Tag Archive for: wire

Former Uber chief security officer to face wire fraud charges over coverup of 2016 hack

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A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that former Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan must face wire fraud charges over allegations that he covered up a security breach involving the theft of 57 million passenger and driver records.

Sullivan (pictured) was initially charged in August 2020 with obstruction of justice and “misprision” or concealment of a felony by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California. The Department of Justice added three additional changers against Sullivan in December, claiming that he arranged to pay money to two hackers to conceal the hacking.

Reuters reported Tuesday that lawyers for Sullivan argued prosecutors did not adequately allege he concealed the hacking to ensure that Uber drivers would not flee and would continue paying service fees. Judge William Orrick also rejected a claim that Sullivan was only attempting to deceive Uber’s then-Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick and Uber’s general counsel, not drivers.

“Those purported misrepresentations, though not made directly to Uber drivers, were part of a larger scheme to defraud them,” Orrick wrote.

The theft of the 57 million records took place in 2016 and came after Sullivan had assisted the Federal Trade Commission concerning Uber’s security practices following an earlier breach in 2014. Sullivan was made aware of the 2016 hack 10 days after providing testimony to the FTC but allegedly took steps to hide the details.

It is alleged that Sullivan paid the hackers by funneling the payoff through Uber’s bug bounty program. Sullivan also sought to have the hackers sign nondisclosure agreements that included a false representation that the hackers did not take or store any data. It was also alleged that Kalanick was aware of Sullivan’s actions.

The details of the hack only came to light when current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took over the reins at Uber, but even then, Sullivan allegedly deceived the new management team by failing to provide them with critical details.

Uber paid $148 million in September 2018 to settle various investigations into the hack and it failed to disclose it at the time it happened. The two hackers were…

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Former AWS engineer found guilty of wire fraud and computer intrusions in 2019 Capital One hack – GeekWire

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(Bigstock Photo)

An ex-Amazon Web Services engineer accused of a massive hack in 2019 was found guilty of seven federal crimes on Friday in the U.S. District Court of Seattle.

Prosecutors showed how Paige Thompson built a tool that identified misconfigured AWS accounts and used them to access data from more than 30 entities, including Capital One, an AWS customer. More than 100 million Capital One customers were affected. It was one of the largest breaches of a major financial service.

A jury found that Thompson violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which drew attention last month after the Justice Department revised its policy for charging cases under the Act and said “good-faith security research should not be charged.”

Thompson was found guilty of wire fraud, five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer, and damaging a protected computer. She used the illegal access to earn income from cryptocurrency mining software that was planted on new servers, according to the suit. Thompson was found not guilty of access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

“Ms. Thompson used her hacking skills to steal the personal information of more than 100 million people, and hijacked computer servers to mine cryptocurrency,” U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said in a press release.  “Far from being an ethical hacker trying to help companies with their computer security, she exploited mistakes to steal valuable data and sought to enrich herself.”

Thompson worked at Amazon as a systems engineer from 2015 to 2016.

Capital One ended up paying $80 million in fines and $190 million to settle a class-action lawsuit related to the hack.

Thompson, 36, is scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 15. Wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years in prison; illegally accessing a protected computer and damaging a protected computer are punishable by up to five years.

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Malware resets Android devices after performing fraudulent wire transfers

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If your Android phone initiates a factory reset out of the blue, there’s a chance it has been infected with the BRATA banking malware and you’ve just been ripped off.

Android malware reset

The unusual functionality serves as a kill switch for the trojan, Cleafy researchers have explained, while also making the victim lose time trying to find out what happened as crooks siphon money out of their account.

European users under attack

First documented by Kaspersky researchers in 2019, BRATA was a RAT targeting Android users in Brazil. It was able to capture and send user’s screen output in real-time, log keystrokes, retrieve device information, turn off the screen to give the impression that it has been turned off, and more.

Through the years, BRATA evolved primarily into banking malware and has lately been aimed against Android users in Europe and the rest of Latin America. (Cleafy researchers hypothesize that the group responsible for maintaining the BRATA codebase is probably located in the LATAM area and is reselling this malware to other local groups.)

The trojan has been spotted targeting customers of several Italian banks in H2 2021.

“The attack chain usually starts with a fake SMS containing a link to a website. The SMS seems to come from the bank (the so-called spoofing scam), and it tries to convince the victim to download an anti-spam app, with the promise to be contacted soon by a bank operator. In some cases, the link redirects the victim to a phishing page that looks like the bank’s, and it is used to steal credentials and other relevant information (e.g. fiscal code and security questions),” the researchers shared last December.

Victims are persuaded by the fraud operators to install the app, which gives the latter control of the device and access to the 2FA code sent by the bank, allowing them to perform fraudulent transactions.

Since then, several variants of the malware posing as a variety of security apps have been targeting users of banks and financial institutions in the UK, Poland, Italy, and LATAM.

BRATA’s new capabilities

These “European” variants have gained interesting capabilities such as establishing multiple communication channels (HTTP and…

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Internet Security Market with COVID-19 Recovery Analysis 2020 | Rapid Adoption of BYOD Policy to Boost Market Growth | Technavio – Business Wire

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Internet Security Market with COVID-19 Recovery Analysis 2020 | Rapid Adoption of BYOD Policy to Boost Market Growth | Technavio  Business Wire
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