How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led To Mat Honan's Identity Theft

An anonymous reader writes "The story behind the hacking of Mat Honan's multiple accounts has been revealed and points to massive failures in how Amazon and Apple handle password recovery. Accounts for both sites can be easily accessed with simple to find publicly available information. If you ask me, both companies should be liable for violating privacy laws."

Comments

the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[aepervius]

"In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification."

All industry standard I know of is to hide the 12 foremost digits with * and show the last 4 or 5 (yes better would be to hide all, but client might need to recognize the CC number for some reason). Who in their right mind would consider that secure ? Apple apparently.

Re:the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[pnot]

"In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification."

  All industry standard I know of is to hide the 12 foremost digits with * and show the last 4 or 5 (yes better would be to hide all, but client might need to recognize the CC number for some reason). Who in their right mind would consider that secure ? Apple apparently.

Indeed, the article itself makes this point: And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life..

Till receipts also commonly show this information.

Re:the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[mcvos]

I don't give credit card numbers to pizza boys. I give them cash. Or I pay with iDeal, a Dutch internet payment system that's actually secure, unlike all that credit card crap.

Really, rest of the world, you guys need to implement iDeal so I can use it for international payments. The only reason I have a credit card at all is because it's the only way to buy stuff online from non-Dutch sites. Steam uses iDeal. Once everybody else does too, we can finally get rid of those stupid credit cards.

Re:the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[flimflammer]

Privacy issues for most of your post. People in general do not like the idea of a national ID system. This isn't just a US thing, either. A lot of countries try to fight this sort of system when it comes knocking.

As for personal checks, they are not used that frequently anymore. Most places I go to don't even accept them. I haven't encountered one personally in several years. They're used little more than promissory notes between people nowadays. Short of going to an ATM or bank, there's no easy way to give people cash. Personal checks still fill that role. Nothing wrong with that.

Re:the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[Lord_Jeremy]

What?!! Apple requests the CVV2 code of your credit card for verification, not the last 4 digits of the number. The CVV2 code is never shown on a statement or invoice anywhere, and since they're processing credit card transactions they can only store it hashed.

Re:the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to your cave fanboi, if you RTFA they tried themselves calling Apple and the last 4 digits was all they asked. Also, vendors don't normally store the CVV code, because its purpose is exactly that - let the user verify the transaction by entering it themselves. So Apple storing it and letting their CSRs view it would be quite against established CC security practices.

Re:the 4 last digit of CC are unsecure

[cvtan]

One glaring difference between US and Euro money dealing is that in the US bank-to-bank transfers are expensive. In Germany, they are free (by law, I believe). So if you are buying a $60 item in the US, you can't afford to spend $40 to do a bank transfer so you write a check. This situation is even worse if you are trying to buy something in Europe. Bank transfers are too expensive, individuals do not take credit cards, Paypal is not popular (because euro bank transfers are ~free), you can't send a personal check and mailing cash is problematic. It's the 21st century somewhere, but not at a US bank.

Benefits of free services

[akamad]

I would argue that the biggest benefit of using free services (like GMail) is they offer no or crap phone support! Thus making it very difficult for a hacker to social engineer their way into your account.

Re:Benefits of free services

[rvw]

I would argue that the biggest benefit of using free services (like GMail) is they offer no or crap phone support! Thus making it very difficult for a hacker to social engineer their way into your account.

We were hacked several months ago, and our Amazon EC2 account was hijacked. How did they do this? We host our domain names at a local provider, and somehow they got control over that account. Then they changed the DNS for the mail to their own service. We had two-factor logins at Amazon (normal login + generated key). They tricked Amazon into believing that the key was broken, that they were the rightful owner (with control over the mail), and Amazon removed it. We still wonder how they did all this.

Apple's Failure, Not Amazon's

[StealthyRoid]

Every e-commerce company in the world that allows you to store your card info will display the last four digits of your card number, because what other option is there? What other unique determinant could you possibly display in order to allow people to select one card from a set? There's nothing at all insecure about that on its own, and it's silly to pretend as though everyone else becomes liable for Apple's crappy security policy. This is way more about a.) How one guy had a bad personal password policy, b.) poor security training for Apple support staff and poor security policies at Apple, and c.) How stupid it is to make any of your data deletable remotely. "There's this option to wipe all my data on Apple's site, and then these evil hax0rs totally did it, and I didn't have backups" does not translate into "Amazon has bad security policy".

Re:Why remote wipe?

[juventasone]

If your device is lost or stolen.

not privacy, data protection

[l3v1]

From Wikipedia article (Data Protection Directive - Comparison with US data protection law):

"The United States prefers what it calls a 'sectoral' approach to data protection legislation, which relies on a combination of legislation, regulation, and self-regulation, rather than governmental regulation alone.[10] Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former Vice-President Al Gore explicitly recommended in their "Framework for Global Electronic Commerce" that the private sector should lead, and companies should implement self-regulation in reaction to issues brought on by Internet technology." (emphasis added)

I never could really understand how this companies-should-self-regulate could work, and up to this day it didn't really prove to work. If companies are let to roam freely, then there's really nothing (good or bad) you can really expect from them, and even if one seems OK, they can change their policies from one second to the next and you're screwed.

Nobody in their right minds would trust all of their data exclusively and only to a company (yes, you know, that "cloud" you like so much is operated by one or more companies with data protection and privacy policies changing by the weather). If you do so, something like the original article mentions can happen anytime.

I'm not saying you shouldn't use the "cloud" (how I hate that word, oh my), but you should never trust and rely on it completely without any (or weak and borderline useless) fallback. Remember, it's your data, it's your life, protect it as you would protect anything that you own and hold precious.

Thing is, since computing and PCs have become everyone's tools and don't require in-depth tech knowledge, it's pretty easy to get average users to use and rely on such services. It's simple, they don't really know what they are getting into. And it's for this reason that it's sad to see a more knowledgable person (i.e. article writer) fail so terribly.

Always remember, just because so many people are hooked to it and it's easy to use, that doesn't mean it's safe and reliable. It's not.

a lot of mistakes here

[pbjones]

Not backing up data, able to get Amazon account data with 2 phone calls, able to get an Apple/Google/whatever password reset with just a little bit of work. They could have also stolen his CC statement from his mailbox, as well as a Utility bill and got part of the way to getting a new credit pin or drivers license and after a bit of time a new passport. This sort of hacking is not new, just different. Once the security questions used to be the standard 3, your mums maiden name, your city of birth, and your first pet/car/whatever, now the answers are often on-line or traceable via Facebook. The blame should be shared amongst everyone, including the person who did the hacking. Excuse me, I have to backup my computers.

But he's and IT Expert!

[retech]

Yes, the same Mat who did not back anything up locally or (shutter to think) redundantly, is an expert. If this sorry excuse is what passes an expert, I think my grandma has a good chance at a new career.

What an idiot.

A very good article. Read it!

[Qbertino]

This is a very good article, every /. nerd worth his honors should read it. It's pushed my paranoia levels almost up to normal again. That alone was worth the time. I've been dragging out that backup HDD for my MB Air far to long and will now change that.

  I'm also going to solidly review my online presence and accounts, and how they could be linked. And fix any problems that pop up.

Bottom line: Read the article, it's a healthy wake-up call and if you're like me, you need that once in a while.

My 2 cents.

You missed the part about Amazons password reset

[tlambert]

Amazon allowed a bogus card to be added to the account because all they did was check the check-digit, rather than doing that as step one, and then doing an authorization hold/authorization release after requiring the security code from the back of the card as step 2. This would have correlated the billing address and card number in the credit card company database, which would have failed, flagging it as a bogus card.

After this, a second call to Amazon using the bogus card information plus the (already known) billing information got them a password reset, again without them issuing an authorization hold/authorization release. And THAT is where they got the last 4 digits of the (actual) non-bogus credit card number to give to Apple. Admittedly, it's possible that this would cost a web site (other than Amazon, who owns their own payment provider) a transaction fee to do, but they could always require a transaction fee billed to the card being used as identification as part of the recovery process. For example, it looks like Norton Antivirus allows the same thing (just do a quick search for the phrase "the credit card number ending in", you'll see a bunch of people wondering about charges to cards they never registered with various services).

Apple using the last 4 digits as an identity verification was screwed up, but it wasn't information the bad guys had without Amazon's help, in this case.

That is not the problem with Amazon

[Ecuador]

At first I was aghast at how they could implicate Amazon for revealing the last 4 digits of your card, when they appear in every transaction receipt printed etc.
However, after reading TFA it is obvious that Amazon has a serious security flaw as well that they need to address as well. It seems that you can call Amazon support knowing only the name, email and billing address of a person and you can add a bogus credit card number to their file. Then you call back and tell them you can't access your account and they will let you add a new email address to reset your password and you use the credit card number you had just added as verification of your identity!
True, Amazon showing the last 4 digits of your CCs on your account is not a problem, but giving access to your account to a person armed only with knowledge of your name, address and email is a serious flaw.
The summary and even the article don't make it that clear what the problem is with Amazon, you have to read through TFA.

Re:You missed the part about Amazons password rese

[StealthyRoid]

Naw, I didn't miss that part, I just don't think it makes an argument for this being a failure of Amazon security policy. Given that you need to know someone's account email address (how hard is it to do foo+amazon@dingleberry.com, or some other not-easily-guessed email address?), billing address, etc, to even get an Amazon rep to talk to you, the protections on that front seem sufficient (maybe not best, but sufficient) to me. Running an auth/void doesn't really work either. Sure, Amazon has their own payment gateway, but that doesn't make it free, it just makes it cheaper for them. Given the volume of cards that they accept into their system every day, running two transactions on each would pretty quickly jack up costs considerably. For subscription services like Norton, that might make sense, because the overall transaction volume is fairly low, but for Amazon, that bill would get pretty big.
Now, compare Amazon's relatively reasonable, if not super awesome, procedures to Apple's, where all you need is the last four in order to get access to all data and devices, and tell me this is still an Amazon problem.

Well, that didn't cause me any problems...

[Havenwar]

From what I see here, the main problem was apple's security protocol, with amazon coming in a close second... All other things he could really have protected himself against... Using two factor authentication on google and so on. But you can't protect yourself from a company finding easily obtainable information good enough to just hand over control of your account with...

As far as I'm concerned Apple should be liable for damages in this case. They have acted as a gatekeeper, portrayed a sense of security, and then been blatantly lax in security.

What does the law say about a case where I hand over say my credit card information to a merchant and they act carelessly with it, thus allowing it to be intercepted by a criminal? Say I go to a restaurant and they take my card and then let it lay around on the counter for half an hour for anyone to see, scan, steal?

Re:Well, that didn't cause me any problems...

[viperidaenz]

The law doesn't really need to say anything. The company wouldn't appreciate the loss of business because they can no longer accept credit cards because they violated the contracts with their providers. Those contracts probably make the company liable for any losses too.

Re:Multifactor Authentication

[thmsdrew]

I won't take my security advice from him, but there's no need to discredit his entire body of work because of this. Surely he deals in other topics.

I smell some B.S here.

[mark-t]

He says, when talking about the hackers, that "...their ultimate goal was always to take over [his] Twitter account". Why, then, did they delete his Google Account, and then remotely erase his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook? I might get that they want to erase evidence that could be used to track them down, and to that extent, wiping the Google account, which they had apparently gotten access to, makes a modicum of sense. But unless they were using his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook as well, I'm not sure how erasing all of them was in any way helpful to them in any regard whatsoever. No... the bastards that did this to him definitely had some malicious intent involved.

I'm not saying that he wasn't hacked... nor am I saying that he wasn't hacked in this way, I'm suggesting that the allegation that the hackers were only after his twitter account seems extremely dubious... at least to me.

Checks? What are those?

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Not really, I live in America, I haven't written a check in 7 years.

All my bills are paid through a service known as Billpay. All the banks and credits unions have something similar.

Time to stop making fun of us backward Americans and do some real research before writing your rants about us.

And this applies to most of my co-workers also. The only Americans that rely on checks anymore are over the age of 70 and that is what they grew up with so it is kind of hard to change.

Re:Checks? What are those?

[Rei]

Then you're exceedingly unusual. A quick Google Search turns up this:

* Americans write 42.5 billion checks per year - that's one check per person every three days.
* In the United States checks are among the most popular form of payment, above credit cards.
* People write roughly 450 million "bad checks" or checks that bounce every year - that's 1.5 per person per year.
* 60 percent of all transactions not paid for with cash are paid by check.
* Consumers are 65 percent more likely to use checks than other forms of electronic payments.
* The number of checks used by Americans is increasing. In recent years check use rose 54 percent alone.
* More than 39 trillion dollars in payments are made every year with checks, compared to just 7 trillion for other forms of payment.

Mind you, I have no way to validate those numbers, but it matches my experience with the American check culture. A lot of places in America don't have options for online bill paying. You just happen to have lucked into being in a place that does. Americans typically write each other checks to send each other money as well - such as a "birthday check" from a parent or whatnot.

Sallie Mae

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Even better, Sallie Mae calls me about my daughter's loan, and before the call is connected I have to give Sallie Mae my last four of my SSN to authenticate who I am, no way to authenticate that it's Sallie Mae calling me but I have to authenticate that Sallie called the right number. Even better no way to talk to a real person if I don't authenticate.

Remember I said Sallie Mae initiated the call. I could call any number of random numbers claim to be Sallie Mae and get individuals last four, ridiculous.