defense.

In theory, you are correct. In practice, it's not so simple. Often law enforcement members themselves don't care for porn and won't take such complaints very seriously. Or they may see this as an opportunity to scrutinize the business and make their life difficult as they look for illegal things to bust them for (and even if there aren't any, that doesn't mean it's not a big problem for the business.)

Last I heard, Hustler magazine spent over one million dollars per year just on legal expenses, and generally they do not violate the law. This is probably an extreme example, but I imagine that lots of porn business spend above average amounts on legal expenses just because of the nature of their business. Anything that draws attention to you could very well increase that ...

insurance coverage

[coklat]

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

Insurance!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the way to go. Yes, security is a good start but it is impossible to completely become immune to attacks.

Therefore I say to spend the resources on insurance and simply ignore the threats and attacks. The extortionist get nothing and may waste his power on absolutely nothing, running a serious risk of getting caught - all for nothing.

The company has their assets insured and lose nothing.

In a few days all the extortionists go back to breaking legs for the local loanshark. There they at least get something for their efforts.

It's a lot like terror - it only works (for the terrorists) if they get something out of their efforts. Saying no to them and hitting them back just as hard will make them think twice. They get nothing but trouble out of their efforts and this will - in the long run - make them change their MO and possibly go back to their farms or whatever their dayjob used to be.

really?

[7-Vodka]

Is it really the extortionists driving the companies out of buisness, or is it that the companies played fast and loose with OUR personal data and now they are worried about the lawsuits?
They figure the lawsuits and lost sales from this leaked information would cost X amount of money so they're willing to pay less than X to stop the leak. Maybe they should have kept the sensitive information safer in the first place.
This is a result of either incompetence or knowingly cutting corners. (or just plain using Microsoft software. which is both.)

out-scumbagging a scumbag

[Tablizer]

Here at Xyzzycorp, we never have to give out references for former employees, because 100% of our departed associates coincidentally fall into cranberry crushers.

We have e-cam evidence of these murders. If you don't pay us 2 million bucks, we will release the videos over the 'net. -- Rocko

It doesn't cost $100K to stop a DDoS attack!

[Mordant]

All you have to do is send me $100/month for the next 12 months, and you're golden.

We're good like that, right? ;>

Dont pay.

[jellomizer]

Contact the FBI or some other from of crime investigation unit. Change all the accounts if possible. Also you should make a bunch of fake accounts before hand (As well as tightening up your computer security, and for god sake Hire an independent consultant to run security audits on your network and your code as well if possible)

Threaten to put them on Slashdot

[MinimeMongo]

Pay me one million dollars or I'll post your website URL on Slashdot.

Sarbanes-Oxley?

[hughk]

If you are a public corporation, then Sarbanes-Oxley applies. This mandates disclosure of any issues that may affect share price. Any time bombs waiting to go off, i.e., major systems problems, that are known about must be disclosed. If senior management is aware of a serious problem that they do not disclose, then they can be in serious trouble.