Meta, Chime file lawsuit against alleged phishing scam on Facebook, Instagram

Facebook parent Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it had filed a joint lawsuit with digital banking company Chime against two Nigeria-based individuals who engaged in phishing attacks to deceive people and gain access to their online financial accounts.

The lawsuit, which is the first joint complaint between Meta and a financial services company, alleged that the defendants used Facebook and Instagram accounts to impersonate Chime and lure people to fake branded phishing websites with the aim of obtaining their Chime account login information and withdrawing funds.

In the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Meta said the defendants used a network of computers to control more than 800 impersonating Instagram accounts and five Facebook accounts, in order to conceal their activity and evade technical enforcement measures.

Reuters could not immediately reach the defendants for comment.

"Impersonation scams are a serious challenge, and this action represents a major step forward in cross-industry collaboration against this abuse," Meta's director of platform enforcement and litigation Jessica Romero said in a blog post.

Fintech company Chime was launched by former Visa Inc executive Chris Britt and Comcast Corp alumnus Ryan King in 2012. Reuters exclusively reported last month that Chime had asked Goldman Sachs to help it with IPO preparations.

Meta said it had taken several previous actions against the defendants since June 2020 for violating its terms, including disabling their accounts, blocking impersonating domains on its platforms and sending cease and desist letters. (Reporting by Elizabeth Culliford in New York; Additional reporting by the Lagos bureau; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

-reuters-

Hackers breach cameras at banks, jails, Tesla and more

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - A US hacker collective on Tuesday claimed to have tapped into footage from 150,000 security cameras at banks, jails, schools, carmaker Tesla and other sites to expose "the surveillance state."

Images captured from hacked surveillance video were posted on Twitter with an #OperationPanopticon hashtag.

"What if we just absolutely ended surveillance capitalism in two days?" a purported member of a group called APT-69420 Arson Cats asked amid a string of tweeted images.

"This is the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg."

The hacker group claimed to have ferreted out credentials of a high level administrator account at Silicon Valley firm Verkada, which runs a platform operating security systems online.

"We have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorized access," a Verkada spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.

"Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified law enforcement."

Verkada added that it has notified companies that rely on its platform.

Surveillance camera imagery posted on Twitter included a jail cell block and a man wearing a fake beard dancing in a bank storage room.

The Verkada breach shows the risk of outsourcing security surveillance to companies in the internet cloud, according to Rick Holland, chief information security officer at Digital Shadows, a risk protection firm.

"Verkada positions itself as a 'more secure, scalable' alternative to on-premises network video recorders," Holland said.

"You don't always get more secure when you outsource your security to a third party."

He said he expected the breach to trigger investigations by privacy regulators in the US and Europe.

Agence France-Presse

Hackers breach US agencies, Homeland Security a reported target

NEW YORK - The US Department of Homeland Security was the third federal department to be targeted in a major cyberattack, US media reported Monday, a day after Washington revealed the hack which may have been coordinated by a foreign government.

The Washington Post cited unnamed officials who said that the DHS -- which is in charge of protecting the country from attacks both online and off -- had been added to a growing list of targets in the attack, including the Treasury and Commerce departments.

A statement from DHS Monday did not confirm the report, saying only that it was "aware of cyber breaches across the federal government and working closely with our partners in the public and private sector on the federal response."

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is attached to the DHS, on Sunday said it had ordered federal agencies to immediately stop using SolarWinds Orion IT products following reports that hackers had used a recent update to gain access to internal communications. 

"We urge all our partners -- in the public and private sectors -- to assess their exposure to this compromise and to secure their networks," said CISA Acting Director Brandon Wales.

SolarWinds over the weekend admitted that hackers had exploited a backdoor in an update of some of its software released between March and June.

The hacks are part of a wider campaign that also hit major cybersecurity firm FireEye, which said its own defenses had been breached by sophisticated attackers who stole tools used to test customers' computer systems.

FireEye said it suspected the attack was state-sponsored, and warned it could have affected numerous high profile targets across the globe.

"This campaign may have begun as early as Spring 2020 and is currently ongoing," FireEye said in a blog post.

RUSSIA INVOLVED?

The content the hackers have sought to steal -- and how successful they have been -- is not known at this time. 

"We believe this is nation-state activity at significant scale, aimed at both the government and private sector," said IT giant Microsoft, which is also investigating, in a blog post. 

While Microsoft refrained from naming a country, several US media pointed the finger at the Russian group "APT29", also known as "Cozy Bear." 

According to the Washington Post, the group is part of Moscow's intelligence services, and hacked servers at the State Department and the White House during the Obama administration.

The Russian Embassy in the United States categorically denied the accusations in a statement on Facebook.

Both the public and private sectors must be increasingly on guard against such hacks, warned Hank Schless, senior manager at Lookout, a California-based mobile security company. 

"Adversarial nation-states have recognized the value in targeting both sectors, which means neither is safe from the types of attacks that have government resources behind them," he said.

Matt Walmsley of Vectra, which provides cyberattack detection services from its base in California, agreed.

"Security teams need to drastically reduce the overall risk of a breach by gaining instant visibility and understanding of who and what is accessing data or changing configurations, regardless of how they are doing it, and from where," he said.

Agence France-Presse

US-based hacker fighter FireEye says breached by elite attackers

SAN FRANCISCO - Hacker fighting firm FireEye on Tuesday said its own defenses were breached by sophisticated attackers who stole "Red Team" tools used to test customers' computer systems.

While the hackers had yet to be identified, their tactics and targets led FireEye to believe it was a state-sponsored attack "by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities."

"The hack of a premier cybersecurity firm demonstrates that even the most sophisticated companies are vulnerable to cyber-attacks," said US Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who is vice chairman of the

 senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"We have come to expect and demand that companies take real steps to secure their systems, but this case also shows the difficulty of stopping determined nation-state hackers."

It did not appear any customer data was stolen from FireEye, or that the taken tools have been used in other attacks, according to the Silicon Valley-based firm.

"The attackers tailored their world-class capabilities specifically to target and attack FireEye," FireEye chief executive Kevin Mandia said in a blog post revealing the breach.

"They used a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past."

FireEye shares were down more than 7 percent in after-market trades that followed released of news about the hack.

RELENTLESS ATTACKS

FireEye said it is investigating the attack with help from the FBI and industry partners, including technology colossus Microsoft.

"Their initial analysis supports our conclusion that this was the work of a highly sophisticated state-sponsored attacker utilizing novel techniques," Mandia said.

The hackers primarily sought information related to government customers which is consistent with nation-state cyberespionage, according to FireEye.

Also targeted in the attack were "Red Team" tools that help diagnose the security of customers' networks by mimicking the behavior of hackers, Mandia said.

FireEye was making available countermeasures to defend against someone using the tools.

The US Department of Homeland Security said it was aware of the attack but that it had no information indicating the stolen cyber tools were being "maliciously used" so far.

US spy agencies have been asked to brief the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about the cyber attack in the coming days, according to chairman Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California.

"Foreign actors have not stopped attacking our country and its critical and cybersecurity infrastructure since 2016," Schiff said.

Schiff found it troubling that the hackers stole from FireEye tools that could be used in future attacks.

OIL-BANKS-POLITICS

The FireEye hack came less than two months after the US Treasury announced sanctions against a Russian research institute which it said was tied to the powerful malware Triton, used to damage a Saudi petrochemical plant in 2017.

FireEye tied Triton to the Moscow-based research institute and a specific, unnamed person with close ties to the institute.

It was not determined whether Russia was linked to the FireEye hack.

"The Russian government continues to engage in dangerous cyber activities aimed at the United States and our allies," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement at the time.

FireEye's track record includes identifying an Iran-based social media campaign to sway public opinion by impersonating reporters, politicians and others, as well as identifying North Korean hackers implicated in of a wave of cyberattacks on global banks that netted "hundreds of millions" of dollars.

Agence France-Presse

Cambodia feared lagging behind predators in cybersex trafficking crackdown

PHNOM PENH - US and Australian crime fighters are preparing Cambodia for a spike in online child sex abuse cases but local officials fear that predators are a step ahead of police due to narrow laws.

The spread of cheap, high-speed internet and the rise in mobile phone ownership is fueling cybersex trafficking across Southeast Asia - a form of modern-day slavery where children are abused and raped over livestreams for paying clients worldwide.

Agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Australian Federal Police (AFP) have in recent months started training Cambodian police to investigate the crime amid concerns that it is becoming more prevalent in the country.

Yet undercover investigations in sexual abuse cases are not permitted under Cambodian law, hindering the authorities' ability to tackle the trend, said Khuon Sokpiseth, deputy director of the interior ministry's cybercrime department.

"We need this capacity to infiltrate networks and we need new cybercrime laws for the department to properly carry out its mission," Sokpiseth told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A more comprehensive cybercrime law has been in the pipeline for at least two years, he said, without giving further details.

The interior ministry and the justice ministry both declined to discuss the proposed legislation.

The Philippines is considered to be the epicenter of cybersex trafficking - with its high level of English, rampant poverty and cheap Internet access - yet campaigners say the crime is spreading across the region from Vietnam to Cambodia.

At least three-quarters of Cambodians had internet access as of the start of this year, up from 45% of the population in 2017, according to We Are Social, a social media marketing firm.

"Countering the online sexual exploitation of children is a priority ... for Cambodia," said a spokesman for the AFP, which ran a workshop with local law enforcement agencies in July.

"Of particular concern is the rise in instances and rates of child exploitation overseas with Australians involved."

The United States, Britain and Australia are the main consumers of child sex abuse streamed over webcam, he added.

The FBI confirmed it had been involved in a recent workshop on the issue with Cambodian police, but did not comment further.

"FOREVER RUNNING BEHIND"

In the Philippines, the AFP is part of a joint taskforce launched earlier this year to tackle online child sex abuse alongside Britain's National Crime Agency, local police and the International Justice Mission, an anti-trafficking charity.

The head of the taskforce, police general William Macavinta, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that more than 90% of successful investigations relied on undercover investigations.

In Cambodia, charity Action Pour Le Enfants (APLE), which works with local police and the FBI, is also calling for a new cybercrime law to be adopted to prevent the crime from growing.

The government last month said the number of trafficking victims rescued in Cambodia had more than doubled in the first half of the year, compared to 2018, with 101 children freed.

Yet the head of APLE, Samleang Seila, said child trafficking had moved off the streets and into "underground environments" in recent years, and that there were now thousands of reports of illicit imagery of children being shared online each month.

Investigators in Cambodia must be allowed to go undercover "to infiltrate networks and dig out criminals", Seila added.

"If we are only relying on victim complaints and reports from the community, I think we will forever be running behind."

More than 260,000 of Cambodia's 16 million people are estimated to be trapped in slavery, according to the Global Slavery Index by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Cybercrime case vs Rappler weak: IT law expert

MANILA - An information technology law expert on Saturday said online news publication Rappler may not be cited for an alleged violation of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 for an incident that happened months before it was signed into law.

Lawyer JJ Disini, a University of the Philippines College of Law professor, said a law may not apply on an alleged crime committed before it took effect.

"Ang hirap kasi d'yan, parang gumagawa sila ng batas para may kaso silang mai-file sa Rappler," said Disini said.

"Parang gumagawa sila ng bagong teorya ng batas para ma-filan nila ng case 'yung Rappler. Hindi ganun ka-solid 'yung case nila," said Disini.


On Thursday, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) summoned Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and the site's former justice beat reporter Reynaldo Santos Jr. to appear before its Cybercrime Division on Monday.

This as the NBI investigated a complaint filed by Century Peak president Wilfredo Keng against Rappler for an article published in May 2012.

In that article, Rappler reported that Keng allegedly lent a car to the late former Chief Justice Renato Corona. Corona allegedly used the car even while one of Keng's companies supposedly had a pending case in a lower court, the news site reported.

Keng had denied that Corona was using his car.

The complaint invoked provisions of the Cybercrime Prevention Act, which was signed into law on September 22, 2012, months after the publication of the Rappler report that Keng had found offensive.

Disini also cited the prescription period in filing criminal cases.

"Dapat one year lang, di ba? Dapat 2013 siya nag-file," Disini said.

The NBI meanwhile cited the theory of "continuous publication," making Rappler still liable for the crime.

The NBI investigation of Keng's complaint came shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission revoked Rappler's incorporation papers, citing its alleged violation of foreign ownership regulations under the 1987 Constitution.

Rappler has asserted that it "remains 100-percent Filipino-owned" despite having foreign investors and slammed the SEC ruling as an assault on press freedom.


--With report from Michael Delizo, ABS-CBN News

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Bautista files cybercrime rap vs estranged wife, lawyer

MANILA - Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman Andres Bautista on Friday filed cybercrime charges against his estranged wife Patricia, her lawyer Lorna Kapunan and other John Does for allegedly accessing his emails.

Bautista sued his wife and lawyer for violating the Cybercrime Prevention Act after allegedly going through messages on his iPad, among items that Patricia had retrieved after purportedly ransacking his personal belongings in their house in 2016.

The chairman's wife has used emails on the device as evidence in her allegation that Bautista had P1 billion in undeclared wealth.

Patricia claimed Sunday that she discovered bank and real property documents, and several passbooks under her husband's name that were not included in his 2016 statement of assets, liabilities and net worth.

Bautista denied the allegation, saying his family will hold a press conference "in due time" to shed light on her accusations.

The Comelec chief said items Patricia had made public were taken from a locked cabinet in their house, which she allegedly forced open. He found this out upon returning from an official trip to the United States in November 2016.

He said his wife, with whom he has had marital troubles since 2013, barred him from entering their house at the time.

Bautista on Wednesday filed cases of grave coercion, qualified theft and robbery, and extortion against Patricia. 

The Comelec chief accused his estranged wife of extorting a P620-million settlement, but Patricia said she only sought P260 million.

-- Report from Zen Hernandez, ABS-CBN News

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Facebook gives security tips amid hacking reports in PH

Following reports of Filipino Facebook users getting locked out of their accounts, the social networking site gave some tips on how to secure them.

 The tips were in response to an inquiry made by ABS-CBN News to Facebook officials which was received by its public relations team in the Philippines, Ogilvy and Mather.

Below are the tips:

1.     Log-in approvals (or two-step verification)

Log-in approvals are the best and easiest way to keep Facebook accounts from getting hacked, according to Ogilvy and Mather.

With this, you must enter a code sent to your phone before you can log in from a new computer, phone or web browser you don't usually use.

To turn on log-in approvals, go to “More” and tap “Settings.” From there, select Security Settings and check the box next to “Login Approvals.”


2.     Reporting

Facebook includes a link on nearly every piece of content for reporting abuse, bullying, harassment and other issues, it said.

To report a post, just click on the top right of the post and choose the option that best describes the issue, then follow the on-screen instructions.

If you reported something on Facebook, you have the option to check the status of your report from your Support Inbox.

Facebook doesn't include any information about the person who filed the report when they reach out to the person responsible.

Earlier, experts also told ABS-CBN News that users should make their passwords stronger, use only secure wifi networks and refrain from giving too much information online.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Six US senators urge Obama to prioritize cyber crime at G20 summit

NEW YORK - Six U.S. senators have urged President Barack Obama to prioritize cyber crime at this weekend's Group of 20 summit in China, in the wake of the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank, according to a letter obtained by Reuters.

In the letter sent to the White House ahead of the Sept. 4-5 summit, Sherrod Brown, a senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, and five other Democratic senators say they want the U.S. president to press leaders from the world's 20 biggest economies to commit in joint communiques to a "coordinated strategy to combat cyber-crime at critical financial institutions."

The letter, dated Monday, suggests that concern among U.S. lawmakers is growing over the February incident in which hackers breached Bangladesh Bank's systems and used the SWIFT banking network to request nearly $1 billion from an account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Some of the dozens of orders were filled, with much of the lost $81 million disappearing into Philippines casinos - prompting months of international finger-pointing, an ongoing investigation, and several requests from members of Congress for answers from the Fed and from SWIFT, the secure messaging service that banks use to transfer money around the world.

"Our financial institutions are connected in order to facilitate global commerce, but cyber criminals - whether independent or state-sponsored - imperil this international system in a way few threats have," the senators, headed by Gary Peters of Michigan, wrote in the letter to Obama.

"We strongly urge you to work with your counterparts and prioritize this discussion at the G20 leaders level in September," it said of the summit to be held in Hangzhou, China, adding that "executive leadership circles across the globe" needed to pay more attention to the risks.

A senator in the Philippines has said Chinese hackers were likely to have pulled off the Bangladesh Bank heist, citing a network of Chinese people involved in the routing of the stolen funds through Manila.

Beijing has dismissed the suggestion.

Copies of the letter from the U.S. senators were also sent to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

The other senators signing the letter were Mark Warner and Martin Heinrich, both members of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence; Kirsten Gillibrand and Debbie Stabenow, the ranking Democrat on the Senate's Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.

The White House expects G20 members at the summit "to affirm their commitment to cooperate to fight cybercrime and to enhance confidence and trust in the digital economy," a senior administration official said.

Asked generally about cyber security on Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a press conference: "I would anticipate that this issue more generally will be on the agenda" when Obama meets Chinese President Xi Jinping, the G20 summit host, later this week.

At a November summit, the G20 pledged not to conduct economically motivated cyber espionage, an agreement intended to reduce the estimated hundreds of billions of dollars worth of commercial trade secrets that are stolen by foreign governments seeking to benefit industry in their own countries.

Since then, the Bangladesh Bank attack and others that have emerged are only some of the threats posed by cyber criminals, the senators wrote. World regulators should "erect more robust defenses and collaborative systems to prevent and mitigate the impact of successful attacks," the letter said, noting that steps already taken by SWIFT are not enough.

The Fed and other U.S. regulators said in a letter last week they were focused on cyber risks and controls at banks in the wake of the Bangladesh incident, though they offered few specifics.

Peters, a member of the Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, told Reuters he is considering requesting a committee hearing on the heist.

"I am concerned about the response and what steps have been taken to make sure it doesn't happen again," he said in an interview. "You just need more collaboration and sharing of information... because often times all these entities aren't talking to each other."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

'Sextortion,' a new cyber crime, is common: study

Sextortion -- using nude photos of someone to press for even racier content or other goods -- is surprisingly common, a US think tank says in what it calls the first in-depth study of another danger lurking in cyberspace.

Most victims are minors, the predators are almost always men who prey on multiple targets, and almost all adult victims are women, it said. Most victims choose to stay anonymous, out of shame.

And while US law enforcement officials acknowledge the problem, no agency or advocacy group keeps data on it, said the Brookings Institution, which published the study on Wednesday.

Even the term 'sextortion' is not a real word, but rather slang that prosecutors use to refer to an offense that does not fit neatly into a single category.

Depending on where you are in America, it can be prosecuted as child pornography, stalking, extortion or hacking. But sextortion as a crime per se does not exist, the think tank said.

"Legally speaking, there's no such thing," the report states.

Sextortion can entail a hack into someone's computer to rob a sexy picture or video or take over a webcam, then the use of this content to extort victims for even more.

It is even more common for perpetrators to resort to social media to elicit a photograph from a victim, than use it to demand more.

The Brookings Institution said it studied 78 cases from recent years that met its definition of sextortion and many others that contained elements of it.

- A sad first -

Those 78 were prosecuted in 29 states and territories of the United States and three foreign jurisdictions.

"For the first time in the history of the world, the global connectivity of the Internet means that you don't have to be in the same country as someone to sexually menace that person," the study states.

Those cases involve at least 1,379 victims. But for a variety of reasons -- such as prosecutors not seeking out all victims of a given predator -- the true number of victims from those 78 cases could actually range from 3,000 to 6,500 or even more, the study said.

An accompanying report from the same think tank detailed how sentencing of people convicted in sextortion cases varies wildly because some are tried in federal court and some in state court.

One man accused of victimizing at least 22 young boys and tried in a state court got a prison sentence of a year. But another alleged to have had one victim faced trial in federal court and got 12 years, the study found.

The key to ending the disparity, it added, is for Congress to pass a federal sextortion law incorporating elements present in federal sexual abuse, extortion, child pornography, and abusive sexual contact statutes.

The first report on the offense itself also provided harrowing details of actual sextortion cases.

One involved a woman who opened an email from an unknown sender and found sexually explicit photos of herself, data about her job, husband and three kids, and a demand for a porno video of her.

"And if she did not send it within one day, he threatened to publish the images already in his possession, and 'let (her) family know about [her] dark side,'" the study said.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com