Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.

I’m willing to bet that a good percentage of regular readers here would never respond — honestly or otherwise — to such questionnaires (except perhaps to chide others for responding). But I thought it was worth mentioning because certain social networks — particularly Facebook — seem positively overrun with these data-harvesting schemes. What’s more, I’m constantly asking friends and family members to stop participating in these quizzes and to stop urging their contacts to do the same.

On the surface, these simple questions may be little more than an attempt at online engagement by otherwise well-meaning companies and individuals. Nevertheless, your answers to these questions may live in perpetuity online, giving identity thieves and scammers ample ammunition to start gaining backdoor access to your various online accounts.

Consider, for example, the following quiz posted to Facebook by San Benito Tire Pros, a tire and auto repair shop in California. It asks Facebook users, “What car did you learn to drive stick shift on?”

I hope this is painfully obvious, but for many people the answer will be the same as to the question, “What was the make and model of your first car?”, which is one of several “secret questions” most commonly used by banks and other companies to let customers reset their passwords or gain access to the account without knowing the password.

Probably the most well-known and common secret question, “what was the name of your first pet,” comes up in a number of Facebook quizzes that, incredibly, thousands of people answer willingly and (apparently) truthfully. When I saw this one I was reminded of this hilarious 2007 Daily Show interview wherein Jon Stewart has Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on and tries to slyly ask him the name of his first pet.

Womenworking.com asked a variation on this same question of their huge Facebook following and received an impressive number of responses:

Here’s a great one from springchicken.co.uk, an e-commerce site in the United Kingdom. It asks users to publicly state the answer to yet another common secret question: “What street did you grow up on?”

This question, from the Facebook account of Rving.how — a site for owners of recreational vehicles — asks: “What was your first job?” How the answer to this question might possibly relate to RV camping is beyond me, but that didn’t stop people from responding.

The question, “What was your high school mascot” is another common secret question, and yet you can find this one floating around lots of Facebook profiles:

Among the most common secret questions is, “Where did you meet your spouse or partner?” Loads of people like to share this information online as well, it seems:

Here’s another gem from the Womenworking Facebook page. Who hasn’t had to use the next secret question at some point? Answering this truthfully — in a Facebook quiz or on your profile somewhere — is a bad idea.

Do you remember your first grade teacher’s name? Don’t worry, if you forget it after answering this question, Facebook will remember it for you:

I’ve never seen a “what was the first concert you ever saw” secret question, but it is unique as secret questions go and I wouldn’t be surprised if some companies use this one. “What is your favorite band?” is definitely a common secret question, however:

Giving away information about yourself, your likes and preferences, etc., can lead to all kinds of unexpected consequences. This practice may even help turn the tide of elections. Just take the ongoing scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, which reportedly collected data on more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent and then used this information to build behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns.

I hope readers don’t interpret this story as KrebsOnSecurity endorsing secret questions as a valid form of authentication. In fact, I have railed against this practice for years, precisely because the answers often are so easily found using online services and social media profiles.

But if you must patronize a company or service that forces you to select secret questions, I think it’s a really good idea not to answer them truthfully. Just make sure you have a method for remembering your phony answer, in case you forget the lie somewhere down the road.

Many thanks to RonM for assistance with this post.

The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a new scam involving the temporary theft of chip-based debit cards issued to large corporations. In this scheme, the fraudsters intercept new debit cards in the mail and replace the chips on the cards with chips from old cards. When the unsuspecting business receives and activates the modified card, thieves can start draining funds from the account.

According to an alert sent to banks late last month, the entire scheme goes as follows:

1. Criminals intercept mail sent from a financial institution to large corporations that contain payment cards, targeting debit payment cards with access to large amount of funds.

2. The crooks remove the chip from the debit payment card using a heat source that warms the glue.

3. Criminals replace the chip with an old or invalid chip and repackage the payment card for delivery.

4. Criminals place the stolen chip into an old payment card.

5. The corporation receives the debit payment card without realizing the chip has been replaced.

6. The corporate office activates the debit payment card; however, their payment card is inoperable thanks to the old chip.

7. Criminals use the payment card with the stolen chip for their personal gain once the corporate office activates the card.

The reason the crooks don’t just use the debit cards when intercepting them via the mail is that they need the cards to be activated first, and presumably they lack the privileged information needed to do that. So, they change out the chip and send the card on to the legitimate account holder and then wait for it to be activated.

The Secret Service memo doesn’t specify at what point in the mail process the crooks are intercepting the cards. It could well involve U.S. Postal Service employees (or another delivery service), or perhaps the thieves are somehow gaining access to company mailboxes directly. Either way, this alert shows the extent to which some thieves will go to target high-value customers.

One final note: It seems almost every time I write about the Secret Service in relation to credit card fraud, some readers are mystified why an agency entrusted with protecting the President of the United States is involved at all in these types of investigations. The truth is that safeguarding the nation’s currency supply from counterfeiters was the Secret Service’s original mission when it was first created in 1865. Only after the assassination of President William McKinley — the third sitting president to be assassinated — did that mandate come to include protecting the president and foreign dignitaries.

Incidentally, if you enjoy reading historical non-fiction, I’d highly recommend Candice Millard‘s magnificently researched and written book, Destiny of the Republic, about the life and slow, painful death of President James A. Garfield after he was shot in the back by his lunatic assailant.

A story published here last week warned readers about a vast network of potentially malicious Web sites ending in “.cm” that mimic some of the world’s most popular Internet destinations (e.g. espn[dot]cm, aol[dot]cm and itunes[dot].cm) in a bid to bombard visitors with fake security alerts that can lock up one’s computer. If that piece lacked one key detail it was insight into just how many people were mistyping .com and ending up at one of these so-called “typosquatting” domains.

On March 30, an eagle-eyed reader noted that four years of access logs for the entire network of more than 1,000 dot-cm typosquatting domains were available for download directly from the typosquatting network’s own hosting provider. The logs — which include detailed records of how many people visited the sites over the past three years and from where — were deleted shortly after that comment was posted here, but not before KrebsOnSecurity managed to grab a copy of the entire archive for analysis.

Matthew Chambers, a security expert with whom this author worked on the original dot-cm typosquatting story published last week, analyzed the access logs from just the past three months and found the sites were visited approximately 12 million times during the first quarter of 2018.

Chambers said he combed through the logs and weeded out hits from Internet addresses that appeared to be bots or search engine scrapers. Here’s Chambers’ analysis of the 2018 access log data:

January 2018: 2,200,160 unique IPs
February 2018: 3,352,032 unique IPs
Mar 2018: 3,197,119 unique IPs

Those figures suggest that the total number of visits to these typosquatting sites in the first quarter of 2018 was approximately 12 million, or almost 50 million hits per year. Certainly, not everyone visiting these sites will have the experience that Chambers’ users reported (being bombarded with misleading malware alerts and redirected to scammy and spammy Web sites), but it seems clear this network could make its operators a pretty penny regardless of the content that ends up getting served through it.

Chambers also performed “reverse DNS” lookups on the IP addresses listed in the various dot-cm access logs for the month of February 2018. It’s worth noting here that many of the dot-cm (.cm) typosquatting domains in this network (PDF) are trying to divert traffic away from extremely popular porn sites (e.g. pornhub[dot]cm).

“I’ve been diving thru the data thus far, and came up with some interesting visitors,” Chambers said. “I pulled those when it was easy to observe that a particular agency owned a large range of IPs.”

Chambers queried the logs from 2018 for any hits coming from .gov or .mil sites. Here’s what he found:

-National Aeronautics and Space Administration (JSC, GSFC, JPL, NDC): Accessed one of the .cm typosquatting sites 104 times in February, including 16 porn sites.
–Department of Justice (80 times) [7 porn sites]
–United States House of Representatives (47 times) [17 porn sites]
–Central Intelligence Agency (6 times)
–United State Army (29 times)
–United States Navy (25 times)
–Environmental Protection Agency (15 times)
–New York State Court System (4 times)

Other federal agencies with typosquatting victims visiting these domains include:

Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)
Sandia National Laboratories
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
United States Department of Agriculture
Berkeley Lab
Pacific Northwest Lab

Last week’s story noted this entire network appears to be rented out by a Colorado-based online marketing firm called Media Breakaway. That company is headed by Scott Richter, a convicted felon and once self-avowed “spam king” who’s been successfully sued for spamming by Microsoft, MySpace and the New York attorney general. Neither Richter nor anyone else at Media Breakaway has responded to requests for comment.

If you’re in the habit of directly navigating to Web sites (i.e. typing the name of the site into a Web browser address bar), consider weaning yourself of this risky practice. As these ubiquitous typosquatting sites show, it’s a good idea to avoid directly navigating to Web sites you frequent. Instead, bookmark the sites you visit most, particularly those that store your personal and financial information, or that require a login for access.

Panerabread.com, the Web site for the American chain of bakery-cafe fast casual restaurants by the same name, leaked millions of customer records — including names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number — for at least eight months before it was yanked offline earlier today, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

The data available in plain text from Panera’s site appeared to include records for any customer who has signed up for an account to order food online via panerabread.com. The St. Louis-based company, which has more than 2,100 retail locations in the United States and Canada, allows customers to order food online for pickup in stores or for delivery.

KrebsOnSecurity learned about the breach earlier today after being contacted by security researcher Dylan Houlihan, who said he initially notified Panera about customer data leaking from its Web site back on August 2, 2017.

A long message thread that Houlihan shared between himself and Panera indicates that Mike Gustavison, Panera’s director of information security, initially dismissed Houlihan’s report as a likely scam. A week later, however, those messages suggest that the company had validated Houlihan’s findings and was working on a fix.

“Thank you for the information we are working on a resolution,” Gustavison wrote.

Fast forward to early this afternoon — exactly eight months to the day after Houlihan first reported the problem — and data shared by Houlihan indicated the site was still leaking customer records in plain text. Worse still, the records could be indexed and crawled by automated tools with very little effort.

For example, some of the customer records include unique identifiers that increment by one for each new record, making it potentially simple for someone to scrape all available customer accounts. The format of the database also lets anyone search for customers via a variety of data points, including by phone number.

“Panera Bread uses sequential integers for account IDs, which means that if your goal is to gather as much information as you can instead about someone, you can simply increment through the accounts and collect as much as you’d like, up to and including the entire database,” Houlihan said.

Asked whether he saw any indication that Panera ever addressed the issue he reported in August 2017 until today, Houlihan said no.

“No, the flaw never disappeared,” he said. “I checked on it every month or so because I was pissed.”

Shortly after KrebsOnSecurity spoke briefly with Panera’s chief information officer John Meister by phone today, the company briefly took the Web site offline. As of this publication, the site is back online but the data referenced above no longer appears to be reachable.

Another data point exposed in these records included the customer’s Panera loyalty card number, which could potentially be abused by scammers to spend prepaid accounts or to otherwise siphon value from Panera customer loyalty accounts.

It is not clear yet exactly how many Panera customer records may have been exposed by the company’s leaky Web site, but incremental customer numbers indexed by the site suggest that number may be higher than seven million. It’s also unclear whether any Panera customer account passwords may have been impacted.

In a written statement, Panera said it had fixed the problem within less than two hours of being notified by KrebsOnSecurity. But Panera did not explain why it appears to have taken the company eight months to fix the issue after initially acknowledging it privately with Houlihan.

“Panera takes data security very seriously and this issue is resolved,” the statement reads. “Following reports today of a potential problem on our website, we suspended the functionality to repair the issue.  Our investigation is continuing, but there is no evidence of payment card information nor a large number of records being accessed or retrieved.”

A story published here this week revealed the real-life identity behind the original creator of Coinhive — a controversial cryptocurrency mining service that several security firms have recently labeled the most ubiquitous malware threat on the Internet today. In an unusual form of protest against that story, members of a popular German language image-posting board founded by the Coinhive creator have vented their dismay by donating tens of thousands of euros to local charities that support cancer research.

On Monday KrebsOnSecurity published Who and What is Coinhive, an in-depth story which proved that the founder of Coinhive was indeed the founder of the German image hosting and discussion forum pr0gramm[dot]com (not safe for work). I undertook the research because Coinhive’s code primarily is found on tens of thousands of hacked Web sites, and because the until-recently anonymous Coinhive operator(s) have been reluctant to take steps that might curb the widespread abuse of their platform.

In an early version of its Web site, Coinhive said its service was first tested on pr0gramm, and that the founder(s) of Coinhive considered pr0gramm “their platform” of 11 years (exactly the length of time pr0gramm has been online). Coinhive declined to say who was running their service, and tried to tell me their earlier statement about Coinhive’s longtime affiliation with pr0gramm was a convenient lie that was used to helped jump-start the service by enlisting the help of pr0gramm’s thousands of members.

Undeterred, I proceeded with my research based on the assumption that one or more of the founders of pr0gramm were involved in Coinhive. When I learned the real-life identities of the pr0gramm founders and approached them directly, each deflected questions about their apparent roles in founding and launching Coinhive.

However, shortly after the Coinhive story went live, the original founder of pr0gramm (Dominic Szablewski, a.k.a. “cha0s”) published a blog post acknowledging that he was in fact the creator of Coinhive. What’s more, Coinhive has since added legal contact information to its Web site, and has said it is now taking steps to ensure that it no longer profits from cryptocurrency mining activity after hacked Web sites owners report finding Coinhive’s code on their sites.

Normally, when KrebsOnSecurity publishes a piece that sheds light on a corner of the Internet that would rather remain in the shadows, the response is as predictable as it is swift: Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on this site combined with threats of physical violence and harm from anonymous users on Twitter and other social networks.

While this site did receive several small DDoS attacks this week — and more than a few anonymous threats of physical violence and even death related to the Coinhive story — the response from pr0gramm members has been remarkably positive overall.

The pr0gramm community quickly seized on the fact that my last name — Krebs — means “crab” and “cancer” in German. Apparently urged by one of the pr0gramm founders named in the story to express their anger in “objective and polite” ways, several pr0gramm members took to donating money to the Deutsche Krebshilfe (German Cancer Aid/DKMS) Web site as a way to display their unity and numbers.

The protest (pr0test?) soon caught on in the Twitter hashtag “#KrebsIsCancer,” promoted and re-tweeted heavily by pr0gramm members as a means to “Fight Krebs” or fight cancer. According to a story on Wednesday about the effort in Germany’s biggest news portal T-Online.de, German Cancer Aid had at that point received some 4,100 small donations totaling more than 103,000 Euros (~ USD $126,000). The publication said another organization, the German Cancer Research Center, reported 74 small donations likely connected to the effort.

In a statement via Twitter, DKMS Germany said it could not say for sure the total amount the #KrebsIsCancer movement raised, but that it did achieve “above average levels” of donations several days this week. “Last Tuesday alone, a total of over € 50,000 was received. “The amounts can not be assigned directly to the action, but are largely the result” of the #KrebsIsCancer campaign, DKMS said.