Last week cybercriminals deployed ransomware to 1,500 organizations that provide IT security and technical support to many other companies. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in software from Kaseya, a Miami-based company whose products help system administrators manage large networks remotely. Now it appears Kaseya’s customer service portal was left vulnerable until last week to a data-leaking security flaw that was first identified in the same software six years ago.

On July 3, the REvil ransomware affiliate program began using a zero-day security hole (CVE-2021-30116) to deploy ransomware to hundreds of IT management companies running Kaseya’s remote management software — known as the Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA).

According to this entry for CVE-2021-30116, the security flaw that powers that Kaseya VSA zero-day was assigned a vulnerability number on April 2, 2021, indicating Kaseya had roughly three months to address the bug before it was exploited in the wild.

Also on July 3, security incident response firm Mandiant notified Kaseya that their billing and customer support site —portal.kaseya.net — was vulnerable to CVE-2015-2862, a “directory traversal” vulnerability in Kaseya VSA that allows remote users to read any files on the server using nothing more than a Web browser.

As its name suggests, CVE-2015-2862 was issued in July 2015. Six years later, Kaseya’s customer portal was still exposed to the data-leaking weakness.

Mandiant notified Kaseya after hearing about it from Alex Holden, founder and chief technology officer of Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security. Holden said the 2015 vulnerability was present on Kaseya’s customer portal until Friday afternoon, allowing him to download the site’s “web.config” file, a server component that often contains sensitive information such as usernames and passwords and the locations of key databases.

“It’s not like they forgot to patch something that Microsoft fixed years ago,” Holden said. “It’s a patch for their own software. And it’s not zero-day. It’s from 2015!”

The official description of CVE-2015-2862 says a would-be attacker would need to be already authenticated to the server for the exploit to work. But Holden said that was not the case with the vulnerability on the Kaseya portal that he reported via Mandiant.

“This is worse because the CVE calls for an authenticated user,” Holden said. “This was not.”

Michael Sanders, executive vice president of account management at Kaseya, confirmed that the customer portal was taken offline Friday in response to a vulnerability report. Sanders said the portal had been retired in 2018 in favor of a more modern customer support and ticketing system, yet somehow the old site was still left available online.

“It was deprecated but left up,” Sanders said.

In a written statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Kaseya said that in 2015 CERT reported two vulnerabilities in its VSA product.

“We worked with CERT on responsible disclosure and released patches for VSA versions V7, R8, R9 and R9 along with the public disclosure (CVEs) and notifications to our customers. Portal.kaseya.net was not considered by our team to be part of the VSA shipping product and was not part of the VSA product patch in 2015. It has no access to customer endpoints and has been shut down – and will no longer be enabled or used by Kaseya.”

“At this time, there is no evidence this portal was involved in the VSA product security incident,” the statement continued. “We are continuing to do forensic analysis on the system and investigating what data is actually there.”

The REvil ransomware group said affected organizations could negotiate independently with them for a decryption key, or someone could pay $70 million worth of virtual currency to buy a key that works to decrypt all systems compromised in this attack.

But Sanders said every ransomware expert Kaseya consulted so far has advised against negotiating for one ransom to unlock all victims.

“The problem is that they don’t have our data, they have our customers’ data,” Sanders said. “We’ve been counseled not to do that by every ransomware negotiating company we’ve dealt with. They said with the amount of individual machines hacked and ransomwared, it would be very difficult for all of these systems to be remediated at once.”

In a video posted to Youtube on July 6, Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola said the ransomware attack had “limited impact, with only approximately 50 of the more than 35,000 Kaseya customers being breached.”

“While each and every customer impacted is one too many, the impact of this highly sophisticated attack has proven to be, thankfully, greatly overstated,” Voccola said.

The zero-day vulnerability that led to Kaseya customers (and customers of those customers) getting ransomed was discovered and reported to Kaseya by Wietse Boonstra, a researcher with the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD).

In a July 4 blog post, DIVD’s Victor Gevers wrote that Kaseya was “very cooperative,” and “asked the right questions.”

“Also, partial patches were shared with us to validate their effectiveness,” Gevers wrote. “During the entire process, Kaseya has shown that they were willing to put in the maximum effort and initiative into this case both to get this issue fixed and their customers patched. They showed a genuine commitment to do the right thing. Unfortunately, we were beaten by REvil in the final sprint, as they could exploit the vulnerabilities before customers could even patch.”

Still, Kaseya has yet to issue an official patch for the flaw Boonstra reported in April. Kaseya told customers on July 7 that it was working “through the night” to push out an update.

Gevers said the Kaseya vulnerability was discovered as part of a larger DIVD effort to look for serious flaws in a wide array of remote network management tools.

“We are focusing on these types of products because we spotted a trend where more and more of the products that are used to keep networks safe and secure are showing structural weaknesses,” he wrote.

Microsoft on Tuesday issued an emergency software update to quash a security bug that’s been dubbed “PrintNightmare,” a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is actively being exploited. The fix comes a week ahead of Microsoft’s normal monthly Patch Tuesday release, and follows the publishing of exploit code showing would-be attackers how to leverage the flaw to break into Windows computers.

At issue is CVE-2021-34527, which involves a flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service that could be exploited by attackers to run code of their choice on a target’s system. Microsoft says it has already detected active exploitation of the vulnerability.

Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable, said Microsoft’s patch warrants urgent attention because of the vulnerability’s ubiquity across organizations and the prospect that attackers could exploit this flaw in order to take over a Windows domain controller.

“We expect it will only be a matter of time before it is more broadly incorporated into attacker toolkits,” Narang said. “PrintNightmare will remain a valuable exploit for cybercriminals as long as there are unpatched systems out there, and as we know, unpatched vulnerabilities have a long shelf life for attackers.”

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Security Response Center said it was delayed in developing fixes for the vulnerability in Windows Server 2016, Windows 10 version 1607, and Windows Server 2012. The fix also apparently includes a new feature that allows Windows administrators to implement stronger restrictions on the installation of printer software.

“Prior to installing the July 6, 2021, and newer Windows Updates containing protections for CVE-2021-34527, the printer operators’ security group could install both signed and unsigned printer drivers on a printer server,” reads Microsoft’s support advisory. “After installing such updates, delegated admin groups like printer operators can only install signed printer drivers. Administrator credentials will be required to install unsigned printer drivers on a printer server going forward.”

Windows 10 users can check for the patch by opening Windows Update. Chances are, it will show what’s pictured in the screenshot below — that KB5004945 is available for download and install. A reboot will be required after installation.

Friendly reminder: It’s always a good idea to backup your data before applying security updates. Windows 10 has some built-in tools to help you do that, either on a per-file/folder basis or by making a complete and bootable copy of your hard drive all at once.

This post will be updated if Windows users start reporting any issues in applying the patch.

Countless Western Digital customers saw their MyBook Live network storage drives remotely wiped in the past month thanks to a bug in a product line the company stopped supporting in 2015, as well as a previously unknown zero-day flaw. But there is a similarly serious zero-day flaw present in a much broader range of newer Western Digital MyCloud network storage devices that will remain unfixed for many customers who can’t or won’t upgrade to the latest operating system.

At issue is a remote code execution flaw residing in all Western Digital network attached storage (NAS) devices running MyCloud OS 3, an operating system the company only recently stopped supporting.

Researchers Radek Domanski and Pedro Ribeiro originally planned to present their findings at the Pwn2Own hacking competition in Tokyo last year. But just days before the event Western Digital released MyCloud OS 5, which eliminated the bug they found. That update effectively nullified their chances at competing in Pwn2Own, which requires exploits to work against the latest firmware or software supported by the targeted device.

Nevertheless, in February 2021, the duo published this detailed YouTube video, which documents how they discovered a chain of weaknesses that allows an attacker to remotely update a vulnerable device’s firmware with a malicious backdoor — using a low-privileged user account that has a blank password.

The researchers said Western Digital never responded to their reports. In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Western Digital said it received their report after Pwn2Own Tokyo 2020, but that at the time the vulnerability they reported had already been fixed by the release of My Cloud OS 5.

“The communication that came our way confirmed the research team involved planned to release details of the vulnerability and asked us to contact them with any questions,” Western Digital said. “We didn’t have any questions so we didn’t respond. Since then, we have updated our process and respond to every report in order to avoid any miscommunication like this again. We take reports from the security research community very seriously and conduct investigations as soon as we receive them.”

Western Digital ignored questions about whether the flaw found by Domanski and Ribeiro was ever addressed in OS 3. A statement published on its support site March 12, 2021 says the company will no longer provide further security updates to the MyCloud OS 3 firmware.

“We strongly encourage moving to the My Cloud OS5 firmware,” the statement reads. “If your device is not eligible for upgrade to My Cloud OS 5, we recommend that you upgrade to one of our other My Cloud offerings that support My Cloud OS 5. More information can be found here.” A list of MyCloud devices that can support OS 5 is here.

But according to Domanski, OS 5 is a complete rewrite of Western Digital’s core operating system, and as a result some of the more popular features and functionality built into OS3 are missing.

“It broke a lot of functionality,” Domanski said of OS 5. “So some users might not decide to migrate to OS 5.”

In recognition of this, the researchers have developed and released their own patch that fixes the vulnerabilities they found in OS 3 (the patch needs to be reapplied each time the device is rebooted). Western Digital said it is aware of third parties offering security patches for My Cloud OS 3.

“We have not evaluated any such patches and we are unable to provide any support for such patches,” the company stated.

Domanski said MyCloud users on OS 3 can virtually eliminate the threat from this attack by simply ensuring that the devices are not set up to be reachable remotely over the Internet. MyCloud devices make it super easy for customers to access their data remotely, but doing so also exposes them to attacks like last month’s that led to the mass-wipe of MyBook Live devices.

“Luckily for many users they don’t expose the interface to the Internet,” he said. “But looking at the number of posts on Western Digital’s support page related to OS3, I can assume the userbase is still considerable. It almost feels like Western Digital without any notice jumped to OS5, leaving all the users without support.”

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica has a fascinating deep dive on the other zero-day flaw that led to the mass attack last month on MyBook Live devices that Western Digital stopped supporting in 2015. In response to Goodin’s report, Western Digital acknowledged that the flaw was enabled by a Western Digital developer who removed code that required a valid user password before allowing factory resets to proceed.

Facing a backlash of angry customers, Western Digital also pledged to provide data recovery services to affected customers starting this month. “MyBook Live customers will also be eligible for a trade-in program so they can upgrade to MyCloud devices,” Goodin wrote. “A spokeswoman said the data recovery service will be free of charge.”

If attackers get around to exploiting this OS 3 bug, Western Digital might soon be paying for data recovery services and trade-ins for a whole lot more customers.

Financial services giant Intuit this week informed 1.4 million small businesses using its QuickBooks Online Payroll and Intuit Online Payroll products that their payroll information will be shared with big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax starting later this year unless customers opt out by the end of this month.

Intuit says the change is tied to an “exciting” and “free” new service that will let millions of small business employees get easy access to employment and income verification services when they wish to apply for a loan or line of credit.

“In early fall 2021, your QuickBooks Online Payroll subscription will include an automated income and employment verification service powered by The Work Number from Equifax,” reads the Intuit email, which includes a link to the new Terms of Service. “Your employees may need to verify their income and employment info when applying for things like loans, credit, or public aid. Before, you likely had to manually provide this info to lenders, creditors or government agencies. These verifications will be automated by The Work Number, which helps employees get faster approvals and saves you time.”

An Intuit spokesperson clarified that the new service is not available through QuickBooks Online or to QuickBooks Online users as a whole. Intuit’s FAQ on the changes is here.

Equifax’s 2017 megabreach that exposed the personal and financial details of 145.5 million Americans may have shocked the public, but it did little to stop more than a million employers from continuing to sell Equifax their employee payroll data, Bloomberg found in late 2017.

“The workforce-solutions unit is now among Equifax’s fastest-growing businesses, contributing more than a fifth of the firm’s $3.1 billion of revenue last year,” wrote Jennifer Surane. “Using payroll data from government agencies and thousands of employers — including a vast majority of Fortune 500 companies — Equifax has cultivated a database of 300 million current and historic employment records, according to regulatory filings.”

QuickBooks Online user Anthony Citrano posted on Twitter about receiving the notice, noting that the upcoming changes had yet to receive any attention in the financial or larger media space.

“The way I read the terms, Equifax gets to proactively collect all payroll data just in case they need to share it later — similar to how they already handle credit reporting,” said Citrano, who is founder and CEO of Acquicent, a company that issues non-fungible tokens (NFTs). “And that feels like a disaster waiting to happen, especially given Equifax’s history.”

In selling payroll data to Equifax, Intuit will be joining some of the world’s largest payroll providers. For example, ADP — the largest payroll software provider in the United States — has long shared payroll data with Equifax.

But Citrano said this move by Intuit will incorporate a large number of fairly small businesses.

“ADP participates in some way already, but QuickBooks Online jumping on the bandwagon means a lot of employees of small to mid-sized businesses are going to be affected,” he said.

Why might small businesses want to think twice before entrusting Equifax with their payroll data? The answer is the company doesn’t have a great track record of protecting that information.

In the days following the 2017 breach at Equifax, KrebsOnSecurity pointed out that The Work Number made it a little too easy for anyone to learn your salary history. At the time, all you needed to view someone’s entire work and salary history was their Social Security number and date of birth. It didn’t help that for roughly half the U.S. population, both of the pieces of information were known to be in the possession of criminals behind the breach.

Equifax responded by taking down its Work Number website until it was able to include additional authentication requirements, saying anyone could opt out of Equifax revealing their salary history.

Equifax’s security improvements included the addition of four multiple-guess questions whose answers were based on publicly-available data. But these requirements were easily bypassed, as evidenced by a previous breach at Equifax’s employment division.

The Work Number is a user-paid verification of employment database created by TALX Corp., a data broker acquired by Equifax in 2007. Four months before the epic 2017 breach became public, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that fraudsters who specialize in tax refund fraud had been successfully guessing the answers to those secret questions to reset TALX account PINs, which then let them view past W-2 tax forms for employees at many Fortune 500 companies.

Intuit says affected customers that do not want this new service included must update their preferences and opt-out by July 31, 2021. Otherwise, they will be automatically will be opted in. According to Intuit, customers can opt out by following these steps:

1. Sign in to QuickBooks Online Payroll.

2. Go to Payroll Settings.

3. In the Shared data section, select the pencil and uncheck the box.

4. Select Save.

Imagine waking up each morning knowing the identities of thousands of people who are about to be mugged for thousands of dollars each. You know exactly when and where each of those muggings will take place, and you’ve shared this information in advance with the authorities each day for a year with no outward indication that they are doing anything about it. How frustrated would you be?

Such is the curse of the fraud fighter known online by the handles “Brianna Ware” and “BWare” for short, a longtime member of a global group of volunteers who’ve infiltrated a cybercrime gang that disseminates counterfeit checks tied to a dizzying number of online scams.

For the past year, BWare has maintained contact with an insider from the criminal group that’s been sending daily lists of would-be victims who are to receive counterfeit checks printed using the real bank account information of legitimate companies.

“Some days we’re seeing thousands of counterfeit checks going out,” BWare said.

The scams used in connection with the fraudulent checks vary widely, from fake employment and “mystery shopper” schemes to those involving people who have been told they can get paid to cover their cars in advertisements (a.k.a. the “car wrap” scam).

Most of the counterfeit checks being disseminated by this fraud group are in amounts ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. The crimes that the checks enable are known variously as “advanced fee” scams, in that they involve tricking people into making payments in anticipation of receiving something of greater value in return.

But in each scheme the goal is the same: Convince the recipient to deposit the check and then wire a portion of the amount somewhere else. A few days after the check is deposited, it gets invariably canceled by the organization whose bank account information was on the check. And then person who deposited the phony check is on the hook for the entire amount.

“Like the car wrap scam, where they send you a check for $5,000, and you agree to keep $1,000 for your first payment and send the rest back to them in exchange for the car wrap materials,” BWare said. “Usually the check includes a letter that says they want you to text a specific phone number to let them know you received the check. When you do that, they’ll start sending you instructions on how and where to send the money.”

Traditionally, these groups have asked recipients to transit money via wire transfer. But these days, BWare said, the same crooks are now asking people to forward the money via mobile applications like CashApp and Venmo.

BWare and other volunteer fraud fighters believe the fake checks gang is using people looped into phony employment schemes and wooed through online romance scams to print the counterfeit checks, and that other recruits are responsible for mailing them out each day.

“More often than not, the scammers creating the shipping labels will provide those to an unwitting accomplice, or the accomplice is told to log in to an account and print the labels,” BWare explained.

Often the counterfeit checks and labels forwarded by BWare’s informant come with notes attached indicating the type of scam with which they are associated.

“Sometimes they’re mystery shopper scams, and other times it’s overpayment for an item sold on Craigslist,” BWare said. “We don’t know how the scammers are getting the account and routing numbers for these checks, but they are drawn on real companies and always scan fine through a bank’s systems initially. The recipients can deposit them at any bank, but we try to get the checks to the banks when we can so they have a heads up.”

SHRINKING FROM THE FIREHOSE?

Roughly a year ago, BWare’s group started sharing its intelligence with fraud investigators at FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service — the primary delivery mechanisms for these counterfeit checks.

Both the USPS and FedEx have an interest in investigating because the fraudsters in this case are using stolen shipping labels paid for by companies who have no idea their FedEx or USPS accounts are being used for such purposes.

“In most cases, the name of the sender will be completely unrelated to what’s being sent,” BWare said. “For example, you’ll see a label for a letter to go out with a counterfeit check for a car wrap scam, and the sender on the shipping label will be something like XYZ Biological Resources.”

But BWare says a year later, there is little sign that anyone is interested in acting on the shared intelligence.

“It’s so much information that they really don’t want it anymore and they’re not doing anything about it,” BWare said of FedEx and the USPS. “It’s almost like they’re turning a blind eye. There are so many of these checks going out each day that instead of trying to drink from the firehouse, they’re just turning their heads.”

FedEx did not respond to requests for comment. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service responded with a statement saying it “does not comment publicly on its investigative procedures and operational protocols.”

ANY METHOD THAT WORKS

Ronnie Tokazowski is a threat researcher at Agari, a security firm that has closely tracked many of the groups behind these advanced fee schemes [KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Tokazowski in 2018 after he received a security industry award for his work in this area].

Tokazowski said it’s likely the group BWare has infiltrated is involved in a myriad other email fraud schemes, including so-called “business email compromise” (BEC) or “CEO scams,” in which the fraudsters impersonate executives at a company in the hopes of convincing someone at the firm to wire money for payment of a non-existent invoice. According to the FBI, BEC scams netted thieves nearly $2 billion in 2020 — far more than any other type of cybercrime.

In a report released in 2019 (PDF), Agari profiled a group it dubbed “Scattered Canary” that is operating principally out of West Africa and dabbles in a dizzying array of schemes, including BEC and romance scams, FEMA and SBA loans, unemployment insurance fraud, counterfeit checks and of course money laundering.

Tokazowski said he doesn’t know if the group BWare is watching has any affiliation with Scattered Canary. But he said his experience with Scattered Canary shows these groups tend to make money via any and all methods that reliably produce results.

“One of the things that came out of the Scattered Canary report was that the actors we saw doing BEC scams were the same actors doing the car wrap and various Craigslist scams involving fake checks,” he said. “The people doing this type of crime will have tutorials on how to run the scam, how to wire money out for unemployment fraud, how to target people on Craigslist, and so on. It’s very different from the way a Russian hacking group might go after one industry vertical or piece of software or focus on one or two types of fraud. They will follow any method they can that works.”

Tokazowski said he’s taken his share of flack from people on social media who say his focus on West African nations as the primary source of these advanced fee and BEC scams is somehow racist [KrebsOnSecurity experienced a similar response to the 2013 stories, Spy Service Exposes Nigerian ‘Yahoo Boys’, and ‘Yahoo Boys’ Have 419 Facebook Friends].

But Tokazowski maintains he has been one of the more vocal proponents of the idea that trying to fight these problems by arresting those involved is something of a Sisyphean task, and that it makes way more sense to focus on changing the economic realities in places like Nigeria, which has been a hotbed of advanced fee activity for decades.

Nigeria has the world’s second-highest unemployment rate — rising from 27.1 percent in 2019 to 33 percent in 2020, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The nation also is among the world’s most corrupt, according to 2020 findings from Transparency International.

“Education is definitely one piece, as raising awareness is hands down the best way to get ahead of this,” Tokazowski said. “But we also need to think about ways to create more business opportunities there so that people who are doing this to put food on the table have more legitimate opportunities. Unfortunately, thanks to the level of corruption of government officials, there are a lot of cultural reasons that fighting this type of crime at the source is going to be difficult.”