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"Crimeserver" Full of Personal/Business Data Found

Posted by kdawson on from the gotta-store-it-somewhere dept.

Presto Vivace sends news of a server found by security firm Finjan that contained a 1.4-GB cache of stolen data, accumulated over a period of less than a month from compromised PCs around the world. The "crimeserver," as Finjan dubs it, "provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers. ... The stolen data consisted of 5,388 unique log files including 1,037 from Turkey, 621 from Germany, 571 from the United States, 322 from France, 308 from India and 232 from Britain." Oddly enough, the data was stored in the open, with not even basic auth to protect it. Finjan notes in their press release that this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far larger than most observers have been assuming. Update: 05/08 12:29 GMT by T : Note, the security firm involved is spelled "Finjan," not "Finjin" as originally shown.

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Why would they need basic auth? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why would they need basic auth? After all, the security on the compromised computers was bad enough for them, complete random strangers to the owners of the PCs, to bypass system authentication and authorization controls to grab the data in the first place.

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    1. Re:Why would they need basic auth? by kcbanner · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because all scammers aren't friends with each other.

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    2. Re:Why would they need basic auth? by NoobixCube · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My first thought was, surely someone who accumulates this kind of data would go to some lengths to secure it. That leads me to believe that this "crime server" is owned by an amateur. The computer crime equivalent of a petty thief. Imagine how many properly run and hidden crime servers must exist. And think how many more petty thieves must own similar ones.

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    3. Re:Why would they need basic auth? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This might come as a surprise, but scammers are not necessarily more tech savvy than their victims.

      This isn't the first completely unprotected (or default password protected) scammer server. Actually, a certain security company which I won't name (but you can guess it...) will have a hard time working with certain other security companies from now on since there are things you don't yap about. Those hardly-if-ever protected ID-theft servers is one of those things.

      The reason is twofold. First of all, those criminals with a minimal technical knowledge (most of the times, those drop servers are part of the package you buy from someone who does actually know how to use a computer and write the necessary client/server package to steal information) might start wisening up and protect their servers better, making our work harder. It's the whole "the less your enemy knows about you and the more you know about your enemy, the better" thing.

      The second reason, though, is even more important. When it becomes "mostly common" knowledge that there are servers stuffed with stolen information, a second part of the criminal chain opens. Well, opens isn't the right word, it already opened, but it will have a wider, let's say, audience. People who want that information for their own goals won't infect your machine but rather try to steal from the thieves, multiplying the problem in proportions that cannot even be measured anymore. So far, we have a pretty good picture of the threat and problem, knowing (or at least being able to estimate) how many people are infected by a certain trojan, what information is siphoned and by the actions taken thereafter, we can draw a picture of the threat, the goals of the group that siphoned the information and so on.

      If now many criminals start working with the same data base, it becomes a damn lot harder to even try working out a threat scenario.

      That's why this is being kept on a low profile, and why nobody so far went out into the broad public about it. It's one of those "don't give them ideas" doctrines. I was certainly not in favor of the idea when it was presented, because withholding information does rarely lead to more security. I just couldn't offer a better solution. Or at least a better broom to keep the ocean at bay.

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  2. So you have to a CISSP to run a script now? by mungmaster2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The server was not secure at all. It indicates that these people that are doing the crime today, they are not security experts, they are not computer science experts." Uhhh....So someone knocks over a liquor store with a 9 mm. Does that mean that he's a gunsmith or a sharpshooter, or skilled in advanced war-fighting techniques of some kind? No...Chances are he's a just a guy with a gun. People use whatever they can to take what they want. Film at eleven.

  3. Security company finds unsecure server by Whuffo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Must be a slow news day for this kind of astroturf to bubble to the top. Notice how carefully they count how many people in each country had their data stolen and stored on this server. Also notice how many of those people these security folks notified of the data breach. Yup, exactly zero.

    So they're not trying to help at all. What they're trying to do is sell their services and using this pseudo-news article to do it. Shame on them.