If you receive an email this holiday season asking you to “confirm” an online e-commerce order or package shipment, please resist the urge to click the included link or attachment: Malware purveyors and spammers are blasting these missives by the millions each day in a bid to trick people into giving up control over their computers and identities.

Seasonal scams like these are a perennial scourge of the holidays, mainly because the methods they employ are reliably successful. Crooks understand that it’s easier to catch would-be victims off-guard during the holidays. This goes even for people who generally know better than to click on links and attachments in emails that spoof trusted brands and retailers, because this is a time of year when many people are intensely focused on making sure their online orders arrive before Dec. 25.

According to Malcovery, a company that closely tracks email-based malware attacks, these phony “order confirmation” spam campaigns began around Thanksgiving, and use both booby-trapped links and attached files in a bid to infect recipients’ Windows PCs with the malware that powers the Asprox spam botnet.

Asprox is a nasty Trojan that harvests email credentials and other passwords from infected machines, turns the host into a zombie for relaying junk email (such as the pharmaceutical spam detailed in my new book Spam Nation), and perpetuates additional Asprox malware attacks. Asprox also deploys a scanning module that forces hacked PCs to scan websites for vulnerabilities that can be used to hack the sites and foist malware on visitors to that site. For an exhaustive and fairly recent analysis of Asprox, see this writeup (PDF) from Trend Micro.

Malcovery notes that the Asprox spam emails use a variety of subject lines, including “Acknowledgment of Order,” “Order Confirmation,” “Order Status,” “Thank you for buying from [insert merchant name here]”, and a “Thank you for your order.”

If you receive an email from a recognized brand that references an issue with an online or in-store order and you think it might be legitimate, do not click the embedded links or attachment. Instead, open up a Web browser and visit the merchant site in question. Generally speaking, legitimate communications about order issues will reference an order number and/or some other data points specific to the transaction — information that can be used to look up the order status at the merchant’s Web site. I know I’m probably preaching to the choir for the loyal readers of this site, but I’m sure most of you have friends and relatives who could use a reminder about all of this. Please feel free to forward them a link to this story.

The recent hacker break-in at Sony Pictures Entertainment appears to have involved the theft of far more than unreleased motion pictures: According to multiple sources, the intruders also stole more than 25 gigabytes of sensitive data on tens of thousands of Sony employees, including Social Security numbers, medical and salary information. What’s more, it’s beginning to look like the attackers may have destroyed data on an unknown number of internal Sony systems.

Several files being traded on torrent networks seen by this author include a global Sony employee list, a Microsoft Excel file that includes the name, location, employee ID, network username, base salary and date of birth for more than 6,800 individuals.

Sony officials could not be immediately reached for comment; a press hotline for the company rang for several minutes without answer, and email requests to the company went unanswered.  But a comprehensive search on LinkedIn for dozens of the names in the list indicate virtually all correspond to current or former Sony employees.

Another file being traded online appears to be a status report from April 2014 listing the names, dates of birth, SSNs and health savings account data on more than 700 Sony employees. Yet another apparently purloined file’s name suggests it was the product of an internal audit from accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and includes screen shots of dozens of employee federal tax records and other compensation data.

The latest revelations come more than a week after a cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment brought down the company’s corporate email systems. A Sony spokesperson told Reuters that the company has since “restored a number of important services” and was “working closely with law enforcement officials to investigate the matter.”

Several media outlets reported at the time that Sony employees had been warned not to connect to the company’s corporate network or to check email, and noted that Sony’s IT departments had instructed employees to turn off their computers as well as disable Wi-Fi on all mobile devices.” Other reports cited unnamed investigators pointing to North Korean hackers as the source of the attack, although those reports could not be independently confirmed.

Such extreme precautions would make sense if the company’s network was faced with a cyber threat designed to methodically destroy files on corporate computers. Indeed, the FBI this week released a restricted “Flash Alert” warning of just such a threat, about an unnamed attack group that has been using malware designed to wipe computer hard drives — and the underlying “master boot record” (MBR) on the affected systems — of all data.

KrebsOnSecurity obtained a copy of the alert, which includes several file names and hashes (long strings of letters and numbers that uniquely identify files) corresponding to the file-wiping malware. The FBI does not specify where the malware was found or against whom it might have been used, noting only that “the FBI has high confidence that these indicators are being used by CNE [computer network exploitation] operators for further network exploitation.” The report also says the language pack referenced by the malicious files is Korean.

The FBI alert references several network traffic “signatures” that organizations can use to detect the traffic seen in previous attacks from this malware — traffic that appears to beacon back to (most likely compromised) systems in Thailand, Poland and Italy. But the alert also says this type of vigilance may only serve to let organizations know that their files are currently in the process of being deleted.

“The following Snort signature can be used to detect the beacon traffic, though by the time the beacons occur, the destructive process of wiping the files has begun,” the alert warned.

Here’s the Snort signature, in case this is useful for any readers who didn’t get this memo:

Alert tcp any any – > [88.53.215.64, 217.96.33.164, 203.131.222.102] [8080, 8000] (msg: “wiper_callout”;
dsize:42;  content:  “|ff  ff  ff  ff|”;  offset:  26;  depth:  4;  sid:  314;

Update: 1:58 p.m. ET: Multiple sources are reporting that the links to the torrents for the stolen Sony internal data were posted on Pastebin late Monday morning. Less than an hour after that post went live, the individual hosts that were sharing copies of the Sony data came under sustained denial-of-service attacks apparently aimed at keeping the files from being shared with other torrent users.

Also, the security guys over at Packetninjas have posted a useful write-up on a malware sample they spotted from early July 2014 that matches the file name of the malware described in the FBI’s Flash alert about the file-wiping malware. Packetninjas notes that the file also was calling home to the same control server in Thailand that was documented in this week’s FBI alert.

This file directory tree, included in the leaked data, offers a glimpse into the sheer volume of files apparently compromised in this breach.

This is a developing story. More to come. Stay tuned.

In case any of you loyal readers missed it, KrebsOnSecurity.com and its author were featured in a 60 Minutes interview last night on the credit and debit card breaches that have hit countless retailers and consumers over the past year.

I spent more than a dozen hours with 60 Minutes producers, film crews and the host of this segment — CBS’s Bill Whitaker, so I’m glad they were able to use as much footage as they did. Leading up to the filming, the producer of the show asked some very incisive questions — some of which I didn’t know the answers to myself — and I was hoping the segment would address some of the less discussed issues that contribute to this epidemic of card breaches. But, alas, I hope to explore some of those questions in future posts.

A link to a video and transcript of the program is here.

Much of the segment was shot in a nearby hotel. The rest of it was filmed right in my living room. The 60 Minutes crew had so much camera, sound and lighting gear set up in that room that they actually had to put a ton of other equipment in our kitchen (see the admittedly blurry picture below).

Underground cybercrime shops that sell credit and debit card accounts stolen from retailers are slashing prices and promoting their own Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales as fraudsters gear up for the busy holiday shopping season.

Card data stolen from main street retailers, a.k.a. “dumps,” is sold to crooks who encode the numbers onto new plastic and go shopping for high-priced electronics and gift cards at big box stores. Other shops sell mainly stolen card numbers, expiration dates and card security codes that can only be used to shop at online retailers.

Have a look at the slide show below, which features multiple advertisements pushed out by some of the most bustling crime shops competing for buyers with discounts and promotions. You might have to scroll down a bit to see the slideshow. Advance the slides by hovering over the right edge of the image and clicking the arrow that appears.

It’s nearly impossible for consumers to tell how secure a main street or online merchant is, so it’s best just to shop as if they’re all compromised. That is, if you have the choice between using a credit or debit card, shop with your credit card.

Sure, the card associations and your bank will be quick to point out that you’re not liable for fraudulent charges that you report in a timely manner, but this assurance rings hollow for many who find their checking accounts emptied by card thieves after shopping at a breached merchant with a debit card. Who pays for the fees levied against you by different merchants when your checks bounce? You do. Does the bank reimburse you when your credit score takes a ding because your mortgage or car payment was late? Don’t hold your breath.

Also, if you’re shopping online this holiday season, be wary of phantom stores. If you don’t know much about the seller that has the item you want to buy, take a few minutes to investigate its online reputation. It’s not uncommon for bargain basement, phantom Web sites to materialize during the holiday season and vanish forever not long afterward. If you’re buying merchandise from an online store that is brand new, the risk that you will get scammed increases significantly. But how do you know the lifespan of a site selling that must-have gadget at the lowest price? One easy way to get a quick idea is to run a basic WHOIS search on the site’s domain name. The more recent the site’s “creation date,” the more likely it is a phantom store.

Be careful what you agree to: Check to make sure you know how long the item will take to be shipped, and that you understand the store’s return policies. Also, keep an eye out for hidden surcharges, and be wary of blithely clicking “ok” during the checkout process.

Banks in Europe are warning about the emergence of a rare, virtually invisible form of ATM skimmer involving a so-called “wiretapping” device that is inserted through a tiny hole cut in the cash machine’s front. The hole is covered up by a fake decal, and the thieves then use custom-made equipment to attach the device to ATM’s internal card reader.

According to the European ATM Security Team (EAST), a nonprofit that represents banks in 29 countries, financial institutions in two countries recently reported ATM attacks in which the card data was compromised internally by “wire-tapping” or “eavesdropping” on the customer transaction. The image below shows some criminal equipment used to perpetrate these eavesdropping attacks.

“The criminals cut a hole in the fascia around the card reader where the decal is situated,” EAST described in a recent, non-public report. “A device is then inserted and connected internally onto the card reader, and the hole covered with a fake decal”
[pictured, bottom right].

Pictured above are what appear to be wires that are fed into the machine with some custom-made rods. It looks like the data is collected by removing the decal, fishing out the wire attached to the ATM’s card reader, and connecting it to a handheld data storage device.

I sought clarification from EAST about how the device works. Most skimmers are card slot overlay devices that work by using a built-in component which reads the account data off of the magnetic stripe when the customer inserts the card. But Lachlan Gunn, EAST’s executive director, suggested that this device intercepts the card data from the legitimate card reader on the inside of the ATM. He described the wiretapping device this way:

“It’s where a tap is attached to the pre-read head or read head of the card reader,” Lachlan said. “The card data is then read through the tap. We still classify it as skimming, but technically the magnetic stripe [on the customer/victim’s card] is not directly skimmed as the data is intercepted.”

The last report in my ATM skimming series showcased some major innovations in so-called “insert skimmers,” card-skimming devices made to fix snugly and invisibly inside the throat of the card acceptance slot. EAST’s new report includes another, slightly more advanced, insert skimmer that’s being called an “insert transmitter skimmer.”

Like the one pictured below, an insert transmitter skimmer is made up of two steel plates and an internal battery that lasts approximately one to two weeks. “They do not store data, but transmit it directly to a receiving device — probably placed less than 1 meter from the ATM.

Both of these card skimming technologies rely on hidden cameras to steal customer PIN codes. In a typical skimming attack involving devices that lay directly on top of the card acceptance slot, the hidden camera is a pinhole spy cam that is embedded inside the card slot overlay and angled toward the PIN pad. Just as often, the camera is hidden in a false panel affixed directly above the PIN pan with the pinhole pointed downward.

According to east, the use of false sidebar panels is becoming more prevalent (see image below for an example). It is not unusual for hidden cameras to be obscured inside of phony brochure racks as well.

As this and other insert skimmer attacks show, it’s getting tougher to spot ATM skimming devices. It’s best to focus instead on protecting your own physical security while at the cash machine. If you visit an ATM that looks strange, tampered with, or out of place, try to find another ATM. Use only machines in public, well-lit areas, and avoid ATMs in secluded spots.

Last, but certainly not least, cover the PIN pad with your hand when entering your PIN: That way, if even if the thieves somehow skim your card, there is less chance that they will be able to snag your PIN as well. You’d be amazed at how many people fail to take this basic precaution. Yes, there is still a chance that thieves could use a PIN-pad overlay device to capture your PIN, but in my experience these are far less common than hidden cameras (and quite a bit more costly for thieves who aren’t making their own skimmers).

Are you as fascinated by ATM skimmers as I am? Check out my series on this topic, All About Skimmers.