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No-Fail Identity Theft – Live and In Person
ancientribe writes "A researcher performing social-engineering exploits on behalf of several US banks and other firms in the past year has 'stolen' thousands of identities with a 100 percent success rate. He and his team have posed as investigators for the FDIC (among other things), and numerous times have literally been able to walk out the door with pilfered identities. The reason: organizations are typically so focused on online ID theft that they've forgotten how easy it is for a criminal to socially engineer his way into a bank branch or office and physically hack it."
The human element.
Defective Logic
I love the ad for LifeLock at the top of the page. Didn't the CEO just fall victim to identity theft?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
A wise man once told me, "There is no security patch for human stupidity." I guess he was right...
Internet theft: Wholesale
in-person theft: Retail
We make up the difference in volume!
I'm not worried about Retail level theft. It's the wholesale one that is more worrisome.
if internet theft has a success rate of 1 in a thousand but puts millions of people at risk it's more worrisome.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
people are the weakest link in any security system. Film at 11.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I don't know if you can say it's related to online identity theft though; this sort of social engineering predated that by decades, and its always worked well.
So much of it is about knowing the right number to call, or the right person to approach.
People just need to be suspicious, but suspicious is massively unhelpful to people who legitimately need help. No one ever calls me for security credentials because I am the documentation gestapo; instead they approach one of the other people who can set them up, because they know that those people won't ask as many questions.
On the one hand, I know I don't need to be as thorough as I am, on the other hand I know that the one time I'm not, I'll give access to the wrong person.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Step one, find a birth certificate for a person of the same gender as you, and around the same ago.
Register at your local university and obtain student card in the name of the person on the birth certificate, withdraw before you have to pay anything (this step may vary with your university, I know it is possible at the Uni that I attended).
Obtain utility bills in the name of the person on the birth certificate.
There you go, 100 points of ID!
Use to obtain other forms of ID etc. (If you're in the USA finding the social security number would probably be useful too.)
If the person isn't dead (to create a "new" id, make sure that the birth certificate is for a person who died quite young), then you can have a field day getting access to whatever.
Enjoy.
I wank in the shower.
People are much too obsessed with the image of a diabolical Cheetos-eating hacker without any social skills. The most effective criminals in the world are friendly, well-dressed, and outgoing. And usually only technologically-competent enough to get the job done.
Ever heard of mustard squirters? They squirt your back with mustard, then inform you of the fact you have mustard on your back. They proceed—presumably generously—to wash it off for you: In doing so, they take your wallet. No technology. Tremendous success rate.
Come on. Some people out there need to read the works of Frank Abagnale, or at least Kevin Mitnick.
"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
I think this story is a fake. The FDIC does not audit or insure credit unions, the NCUA does. So either the author of the article got the initials wrong or the whole story is social engineering.
When someone from some esteemed institution of higher learning discovers this, then maybe the "identity theft" groupthink will end.
#1. Banks make money when your identity is stolen The profit comes in the form of transaction penalties when you start reversing the charges and possibly the bank's "identity theft services."
#2. No one seems to have any interest at all in shedding some light on the credit process. Why isn't it quite transparent to all consumers?
The entire "identity theft" scheme works is overwhelmingly favors the banking industry and it's no one's fault but ours.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
While it may have a higher success rate, the fact of the matter is that "in-person" identity theft poses a much higher risk ratio for the would-be criminal.
I'm sure if the researcher were really going to jail for his "crimes", he might not be so cavalier (and calm) when committing them, and this might affect the 100% success rate.
Actually, that's not as good as telling them you're selling photocopiers. Don't remind people about security when you're trying to steal stuff; sometimes it jogs their memory to the boring security lectures they sat through during their first week of work.
The absolute best way to go about it is to be in a semi-authority position where you need information, and you have a right to information. If you need it, and you are perceived to have a right to it, then people will go out of their way to find it for you.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
actually I used to use this trick to take a break when I was a student nurse in the nineties.
I'd pick up an xray or some notes that I knew wouldn't be needed, and go off walking around the hospital. No-one on my ward would question why I was gone, because I was just the student, I got sent places all the time. I found I could go round any department without being challenged, people just assumed I was meant to be there.
Incidentally, student nurse uniforms are easy to buy.
It worked for two years, then I got busy, what with exams and all, so I stopped doing it. I never got caught though.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
This is how I used to get my furniture : put on a work uniform w/ a few friends doing the same, show up to a motel w/ a shipping/receiving invoice, get a desk clerk to sign it, and carry a couch or whatever out. Almost 100% success rate at chain motels.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
And let's remember that this applies to emergencies as well. If you see someone in a crowd who needs medical help, go help him, and call for assistance if he needs it. Don't assume somebody else will do it; everybody else is going to assume that too! If you're the one who needs medical assistance, or you're with that person, don't shout out "call 911." Pick a person out of the crowd, point to him, and say, "You, call 911."
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
Sad but true: someone dressed up like a technician, walked into my company's office and started puttering around with a desktop computer. After a while, he disconnected the computer and walked out with it.
Everyone assumed that someone else had called him to come in and fix the "malfunctioning" computer, and when he left with it, presumed that he was taking it elsewhere for a more serious repair effort.
None of that crap would pan out where I work.
Need help getting through a door? Sure, people will let you through a door if you're lugging a load. Then they'll see you don't have your badge on, offer to help you find the office and person you're looking for, and if you don't know what name or location to give, they'll stick right with you until you figure it out or security comes along to help.
Selling copiers? "Oh, man, dude, nobody on this floor has the authority to buy anything! Lemme walk you over to the facilities guy that you *must* have an appointment with. He'll get you a temp badge or an escort if you need to look around."
New hire? "Gee, ya know, I hate to be a pain about this but you really do have to keep your badge on in the building. Lemme hold your box while you find it."
Lost your badge? "Gee, ya know, you're gonna get hassled a bunch without it. Do you know where Kathy's office is? Let me show you; she can issue you a temp badge for the day."
Lugging in a server or anything that looks remotely computer-like? The security guard will have you sign in and call down someone from IT to escort you.
Visiting executive? Unless you're the commish, in which case you'll be covered by a phalanx of security, even the lowliest of the low in this place will give you a friendly wave, say hi, and offer you a lanyard for your badge while you're in the building. "Oh, that's OK, I can wait till you find your badge. Do you want me to show you where you're going/where to get a temp badge/to security?" In fact, this is one of the few times a data input operator can pull rank on the highest executive in the organization and you'd better believe that no office lacks for people who would relish the opportunity.
Bluff your way past security and take an elevator ride to an upper floor, looking for something? Big deal. All the doors are on card keys and if you knock, the person who answers is going to lead you right back through the "Gee, I hate to be a pain about this but you really have to wear your badge in the building" routine.
Walking around in the hall looking semi-lost because you got in but realize you can't get through any of the doors? You'll be directly challenged by someone who will walk you directly to your manager (if you can provide a name and location) or directly to security.
If by some total breakdown (say, you've got a decent fake badge and you piggyback on someone to get through a door) you get into the work area and plop down in a conference room, you're gonna get caught in short order. Plug in your laptop? If you haven't pre-reserved the room, you'll trip port security, that port on the router will shut down, the telecomm lady will get an automatic page and head up to that conference room to see who's screwing around by plugging in an unregistered MAC. Just turning on a laptop with wireless enabled chances setting off the scanner that's sometimes running in every building; in that case, you get a quick visit from scary men with badges and guns. You're a contractor on site and you plug in a wireless access point? See the sentences immediately previous, plus you get tossed out, fired if you're a sub, lose your individual security clearance, and the overall contract holder gets in seriously hot water. Just sit there and try to look important? The conference room reservations are controlled by the nearest secretary. As soon as s/he sees you in the room, you'll get asked to do a formal reservation. "If the room is free, you can have it, but I need your name and badge number for the log book. By the way, where's your badge?" In offices where the conference rooms aren't tightly controlled, people get used to dropping in so if you're sitting there without a badge, you're going to get questioned. If you don't know the right jargon, the right person to say you're working with, the right organizational attributes to assign to yourself, you're going to be questioned. Even the most tim
I think the effect you're looking for is diffusion of responsibility. Has a similar effect in riots/mobs. If everyone punches the policeman only once, it can't be *you* that killed him, right?
Get your own free personal location tracker
In the 1950s in the town I live (Chenoa, IL), 2 "inspectors" came in to audit the books of the local bank. They stayed for 4 hours pouring over the materials, and appeared knowledgable and professional. They stayed through lunch, when the manager and several other big wigs went out to get a bite - the "inspectors" walked out with the entire cash reserve (since the vault was unlocked to allow them access to the ledgers) Never caught.
meh
The problem with this is two-fold:
First, the folks in control of implementing such technology classes would do the usual (let's memorize IE8 and Office 2008) in order to make people more "productive" instead of teaching people the overall context of DRM, net neutrality, black-box voting, and the like.
Second, even if you could get reasonable content in the class, most students wouldn't give a damn. "But I can use my iPhone (see: I'm using it now!)- therefore, I am tech saavy and this class is stupid."
Until the powers that be in education see the pervasiveness of technology in our lives, they will ignore the larger issues of being informed about our digital commons.
There are places with tight security like that, and I've been to some of them. The overhead is high. For bidding purposes at a major aerospace company, we used to estimate that running a project at SECRET doubled the bid, and running at TOP SECRET ran the price up by 4x or more. At the higher levels, computers are in metal rooms with welded seams raised off the floor (so Security can check underneath) and with RF-tight airlocks. Signing documents in and out of files takes a big chunk of staff resources and time. There's a big bureaucracy associated with accountability.
One of the serious side effects of running highly classified projects is that the people working on them become obsolete in place. They're so cut off from the outside world that they don't keep up, outside their very narrow area of expertise. That's why I left aerospace and went to the commercial world.
made purchases using debits
And the merchant is on the hook for those transactions. They paid penalties for taking the bad card, plus the balance, plus the lost merchandise.
Debit/credit is pretty much the same from the average retailer's perspective, just another cost of doing business.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Operations serious about security do a badge exchange when you enter the facility. You present your "outside" badge, which is validated at the security checkpoint, and exchange it for your "inside" badge, which never leaves the facility. This forces the security people to really check your outside badge, and makes the inside badges harder to copy, since they're not seen outside the facility. Information about what areas you're allowed to access appears only on inside badges. Outside badges won't open anything; inside badges may also be keys.
Learned about this is Psych 101, it's terrifying and good to be aware of.
Bystander Effect (Genovese Effect)
"The bystander effect (also known as bystander apathy, Genovese syndrome, diffused responsibility or bystander intervention) is a psychological phenomenon in which someone is less likely to intervene in an emergency situation when other people are present and able to help than when he or she is alone."
But orgs are not not so focused on online ID theft that they're stopping it. So really they're unfocused on online ID theft, and even more unfocused on in-person ID theft.
Because they don't pay the costs. Any focus on ID theft is an extra cost that doesn't save them any money, because the theft doesn't cost them as much.
Make the orgs liable for mishandling the IDs. Make them indemnify all costs, including the victim's labor to recover and even just monitor for exploitation for years later.
And make them liable for copyright violations when they copy personal data without express permission for that transaction, and they won't be giving it away to risky people anymore, either.
Then you'll see them "focused" like a laser.
--
make install -not war
I was watching a professional thief turned consultant on TV a few years ago describe his best and easiest scam. He would get a rent-a-cop uniform and stand outside a bank branch somewhere at the night depository. When people came to the bank to make their night deposits, he explained that it was broken and the bank had hired him to collect the bags. He claimed that most people actually gave him their night deposit bags!
No, definitely not airtight. I was only responding to the notion that you can bluff your way in, plop down in a conference room, hook up to the network, and do bad things. That's the scenario the GP was discussing and it can't happen here, or, if it can happen, it's unlikely to give anyone any better information than how poor is the quality of the carpet and furniture in our conference rooms.
You bring up good points. Let me take a stab at them.
The security on them is the picture that has to match the face. We're tranisitioning to HSPD12 (RFID smart cards for ID and access) as quickly as we can. The point isn't that the ID badges are of much use in a technical sense. The point is that you must have one of ours. A badge from anyone outside isn't good enough. If you have an accurate-looking fake badge, you can defeat much of our first line of security.
You can't, however, get through any doors with your fake badge. We use separate access-control cards.
Yes to the first question, no to the second. If someone finds a USB stick, they're going to treat it like radioactive anthrax. A lost USB stick means that someone has lost a device that may contain taxpayer (sensitive but unclassified) data. If you possess SBU data you're not supposed to have, you get in big trouble. Nobody wants that. Also, it is almost universally true (though this was definitely not the case not so long ago) that no one will plug into an IRS computer anything that wasn't issued to them by the IRS.
If, OTOH, you're talking about putting malware of some sort on those USB sticks and hoping someone plugs just one of them in, you have a point. However, we run constant scans on the network looking for unapproved software. The last time a contractor in my building plugged in a personally-owned USB stick with various non-IRS-issued applications, his account was locked off the LAN within 5 minutes. Within 10 minutes, Security had concluded a stern talk with his supervisor. He was a good guy, just new to the place and not yet "in the groove" when it comes to security. He took his suspension and a couple of weeks later got back to work with a bit more appreciation for the fact that we mean it when we tell people not to plug anything into the network that wasn't issued to you by the IRS.
I've been around for 26 years. I know this has happened. And in every case I know of, the offender left the office in handcuffs. Slashdot actually had a story about these incidents some months ago. Yearly, we'll have a few hundred incidents. Most are extremely benign, accidental compromises of a few scraps of disjointed information from a single account. The few deliberate "copy and sell" cases with which I am familiar have sent people to jail. Pretty much no one wants to risk that.
Besides, our access isn't as easy as you might think. I can easily access the computers of people who have massive amounts of SBU data. Their default settings, however, place that data in folders protected by Windows encrypted file system. I can't read their stuff. I can get a recovery key for times when there's been a system crash, but doing so requires documentation and approval from the encryption staff and they are, technically, the only ones who actually use the key, i.e. it's initiated from their end over the network. Everything they do is fully monitored.
Thanks, but I wasn't really trying to convince anyone. I was just pointing out that reasonable steps could be taken to guard against obvious attacks.
An apology - I'm sorry that I can't explain exactly how security is set up to isolate a single machine that gets rooted. Going into that much depth in a public forum is, itself, a violation of our security. Suffice it to say that this isn't the sort of scenario that causes me to lose sleep.
Confession 1 - The "caught in 5 minutes" thing was a fluke. Security admitted as much. Most machines get scanned only every few days. This guy just happened to plug in his USB stick right before his scan started.
Confession 2 - Pen testing has been done against us and we've failed. Not in any big ways, but we've had people hand over their passwords. We've had a couple of cases where physical access was gained. When this testing was done, though, the investigators had access to sufficient knowledge of our SOPs and culture that they were able to pull off things that no one who isn't already an employee could accomplish. The only really disturbing tests that I've heard of have been a few cases where an investigator entered an office (they had their badge to get in the building and an access card to get through doors), got to the cube farm, took off his badge, and proceeded to walk around for a half-hour without being challenged. That's an embarrassing failure but it's happened at least a couple of times.
The theme here is that getting in isn't a piece of cake. Once in, the chance of discovery is high. If you're not discovered, you probably can't steal the data. If you're an employee who can steal the data, our monitoring will probably catch you and you won't like the result.
Many layers. One of them should do the trick.
a valid proof of ID, I'm not surprised in the least.
Bank's have certainly outlived their usefulness. They are far too concerned about making money themselves than they are in keeping the money of their customers safe. Real security costs too much and security theater works just as good for public image and getting customers. For example, ID theft protection services. As a bonus this one actually makes the bank money too!
Something is seriously wrong when it's impossible to find a bank that will cash a US Treasury check (and in increasingly more cases a check drawn on their own bank) anymore unless you have an account with them.
Those that still do allow non-accountholders to cash a check drawn on them will require two random forms of ID (something they've made up to meet the law (reg. C? I think it is) on verifying ID, which is just ambiguous enough) a driver's license, CC, vehicle registration, etc. any of which could easily be forged and most of which are utterly useless for verifying that someone is who they say they are.
Pardon my LISP-like sentence structure, even though I haven't done any coding in LISP at all for years.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.