thecheapostore.com - The face of Identify Theft?

TheCheapOStore.com - Everything is sold for 99 cents, including your identity?

Thecheapostore.com is an anomoly in a world of cheap stuff and people searching for the cheapest stuff. At the thecheapostore.com you can buy anything for 99 cents but whether anything actually gets sold is another question.

As you might probably guess, I am constantly making my friends and family aware of malicious internet "stuff". Apparently, they listen.

My wife approached me yesterday to tell me about what she considered a funny story about a website where she was trying to puchase something. The website was called thecheapostore.com. Apparently, everything is on auction and everything costs 99 cents.

There were two funny things about it she told me. The first was that when she tried to purchase, my network identity theft protection fired off an prevented her from going to the website . The second was that all auctions start at 99 cents, end in 30 minutes, but if you refresh your browser, the clock starts again.

"DING!"

So I asked her to show me the site. Here is my short analysis:

The site itself is a simple front end showing "Latest Products", and it opens rather slow, presumably because it is a DSL connection as reported by centralops.

The products are presented to you in an iframe from another website madsem.com

<iframe src="http://campaigns.madsem.com/magentoshops/index.php" width="350" height="280" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Now, go to madsem.com

It says only.

"welcome Biatches :)"

So what exactly happens to your information when you click "Send". Someone has it. And he thinks your a biatch.

My suggestion is to research websites before you send their information or making a purchase.

http://www.scamadviser.com/is-thecheapostore.com-safe.html
http://www.webutation.net/go/review/thecheapostore.com#
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120314153644AArQVTz

Registrant:
   Domains By Proxy, LLC
   DomainsByProxy.com
   15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
   Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
   United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)

IP Address:
82.211.28.22
ACCELERATED IT SERVICES GMBH
Germany
DAWN-SERVER.DE
ip2location.com lists this as a DSL connection

Queried whois.ripe.net with "-B 82.211.28.22"...

% Information related to '82.211.28.0 - 82.211.28.255'

inetnum:         82.211.28.0 - 82.211.28.255
netname:         DE-MEDIA-IP-NETWORK-20110823
descr:           Media IP Network
country:         DE
admin-c:         HN1156-RIPE
tech-c:          HN1156-RIPE
status:          ASSIGNED PA
remarks:         ************************************************
remarks:         * ABUSE CONTACT: medianetworksg@gmail.com IN   *
remarks:         * CASE OF HACK ATTACKS,ILLEGAL ACTIVITY,       *
remarks:         * VIOLATION, SCANS, PROBES, SPAM, ETC.         *
remarks:         ************************************************
mnt-by:          ACCELERATED-MNT
changed:         nk@accelerated.de 20110823
source:          RIPE

person:          Hang Nguyen
address:         Duong 8B Pho 4 Bin An, Quan 2
address:         Saigon, Vietnam
phone:           +84 906482860
e-mail:          medianetworks@gmail.com
nic-hdl:         HN1156-RIPE
mnt-by:          ACCELERATED-MNT
changed:         lir@accelerated.de 20110623
source:          RIPE

% Information related to '82.211.0.0/18AS31400'

route:          82.211.0.0/18
descr:          IP-Routing by Accelerated IT Services GmbH
origin:         AS31400
mnt-by:         ACCELERATED-MNT
changed:        nk@accelerated.de 20080709
source:         RIPE

Traceroute

 6  TenGigE0-0-1-0.GW14.BOS4.ALTER.NET (152.179.2.97)  80.593 ms  81.399 ms  81.   276 ms
 7  0.ge-0-3-0.XL4.BOS4.ALTER.NET (152.63.17.134)  80.176 ms  86.179 ms  85.477    ms
 8  0.xe-7-0-3.XL4.IAD8.ALTER.NET (152.63.2.106)  105.865 ms  103.278 ms  112.64   8 ms
 9  0.ae4.BR1.IAD8.ALTER.NET (152.63.33.121)  104.557 ms  117.249 ms  97.695 ms
10  194.25.211.17 (194.25.211.17)  102.064 ms  111.042 ms  182.673 ms
11  f-ed6-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.156.131.242)  259.001 ms 194.25.6.90 (194.25.6.   90)  256.655 ms  251.036 ms
12  80.156.160.162 (80.156.160.162)  260.455 ms  242.994 ms  241.802 ms
13  fra4.xe-0-1-0.accelerated.de (84.200.230.81)  225.309 ms  224.549 ms  212.82   0 ms
14  82.211.28.22 (82.211.28.22)  228.830 ms  216.740 ms  215.035 ms

Why Forwarding Email to a Free Email Provider is a Bad Idea

Written by Frank Angiolelli, CISSP
www.fortknoxnetworks.com

In many cases, we must balance availability against confidentiality. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in general by increasing confidentiality you decrease availability at least in terms of methods, locations and speed of access.

Why Forwarding Your Email to A Free Email Provide is Good

The benefits of such an action are easy to see:
1. Easier access to the emails.
2. Accessible from any computer without hoops to jump.
3. Easier to configure phones and mobile devices to receive
4. Synchronization options with mobile devices

I have seen cases where this has been done by individuals that just wanted the convenience, did not know how to access their email securely and I have seen cases where a cell phone provider was just trying to help someone access their email but did not know the proper settings, so they assisted with forwarding all the email and setup the phone to receive the forwarded mail.

Why Forwarding Your Email to A Free Email Provide is Bad

The costs associated with this can be tremendous. The primary cost is the considerable lessening of confidentiality. While it is true that most free email solutions provide encryption by default, these services are available to anyone on the web from any computer without restriction. Additionally, their password reset mechanisms are available to anyone on the web.

Beyond that, there is no incident response team attempting to identify unauthorized accesses. Furthermore, audits of who is accessing the system are not possible.

This sets up your organization for the possibility of a malicious individual creating a channel to read corporate email without detection. Take for example the FBI Conference call which was recorded by Anonymous. In this case, an FBI agent had apparently forwarded the conference call details to a free email provider, but the account password had been compromised by the hackers. The result was hackers recording the conference call, which ironically was related to hacking investigations, and posting it to the internet.

What is worse then someone posting the information to the internet? Someone not posting the information and silently, persistently reading the email and information without detection or limits.

In this case where a phone conference was hacked, the forwarding of email to a free email provider was used to further gain access to secure operations, in this case a conference call discussing current investigations. Without disclosing that this had occurred, the malicious individuals could have monitored the email for any other systems which they could access and maintained or even extended their access.

How To Prevent This
1. Block access to webmail providers
2. Monitor mail servers for email forwarding
3. Implement DLP systems
4. Ensure this behavior is restricted by policy
5. Train employees 

As always, I welcome thoughts and suggestions.

Converting RRAS Logs Into MySQL Database

Written By: Frank Angiolelli, CISSP
www.fortknoxnetworks.com

This discussion is about how to automatically pull the RRAS files and convert them into a formatted CSV file which can be imported automatically into a SQL database for querying and reporting. There are tools available that provide a manual interface or the capability to open the files and view them manually and discussion of them is outside the scope of this article.

First and foremost, Windows Servers typically log RRAS connections to %windir%\system32\logfiles and in my case, the files were called in12??.log (in1201.log, in1202.log, etc... presumably the 12 is the year and the ?? is the log file number).

Secondly, the format for RRAS logs is multi-line which is somewhat of an irritation, however can be worked around using find and piping the output.

In the case I was reviewing, the client had Server 2003 using Windows Authentication. Your case may be different and this may be a good starting point.

Running the following find command against the logs extracts what for this example are the usable portions of information concerning login.

find /I "Use Windows Authentication" %windir%\system32\logfiles\in*.log

The output will look something like this
"SERVERNAME","RAS",02/14/2012,10:02:14,4,"username",,,"<WAN IP ADDRESS>",,"<LAN IP ADDRESS>", ,"<SERVER IP ADDRESS>",132,,"<SERVER IP ADDRESS>",,132329231734,,5,,1,2,,,0,"311 1 <SERVER IP ADDRESS> 01/26/
2012 13:48:05 123",,,,,1,,,,"204",2,,,,,"275",1,,1,1,"<WAN IP ADDRESS>",,,,,,,,"MS
RASV5.20",311,,"0x00414C4142",4,,"Use Windows authentication for all users",,,,"
MSRAS-0-<REMOTE COMPUTERNAME>","MSRASV5.20"

For those of you not familiar with using the For /f command check out this link.

Now, let's output all that information into a single file which we can use.

find /I "Use Windows Authentication" %windir%\system32\logfiles\in*.log >> raslog.output.csv

Once all of that information is outputted to a single csv file, we can use the information presented, however we will need to extract only the useful parts that we want. It is not helpful to have a csv file with 35 columns of which we need, say 7. No need to re-invent the wheel here, the tokens we want are 1,3,4,6,7,8 and 31.

Let's go get them. Don't forget to adjust to single %'s if you are not calling this from a batch script.

for /f "tokens=1,3,4,6,7,8,31 delims=," %%a in ('find /I "Use Windows authentication" %windir%\system32\logfiles\in*.log') do echo %%a, %%b, %%c, %%d, %%e, %%f, %%g>> raslog.csv

Wonderful. Some suggestions here would be to use your tool of choice to schedule this as a task and have the output file placed in a location where it can be imported easily into your SQL system, unless you import directly from the RRAS server.

Now schedule that into a batch script and execute using your scheduled task operator or other task scheduler user. Now we have useful information. Notice in your output file, there are three lines for each connection and one for each disconnection and the most useful line is in this format.

"SERVER", 02/14/2012, 07:59:44, "username", "WANIP", "Assigned Lan IP", "MSRAS-0-Computername"

Import that data to a SQL database of your choice, create a front end using <insert web stuff here> and you have usable data which can now be aggregated, sorted and queried.

Each scenario and implementation will be different, please feel free to contact me if you would like assistance with your systems. I welcome any comments or improvements, as well as observations of your scenarios.

Using WMIC To Create SOC Based Inventory of Executables

Written by Frank Angiolelli, CISSP
www.fortknoxnetworks.com

Using WMIC To Create SOC Based Inventory of Executables

As many of us know, WMIC is an exceptionally powerful tool for collecting information. When coupled with additional tools, a useful and actionable collection of material can be created that provides visibility across an enterprise.

For example, leveraging WMIC to collect all running processes and inventory that data is an interesting use case.  For those of you unfamiliar with wmic, the following command can get you started (Pro versions of Windows only):

wmic process list brief /format:list

The information presented provides HandleCount, Name, Priority, Process ID, Threadcount and WorkingSetSize. Interesting information to say the least, however without the actual paths, usefulness is limited.
By running the following command, we can discover all the information presentable:

wmic process list /?

This is a lot of information, not all of which is usable. For my purposes, I choose the following information. Name, ProcessID, Executablepath. The Name will show you the executable, the ProcessID is useful information if you need to executable something based on your query and the Executablepath shows you the location of the executable on the system.

wmic process get name,processid,executablepath

Now as we start to move into useful information, we need to edit formatting and output it to a file that again is useful. This can be achieved using the format and output commands.

wmic /output:%computername%.csv process get name,processid,executablepath /format:csv

Now we have an output of a file that is useful for our purposes. When looking at the csv file, you will notice that the first column is called "Node" which indicates the computername variable.

Without going too in depth, this information can be collected, transported or queried from a centralized location and then input into a database engine of your choice. For example, inputting into MySQL can be done with multiple files using a type command for all csv files created/collected and then running something like. I have not used this with all queries run from a single system as of writing of this article, but this seems quite possible.




Again, in my above case, I've ignored three lines because I'm consolidating multiple queries using a simple type command resulting in the first three lines being garbage.

Once all the data is consolidated, running a query inside MySQL for key indicators like 'temp' or 'appdata' becomes simple and fast. In addition, an inventory of system executables like csrss.exe or explorer.exe can report any executable not running in standard Windows Directories.

Building a front end on the system allows for access, queries and reporting based on standardized queries on a daily basis. Build a python based email reporting system and your system is now alerting you to suspicious executables on a daily basis.

In my Watchtower product I have taken this to extremes building transport, consolidation, reporting and front end systems with email reports daily to account for inventories of processes, startup tasks and services captured from multiple endpoints on a daily basis.