Street thieves who specialize in cashing out stolen credit and debit cards increasingly are hedging their chances of getting caught carrying multiple counterfeit cards by relying on Fuze Cards, a smartcard technology that allows users to store dozens of cards on a single device, the U.S. Secret Service warns.

Launched in May 2017, the Fuze Card is a data storage device that looks like a regular credit card but can hold account data for up to 30 credit cards. The Fuze Card displays no credit card number on either side, instead relying on a small display screen on the front that cardholders can use to change which stored card is to be used to complete a transaction.

After the user chooses the card data to be used, the card data is made available in the dynamic magnetic stripe on the back of the card or via the embedded smart chip. Fuze cards also can be used at ATMs to withdraw funds.

An internal memo the U.S. Secret Service shared with financial industry partners states that Secret Service field offices in New York and St. Louis are currently working criminal investigations where Fuze Cards have been used by fraud rings.

The memo, a copy of which was obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, states that card theft rings are using Fuze Cards to avoid raising suspicions that may arise when shuffling through multiple counterfeit cards at the register.

“The transaction may also appear as a declined transaction but the fraudster, with the push of a button, is changing the card numbers being used,” the memo notes.

Fraud rings often will purchase data on thousands of credit and debit cards stolen from hacked point-of-sale devices or obtained via physical card skimmers. The data can be encoded onto any card with a magnetic stripe, and then used to buy high-priced items at retail outlets — or to withdrawn funds from ATMs (if the fraudsters also have the cardholder’s PIN).

But getting caught holding dozens of counterfeit or stolen cards is tough to explain to authorities. Hence, the allure of the Fuze Card, which may appear to the casual observer to be just another credit card in one’s wallet.

“While this smart card technology makes up a small portion of fraudulent credit cards currently, investigators should be aware of the potential for significant increases in fraud loss amounts with the emergence of this smart card technology,” the Secret Service memo concludes.

Fuze Card did not respond to requests for comment.

In many ways, it is unsurprising that thieves are turning to this new technology to perpetrate credit card fraud, which is something of a constant cat-and-mouse game that employs ever-changing techniques. For evidence of this, one need only look to the constant innovations that fraudsters come up with to deploy physical card skimmers at ATMs and retail checkout lanes.

No doubt, fraudsters engaged in money laundering via virtual currencies like bitcoin will be doubly interested in Fuze Cards in the coming months. Fuze Card says that later this year it plans to launch FuzeX, which contains the same amenities of the Fuze Card and will allow users to conduct purchases using virtual currencies.

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly four dozen security issues with its Windows operating systems and related software. All things considered, this first Patch Tuesday of 2019 is fairly mild, bereft as it is of any new Adobe Flash updates or zero-day exploits. But there are a few spicy bits to keep in mind. Read on for the gory details.

The updates released Tuesday affect Windows, Internet Explorer and Edge, Office, Sharepoint, .NET Framework and Exchange. Patches are available for all client and server versions of Windows, but none of the “critical” flaws — those that can lead to a remote system compromise without any help from users — apply to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, according to Martin Brinkmann at Ghacks.net.

Mercifully, none of the vulnerabilities fixed in Tuesday’s bundle are being actively exploited, although one (CVE-2019-0579) was publicly disclosed prior to the patch release, meaning attackers may have had a head start figuring out how to exploit it. This bug is one of 11 that Microsoft fixed in its Jet Database Engine.

Among the more eyebrow-raising flaws fixed this week is CVE-2019-0547, a weakness in the Windows component responsible for assigning Internet addresses to host computers (a.k.a. “Windows DHCP client”). According to security vendor Tenable, this is the most severe bug of the entire patch batch.

“In order to exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would need to be able to send a specially crafted DHCP response to its target, allowing them to run arbitrary code on the client machine,” said Satnam Narang, senior research engineer at Tenable.

Tuesday’s update bundle also includes a fix that Microsoft released late last month as an emergency patch to plug a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer (CVE-2018-8653) that attackers are already exploiting. Experts at Recorded Future say that vulnerability continues to be exploited in the wild, with several exploit kits now including the publicly released proof-of-concept code into their platforms.

“If you have not patched this vulnerability yet, it should be the number one priority,” writes Allan Liska, senior solutions architect at Recorded Future.

It generally can’t hurt for Windows users to wait a day or two after Microsoft releases monthly security updates before installing the fixes; occasionally buggy patches can cause serious headaches for users who install them before all the kinks are worked out.

Case in point: Computerworld’s Woody Leonhard notes that multiple organizations are reporting problems with their file-sharing operations after installing this month’s patch rollup.

Windows 10 likes to install patches all in one go and reboot your computer on its own schedule. Microsoft doesn’t make it easy for Windows 10 users to change this setting, but it is possible. For all other Windows OS users, if you’d rather be alerted to new updates when they’re available so you can choose when to install them, there’s a setting for that in Windows Update. Also, it’s a good idea to get in the habit of backing up your data before installing Windows updates.

Adobe released an update for its Flash Player plugin, but alas there don’t appear to be any security fixes in it. However, the company last Thursday did release new versions of its Adobe Acrobat and Reader that correct at least two critical vulnerabilities in each.

If you experience any problems installing any of these patches this month, please feel free to leave a comment about it below; there’s a good chance other readers have experienced the same and may even chime in here with some helpful tips.

Buying heavily discounted, popular software from second-hand sources online has always been something of an iffy security proposition. But purchasing steeply discounted licenses for cloud-based subscription products like recent versions of Microsoft Office can be an extremely risky transaction, mainly because you may not have full control over who has access to your data.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who’d just purchased a copy of Microsoft Office 2016 Professional Plus from a seller on eBay for less than $4. Let’s call this Red Flag #1, as a legitimately purchased license of Microsoft Office 2016 is still going to cost between $70 and $100. Nevertheless, almost 350 other people had made the same purchase from this seller over the past year, according to eBay, and there appear to be many auctioneers just like this one.

After purchasing the item, the buyer said he received the following explanatory (exclamatory?) email from the seller — “Newhotsale68” from Vietnam:

Hello my friend!
Thank you for your purchase:)

Very important! Office365 is a subscription product and does not require any KEY activation. Account + password = free lifetime use

1. Log in with the original password and the official website will ask you to change your password!

2. Be sure to remember the modified new password. Once you forget your password, you will lose Office365!

3. After you change your password, log on to the official website to start downloading and installing Office365!

Your account information:

* USERMANE : (sent username)
Password Initial: (sent password)
Microsoft Office 365 access link:

Http://portal.office.com/

Sounds legit, right?

This merchant appears to be reselling access to existing Microsoft Office accounts, because in order to use this purchase the buyer must log in to Microsoft’s site using someone else’s username and password! Let’s call this Red Flag #2.

More importantly, the buyer can’t change the email address associated with the license, which means whoever owns that address can likely still assume control over any licenses tied to it. We’ll call this Ginormous Red Flag #3.

“The username that you use to register and activate Office is one that they provide to you in their email when you buy the license on eBay,” wrote the reader who alerted me about this dodgy transaction. “You never use your own email account to register, you have to log in with theirs. Once you’re inside the account you can’t change the username to your email account because the admin locked it down.”

Here’s what the profile looked like when the reader tried to change details tied to the license.

This version of Office prompts the user to sync all data and documents over to a 5TB Microsoft OneDrive account. What could go wrong?

“You can sign out of their Microsoft account to break the connection to the OneDrive account,” the reader said. “By default it had me signed in and I bet most people installing this just click next and stay signed in.”

That’s not all: The account was set up so that the administrator (seller) maintained control over specific apps on the Office installation, including OneNote and Class Notebook.

“I guess maybe the end result of all of this are the old adages, ‘you get what you pay for’ and, ‘if it sounds too good to be true than it probably is,'” the reader said at the conclusion of his email.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legitimate Apple Support line.

Jody Westby is the CEO of Global Cyber Risk LLC,  a security consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Westby said earlier today she received an automated call on her iPhone warning that multiple servers containing Apple user IDs had been compromised (the same scammers had called her at 4:34 p.m. the day before, but she didn’t answer that call). The message said she needed to call a 1-866 number before doing anything else with her phone.

Here’s what her iPhone displayed about the identity of the caller when they first tried her number at 4:34 p.m. on Jan. 2, 2019:

Note in the above screen shot that it lists Apple’s actual street address, their real customer support number, and the real Apple.com domain (albeit without the “s” at the end of “http://”). The same caller ID information showed up when she answered the scammers’ call this morning.

Westby said she immediately went to the Apple.com support page (https://www.support.apple.com) and requested to have a customer support person call her back. The page displayed a “case ID” to track her inquiry, and just a few minutes later someone from the real Apple Inc. called her and referenced that case ID number at the start of the call.

Westby said the Apple agent told her that Apple had not contacted her, that the call was almost certainly a scam, and that Apple would never do that — all of which she already knew. But when Westby looked at her iPhone’s recent calls list, she saw the legitimate call from Apple had been lumped together with the scam call that spoofed Apple:

The call listed at 11:51 a.m. was the result of Westby accidentally returning the call from the scammers, which she immediately disconnected.

“I told the Apple representative that they ought to be telling people about this, and he said that was a good point,” Westby said. “This was so convincing I’d think a lot of other people will be falling for it.”

KrebsOnSecurity called the number that the scam message asked Westby to contact (866-277-7794). An automated system answered and said I’d reached Apple Support, and that my expected wait time was about one minute and thirty seconds. About a minute later, a man with an Indian accent answered and inquired as to the reason for my call.

Playing the part of someone who had received the scam call, I told him I’d been alerted about a breach at Apple and that I needed to call this number. After asking me to hold for a brief moment, our call was disconnected.

No doubt this is just another scheme to separate the unwary from their personal and financial details, and to extract some kind of payment (for supposed tech support services or some such). But it is remarkable that Apple’s own devices (or AT&T, which sold her the phone) can’t tell the difference between a call from Apple and someone trying to spoof Apple.

As I noted in my October 2018 piece, Voice Phishing Scams are Getting More Clever, phone phishing usually invokes an element of urgency in a bid to get people to let their guard down. If a call has you worried that there might be something wrong and you wish to call them back, don’t call the number offered to you by the caller. If you want to reach your bank, for example, call the number on the back of your card. If it’s another company you do business with, go to the company’s Web site and look up their main customer support number.

Relying on anything other than a number obtained directly from the company in question — such as a number obtained from a direct search on Google or another search engine — is also extremely risky. In many cases, the scammers are polluting top search engine results with phony 800-numbers for customer support lines that lead directly to fraudsters.

These days, scam calls happen on my mobile so often that I almost never answer my phone unless it appears to come from someone in my contacts list. But as this scam shows, even that’s not always a great strategy.

It’s a good idea to advise your friends and loved ones to ignore calls unless they appear to come from a friend or family member, and most importantly to just hang up the moment the caller starts asking for personal information.

Apple has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Cloud hosting provider Dataresolution.net is struggling to bring its systems back online after suffering a ransomware infestation on Christmas Eve, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The company says its systems were hit by the Ryuk ransomware, the same malware strain that crippled printing and delivery operations for multiple major U.S. newspapers over the weekend.

San Juan Capistrano, Calif. based Data Resolution LLC serves some 30,000 businesses worldwide, offering software hosting, business continuity systems, cloud computing and data center services.

The company has not yet responded to requests for comment. But according to a status update shared by Data Resolution with affected customers on Dec. 29, 2018, the attackers broke in through a compromised login account on Christmas Eve and quickly began infecting servers with the Ryuk ransomware strain.

The intrusion gave the attackers control of Data Resolution’s data center domain, briefly locking the company out of its own systems. The update sent to customers states that Data Resolution shut down its network to halt the spread of the infection and to work through the process of cleaning and restoring infected systems.

Data Resolution is assuring customers that there is no indication any data was stolen, and that the purpose of the attack was to extract payment from the company in exchange for a digital key that could be used to quickly unlock access to servers seized by the ransomware.

The Ryuk ransomware strain was first detailed in an August 2018 report by security firm CheckPoint, which says the malware may be tied to a sophisticated North Korean hacking team known as the Lazarus Group.

Ryuk reportedly was the same malware that infected the Los Angeles Times‘ Olympic printing plant over the weekend, an attack that led to the disruption of newspaper printing and delivery services for a number of publications that rely on the plant — including the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune.

A status update shared by Data Resolution with affected customers earlier today indicates the cloud hosting provider is still working to restore email access and multiple databases for clients. The update also said Data Resolution is in the process of restoring service for companies relying on it to host installations of Dynamics GP, a popular software package that many organizations use for accounting and payroll services. 

Cloud hosting providers are often pitched as a way for companies to increase security and to better protect themselves from threats like ransomware, which scrambles data on infected systems and demands payment in exchange for a digital key needed to unlock affected systems.

At the same time, cloud providers represent an especially attractive target for ransomware attacks because they store vast amounts of data for other companies. In 2017, cloud hosting provider Cloudnine was hit by a ransomware attack, leading to an outage that lasted for several days.

Much depends on security practices maintained by each provider, according to an MIT Technology Review story last year that named cloud ransomware attacks as a top security concern for 2018

“The biggest cloud operators, like Google, Amazon, and IBM, have hired some of the brightest minds in digital security, so they won’t be easy to crack,” wrote Martin Giles. “But smaller companies are likely to be more vulnerable, and even a modest breach could lead to a big payday for the hackers involved.”

A source at a company that uses Data Resolution to manage payroll payments told KrebsOnSecurity that the cloud hosting provider said it did not attempt to pay the requested ransom, preferring to restore systems from backups instead.