#people are seemingly a Lot more willing to criticize Brian than they are willing to criticize Jay but it's important to note they both Suck

[brittlebutch]

actually, much to think about re: Brian's relationship with Tim and Jay's relationship with Tim being complete mirrors of each other

[thisdaynews]

7 reporters recount a historic week in impeachment

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/7-reporters-recount-a-historic-week-in-impeachment/

7 reporters recount a historic week in impeachment

Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch during her Friday hearing before the House Intelligence Committee. | Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

History was made this week as public hearings began in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

It was difficult, but not impossible, to overlook this simple fact amid the blizzard of breaking news and onslaught of accusations, counter-claims and Twitter tirades.

The House speaker accused the president of bribery. The president attacked a diplomat during live testimony. Democrats cried witness tamperingon the same dayTrump’s key campaign adviser was convicted of the same charge (alongside six other felony counts) as Republicans scrambled to defend a president intent on defending himself.

It’s a lot to take in and break down, so we asked seven reporters who are covering the Trump presidency and the investigations what on earth just happened, and what in the world will happen next.

What happened this week that moved the dial and will be remembered when the history books get written on this?

Melanie Zanona, Congress reporter:The first public impeachment hearings in 21 years! That was enough to move the dial, no matter what happened. Now, whether that was enough to move public opinion remains to be seen … but there were definitely some standout moments. Like the surprise bombshell from William Taylor, who revealed his staffer overheard a phone call between Trump and another diplomat discussing “the investigations” into the Bidens. Or Marie Yovanovitch testifying about how she was mistreated by Trump administration officials — at the exact same time she was being attacked by President Donald Trump on Twitter, which was then promptly read out loud to her so she could respond in real time.

Anita Kumar, White House correspondent:There were a lot of important moments during the testimony this week but I was actually struck by something that happened outside the hearing room — the moment the speaker of the House accused the president of the United States of bribery. That’s one for the history books. “The devastating testimony corroborated evidence of bribery,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters at her weekly news conference. House Democrats ramped up their rhetoric this week in part to get more Americans’ understanding and support for their investigation. They traded in “quid pro quo” for “bribery” or “extortion.” Bribery, of course, is also one of the few reasons — “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors” — cited in the Constitution for impeachment.

Andrew Desiderio, Congress reporter:The mere fact that the House of Representatives began public impeachment hearings this week is historic on its own, given how rarely the impeachment process has been used in U.S. history. But beyond that, I think it was made clear to the public this week that, despite efforts by partisans on the left and the right to try to spin it to their political advantage, the story of Trump’s impeachment will generally come down to the unfiltered accounts of career, non-partisan Foreign Service officers and diplomats. That will hold true especially next week, when eight witnesses are expected to testify in a three-day span.

Kyle Cheney, Congress reporter:There’s a lot of competition for the worst week of the Trump presidency, but this has to rank in the top three. Roger Stone was convicted on seven felony charges for lying to protect Trump. Trump lost successive court decisions trying to shield his financial records from lawmakers and prosecutors.

But the most unforgettable image from this week that will stick with us is Trump’s attack on a witness of otherwise unquestioned character — not by Democrats or Republicans of any political faction — and the way it backfired in real time. Trump may not ultimately be removed from office, but the moment captured Trumpian defiance, and his sometimes self-destructive behavior, in its purest form and in one of the most perilous moments of his presidency.

Are Trump and his presidency in any more trouble than a week ago?

Nahal Toosi, foreign affairs correspondent:Well, he’s not in any less trouble. I was especially struck by U.S. diplomat Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony. She came across as a sympathetic figure given Trump’s decision to yank her out of Ukraine as his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was smearing her. Even Republicans treated her with caution and praised her service. But memories are short, and in a couple of weeks, the mood could be entirely different.

Anita:Maybe. House Democrats are under pressure to show more about how Trump himself was involved beyond, of course, what we already know from the July 25 call between him and the president of Ukraine. They managed to more directly tie Trump to the scandal when William Taylor, acting ambassador to Ukraine, testified that Trump supposedly asked Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, about “the investigations” he wanted on a July 26 call. The call was overheard by at least two people.

Andrew:I’m not ready to say that quite yet. I think we entered this week with a high probability that the House would ultimately vote to impeach Trump in December — and I think the week largely ended with that same probability. Another obvious reason Trump isn’t in more trouble is that his GOP firewall in the Senate doesn’t appear to have cracked at all this week. Of course, that could change — especially as eight more witnesses testify in public next week. It is still the case that Trump is very likely to be impeached once the House wraps up its inquiry; it also remains true that the Senate is very likely to acquit him. Nothing that happened this week changed that.

Kyle:Trump proved that the biggest trouble from his presidency comes from within. It became clear that there are limits to Trump’s trust-my-gut impeachment defense, so to the degree he recognizes that he’s not winning the battle for America’s hearts and minds on impeachment, it could have a significant effect on the rest of his presidency.

What is the biggest outstanding question you have for Donald Trump in the Ukraine scandal?

Anita:My question is a big one: Why? I’ve been covering the Trump presidency since Day One and I’m constantly asking this question. I know I should be used to it by now but somehow it still surprises me. Why does he do things that he knows other people will criticize him for? After all, politicians are supposed to care what other people think. When I recently wrote about Trump choosing to hold the G-7 summit of world leaders at one of his family’s resorts, I asked people close to him this question. I was told that he has become “fearless” because he has seen over and over again that he won’t lose the backing of supporters no matter what seemingly outrageous action he takes. “He has demonstrated he’s bulletproof,” someone that used to work for him told me. I’d still like Trump to answer the why.

Natasha Bertrand, national security correspondent: My questions are less for Trump and more for the Office of Management and Budget officials who were tasked with carrying out his order to suspend military aid to Ukraine in July. They could provide testimony on the president’s motivations and state of mind when he asked for the funds to be held up, which, as my colleagues Kyle and Andrew have pointed out, remains elusive for the Democrats. Former OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, now the president’s acting chief of staff, was reportedly involved in conversations about suspending the aid until Ukraine opened the investigations Trump sought, and an OMB official was the first to brief the interagency about the hold. Mulvaney has refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify, and so far, only one senior Budget official has agreed to comply with a subpoena. Three other OMB officials, Russ Vought, Michael Duffey and Brian McCormack, have also refused to appear.

Melanie:Marie Yovanovitch actually put it perfectly: Why was it necessary to smear her reputation before ousting her as ambassador to Ukraine? Republicans have argued that the president has the right to appoint whomever he wants to serve as an ambassador. But that doesn’t explain why there was an effort to gin up negative news stories about her and personally damage her reputation.

What did we learn this week about how Trump will fight impeachment?

Anita:Trump continues to do what we’ve come to expect of him — talk, tweet, say whatever he wants, without sticking to Republican talking points. But his aides, at least, began to develop a more coherent, organized message. The White House, Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee set up rapid response teams to push back on testimony in real time — similar to what they did during special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.

Kyle:Trump is willing to go where even his GOP defenders won’t. His direct attack on Ambassador Yovanovitch — in the middle of her testimony — was not only ignored by the Republicans on the impeachment panel but refuted. One after another they praised Yovanovitch’s service, leaving Trump isolated in his willingness to impugn her integrity.

Melanie:The same way he fights everything: attack, attack, attack. He has continued to act as a one-man war room in the impeachment fight, and at times, has undercut his own party’s defense strategy. Trump’s mid-hearing attack on Yovanovitch blew up the GOP’s carefully orchestrated plan not to personally go after Yovanovitch and turn her into an even more sympathetic character.

Andrew:Trump will continue to speak in direct, absolute terms as he defends himself against charges that he abused the power of his presidency — even if he makes life harder for his congressional GOP allies. We saw evidence of that on Friday, when Trump attacked Yovanovitch while Republicans on the Intelligence Committee were praising her service and largely taking pains not to harangue the veteran diplomat. We’ve seen this movie before: Trump has repeatedly dubbed his July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president “perfect,” but none of his allies on Capitol Hill have described the call that way. Some have even said the call itself was inappropriate — but, they stress, not impeachable. Still, Trump has made clear that those defenses aren’t good enough. He demands complete loyalty.

What should we make of Senate Republicans trying to stretch out an impeachment trial to make life difficult for 2020 Democratic candidates who also serve in the Senate?

Melanie:It’s actually not clear that Republicans will try to stretch out the trial — they haven’t even started negotiations over the chamber’s impeachment proceedings. And keep in mind, while a long trial might hurt 2020 presidential candidates, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his own vulnerable senators to protect. They won’t want to be there any more than the Democratic candidates.

Shifting gears, what did we learn about Donald Trump from the Roger Stone trial?

Darren Samuelsohn, senior White House reporter:

Here’s where I can actually offer up something substantive, as these last two weeks have been a crash-course rerun on all things WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Robert Mueller’s attempts to learn what had happened in 2016.

Trump’s name got dropped dozens of times during the course of the Stone’s trial, which ended Friday with a guilty verdict on all seven courts. Stone lied to protect Trump, the prosecutors said. And phone records show Stone called Trump 60 times during the final 11 months of the presidential campaign, including three times during which they appear to have talked about the Democratic document dumps.

We also learned that many of the high-ranking people around Trump were clued in to what Stone was up to, including Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

Now that Stone’s been convicted and is looking at a couple years of prison time, all the focus shifts to Trump and whether he’ll heed calls from MAGA-world to pardon his longtime friend and political adviser. Buckle up.

Whose testimony are you most looking forward to next week?

Andrew:Gordon Sondland’s testimony on Wednesday morning, with no other witnesses beside him, will be fascinating for a number of reasons — chief among them, William Taylor’s revelation this week of a previously unknown phone call between Trump and Sondland that one of Taylor’s staffers overheard. Republicans said Taylor’s testimony about the call — that his aide overheard Trump asking about “the investigations” and that Sondland said the Ukrainians were ready to move forward — was simply second- and third-hand information. But when Sondland appears before lawmakers, it’ll be the first time he addresses the claim. If Taylor’s account of the call is correct, it’s another data point Democrats can use to connect Trump directly to the scandal. Sondland’s public appearance will also present Democrats with an opportunity to put his revised testimony on camera, most notably Sondland’s testimony that he told a top Ukrainian official that the country “likely” would not receive military aid absent public announcements of the investigations Trump was seeking.

Nahal:Gordon Sondland. Gordon Sondland. Gordon Sondland. I cannot WAIT to see him in the spotlight. He’ll be testifying on Wednesday, and he’s one of the people who had direct interaction with Trump on the issue of Ukraine. He’s already had to revise his private testimony and has effectively admitted there was a quid pro quo. I. Cannot. Wait.

Natasha: Gordon Sondland for sure, but also Fiona Hill. Her no-nonsense responses to questioning during a closed-door deposition could make for a very interesting hearing, and as the former top Europe and Russia adviser on Trump’s National Security Council, she could offer up some new, first-hand information on the conversations surrounding Ukraine policy at the White House as Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani conducted his backchannel diplomacy. It will also be difficult for Republicans to maintain their argument that all the witnesses called so far in the inquiry have only had “hearsay” to offer — the witnesses testifying next week, including Volker, Sondland, Tim Morrison, and Hill, spoke directly with the president about Ukraine on several occasions.

Anita:Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council staff, will be the first person who was on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky to testify. Trump and House Republicans keep arguing that Democrats are relying on “hearsay.” Vindman’s testimony will be a first-hand account. Not only that but he makes two serious allegations — the White House released a summary of the call that was missing references to the Bidens and the top NSC lawyer who he spoke to about his concerns about the call told him to keep quiet.

Kyle:Curveball. I’m interested in Kurt Volker. He’s a witness Republicans wanted to call because during his closed-door deposition, he was reluctant to acknowledge that the actions Trump took amounted to a quid pro quo. But Volker also was the very first witness in the entire inquiry. And he’ll now be testifying with the benefit of having seen his colleagues testify and read the transcripts of others, including some who put him closer to the center of the action than was initially understood.

Read More

[jennifersnyderca90]

How Do You Fight a $12B Fraud Problem? One Scammer at a Time

The fraudsters behind the often laughable Nigerian prince email scams have long since branched out into far more serious and lucrative forms of fraud, including account takeovers, phishing, dating scams, and malware deployment. Combating such a multifarious menace can seem daunting, and it calls for concerted efforts to tackle the problem from many different angles. This post examines the work of a large, private group of volunteers dedicated to doing just that.

According to the most recent statistics from the FBI‘s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the most costly form of cybercrime stems from a complex type of fraud known as the “Business Email Compromise” or BEC scam. A typical BEC scam involves phony e-mails in which the attacker spoofs a message from an executive at a company or a real estate escrow firm and tricks someone into wiring funds to the fraudsters.

The FBI says BEC scams netted thieves more than $12 billion between 2013 and 2018. However, BEC scams succeed thanks to help from a variety of seemingly unrelated types of online fraud — most especially dating scams. I recently interviewed Ronnie Tokazowski, a reverse engineer at New York City-based security firm Flashpoint and something of an expert on BEC fraud.

Tokazowski is an expert on the subject thanks to his founding in 2015 of the BEC Mailing List, a private discussion group comprising more than 530 experts from a cross section of security firms, Internet and email providers and law enforcement agents that is dedicated to making life more difficult for scammers who perpetrate these schemes.

Earlier this month, Tokazowski was given the JD Falk award by the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) for his efforts in building and growing the BEC List (loyal readers here may recognize the M3AAWG name: KrebsOnSecurity received a different award from M3AAWG in 2014). M3AAWG presents its JD Falk Award annually to recognize “a project that helps protect the internet and embodies a spirit of volunteerism and community building.”

Here are some snippets from our conversation:

Brian Krebs (BK): You were given the award by M3AAWG in part for your role in starting the BEC mailing list, but more importantly for the list’s subsequent growth and impact on the BEC problem as a whole. Talk about why and how that got started and evolved.

Ronnie Tokazowski (RT): The why is that there’s a lot of money being lost to this type of fraud. If you just look at the financial losses across cybercrime — including ransomware, banking trojans and everything else — BEC is number one. Something like 63 percent of fraud losses reported to the FBI are related to it.

When we started the list around Christmas of 2015, it was just myself and one FBI agent. When we had our first conference in May 2016, there were about 20 people attending to try to figure out how to tackle all of the individual pieces of this type of fraud.

Fast forward to today, and the group now has about 530 people, we’ve now held three conferences, and collectively the group has directly or indirectly contributed to over 100 arrests for people involved in BEC scams.

BK: What did you discover as the group began to coalesce?

RT: As we started getting more and more people involved, we realized BEC was much broader than just phishing emails. These guys actually maintain vast networks of money mules, technical and logistical infrastructure, as well as tons of romance scam accounts that they have to maintain over time.

BK: I want to ask you more about the romance scam aspect of BEC fraud in just a moment, because that’s one of the most fascinating cogs in this enormous crime machine. But I’m curious about what short-term goals the group set in identifying the individuals behind these extremely lucrative scams?

RT: We wanted to start a collaboration group to fight BEC, and really a big part of that involved just trying to social engineer the actors and get them to click on links that we could use to find out more about them and where they’re coming from.

BK: And where are they coming from? When I’ve written about BEC scams previously and found most of them trace back to criminals in Nigeria, people often respond that this is just a stereotype, prejudice, or over-generalization. What’s been your experience?

RT: Right. A lot of people think Nigeria is just a scapegoat. However, when we trace back phone numbers, IP addresses and language usage, the vast majority of that is coming out of Nigeria.

BK: Why do you think so much of this type of fraud comes out of Nigeria?

RT: Well, corruption is a big problem there, but also there’s this subculture where doing this type of wire fraud isn’t seen as malicious exactly. There’s not only a lot of poverty there, but also a very strong subculture there to support this type of fraud, and a lot of times these actors justify their actions by seeing it as attacking organizations, and not the people behind those organizations. I think also because they rationalize that individuals who are victimized will ultimately get their money back. But of course in a lot of cases, they don’t.

BK: Is that why so many of these Nigerian prince, romance and BEC scams aren’t exactly worded in proper English and tend to read kind of funny sometimes?

RT: While a lot of the scammers are typically from Nigeria, the people doing the actual spamming side typically come from a mix of other countries in the region, including Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. And it’s interesting looking at these scams from a language perspective, because you have them writing in English that’s also influenced by [people who speak] French and Arabic. So that explains why the emails often are written in poor English whereas to them it seems normal.

BK: Let’s talk about the romance scams. How does online dating fraud fit into the BEC scam?

RT: [The fraudsters] will impersonate both men and women who are single, divorced or widowed. But their primary target is female widows who are active on social media sites.

BK: And in most of these cases the object of the phony affection is what? To create a relationship so that the other person feels comfortable accepting money or moving money on behalf of their significant other, right?

RT: Yes, they end up being recruited as money mules. Or maybe they’re groomed in order to set up a bank account for their lovers. We’ve dealt with multiple cases where we see a money mule account coming through and then look that person up on social media and quickly able to see they were friends with a clearly fake profile or a profile that we’ve already identified as a BEC scammer. So there is a very strong tie between these BEC scams and romance scams.

BK: Are all of the romance scam victims truly unwitting, do you think?

RT: With the mules who don’t one hundred percent know what they’re doing, they might be [susceptible to the suggestion] hey, could you open this account for me. The second type of mule can be on the payroll [of the scam organization] and getting a cut of the money for assisting in the wiring of money [to the fraudsters’ accounts.]

BK: I saw in one of your tweets you mentioned personally interacting with some of these BEC scammers.

RT: Yeah, a few weeks ago I was running a romance scammer who reached out and added me as a friend on Facebook. The story they were telling was that this person was a single mom with a kid aged 43 looking for companionship. By day 4 [of back and forth conversations] they were asking me to send them iTunes gift cards.

BK: Hah! So what happened then?

RT: I went to my local grocery store, which was all too willing to help. When you’re trying to catch scammers, it doesn’t cost the store a dime to give you non-activated iTunes gift cards.

BK: That sounds like fun. Beyond scamming the scammers to learn more about their operations and who they are, can you talk about what you and other members of the BEC working group have been trying to accomplish to strategically fight this kind of fraud?

RT: What we found was with BEC fraud it’s really hard to find ownership, because there’s no one entity that’s responsible for shutting it down. There are a lot of moving parts to the BEC scam, including lots of romance scam social media accounts, multiple email providers, and bank accounts tied to money mules that get pulled into these scams.

The feds get a lot of flack for not making arrests, the private sector gets criticized for not doing more, and a lot of people are placing the blame on social media for not doing more. But the truth is that in order to address BEC as a whole we all have to work together on that. It’s like the old saying: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

BK: So the primary goal of the group was to figure out ways to get better and faster at shutting down the resources used by these fraudsters?

RT: Correct. The main [focus] we set when starting this group was the sheer length of time it takes for law enforcement to put together a subpoena, which can take up to 30 days to process and get the requested information back that allows you to see who was logged into what account, when and from where. At the same time, these bad actors can stand up a bunch of new accounts each day. So the question was how do we figure out a good way to start whacking the email accounts and moving much faster than the subpoena process allows.

The overall goal of the BEC group has been to put everyone in the same room, [including] social media and email providers and security companies, so that we can attack this problem from all sides at once.

BK: I see. In other words, making it easier for companies that have a role to play to be proactive in shutting down resources that are used by the BEC scammers.

RT: Exactly. And so far we have helped to close hundreds of accounts, helped contribute directly or indirectly to dozens of arrests, and prevented millions of dollars in fraud.

BK: At the same time, this work must feel like a somewhat Sisyphean task. I mean, it costs the bad guys almost nothing to set up new accounts, and there seem to be no limit to the number of people participating in various aspects of these scams.

RT: That’s true, and even with 530 people from dozens of companies and organizations in this BEC working group now it sometimes doesn’t feel like we’re making enough of an impact. But the way I look at it is for each account we get taken down, that’s someone’s father or mother who’s not being scammed and losing their inheritance to a Nigerian scammer.

The one thing I’m proud of is we’ve now operated for three years and have had very few snafus. It’s been very cool to watch the amount of trust that organizations have put into this group and to be along for the ride there in seeing so many competitors actually working together.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Anyone interested in helping in the fight against BEC fraud and related scams should check out the Web site 419eater.com, which includes a ton of helpful resources for learning more. My favorite section of the site is the Letters Archive, which features often hilarious email threads between the scammers and “scam baiters” — volunteers dedicated to stringing the scammers along and exposing them publicly.

Related reading:

Business Email Compromise: Putting a Wisconsin Case Under the Microscope

Spy Service Exposes Nigerian Yahoo Boys

Yahoo Boys Have 419 Facebook Friends

Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Where Did That Scammer Get Your Email Address?

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/10/how-do-you-fight-a-12b-fraud-problem-one-scammer-at-a-time/

[nedsvallesny]

How Do You Fight a $12B Fraud Problem? One Scammer at a Time

The fraudsters behind the often laughable Nigerian prince email scams have long since branched out into far more serious and lucrative forms of fraud, including account takeovers, phishing, dating scams, and malware deployment. Combating such a multifarious menace can seem daunting, and it calls for concerted efforts to tackle the problem from many different angles. This post examines the work of a large, private group of volunteers dedicated to doing just that.

According to the most recent statistics from the FBI‘s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the most costly form of cybercrime stems from a complex type of fraud known as the “Business Email Compromise” or BEC scam. A typical BEC scam involves phony e-mails in which the attacker spoofs a message from an executive at a company or a real estate escrow firm and tricks someone into wiring funds to the fraudsters.

The FBI says BEC scams netted thieves more than $12 billion between 2013 and 2018. However, BEC scams succeed thanks to help from a variety of seemingly unrelated types of online fraud — most especially dating scams. I recently interviewed Ronnie Tokazowski, a reverse engineer at New York City-based security firm Flashpoint and something of an expert on BEC fraud.

Tokazowski is an expert on the subject thanks to his founding in 2015 of the BEC Mailing List, a private discussion group comprising more than 530 experts from a cross section of security firms, Internet and email providers and law enforcement agents that is dedicated to making life more difficult for scammers who perpetrate these schemes.

Earlier this month, Tokazowski was given the JD Falk award by the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) for his efforts in building and growing the BEC List (loyal readers here may recognize the M3AAWG name: KrebsOnSecurity received a different award from M3AAWG in 2014). M3AAWG presents its JD Falk Award annually to recognize “a project that helps protect the internet and embodies a spirit of volunteerism and community building.”

Here are some snippets from our conversation:

Brian Krebs (BK): You were given the award by M3AAWG in part for your role in starting the BEC mailing list, but more importantly for the list’s subsequent growth and impact on the BEC problem as a whole. Talk about why and how that got started and evolved.

Ronnie Tokazowski (RT): The why is that there’s a lot of money being lost to this type of fraud. If you just look at the financial losses across cybercrime — including ransomware, banking trojans and everything else — BEC is number one. Something like 63 percent of fraud losses reported to the FBI are related to it.

When we started the list around Christmas of 2015, it was just myself and one FBI agent. When we had our first conference in May 2016, there were about 20 people attending to try to figure out how to tackle all of the individual pieces of this type of fraud.

Fast forward to today, and the group now has about 530 people, we’ve now held three conferences, and collectively the group has directly or indirectly contributed to over 100 arrests for people involved in BEC scams.

BK: What did you discover as the group began to coalesce?

RT: As we started getting more and more people involved, we realized BEC was much broader than just phishing emails. These guys actually maintain vast networks of money mules, technical and logistical infrastructure, as well as tons of romance scam accounts that they have to maintain over time.

BK: I want to ask you more about the romance scam aspect of BEC fraud in just a moment, because that’s one of the most fascinating cogs in this enormous crime machine. But I’m curious about what short-term goals the group set in identifying the individuals behind these extremely lucrative scams?

RT: We wanted to start a collaboration group to fight BEC, and really a big part of that involved just trying to social engineer the actors and get them to click on links that we could use to find out more about them and where they’re coming from.

BK: And where are they coming from? When I’ve written about BEC scams previously and found most of them trace back to criminals in Nigeria, people often respond that this is just a stereotype, prejudice, or over-generalization. What’s been your experience?

RT: Right. A lot of people think Nigeria is just a scapegoat. However, when we trace back phone numbers, IP addresses and language usage, the vast majority of that is coming out of Nigeria.

BK: Why do you think so much of this type of fraud comes out of Nigeria?

RT: Well, corruption is a big problem there, but also there’s this subculture where doing this type of wire fraud isn’t seen as malicious exactly. There’s not only a lot of poverty there, but also a very strong subculture there to support this type of fraud, and a lot of times these actors justify their actions by seeing it as attacking organizations, and not the people behind those organizations. I think also because they rationalize that individuals who are victimized will ultimately get their money back. But of course in a lot of cases, they don’t.

BK: Is that why so many of these Nigerian prince, romance and BEC scams aren’t exactly worded in proper English and tend to read kind of funny sometimes?

RT: While a lot of the scammers are typically from Nigeria, the people doing the actual spamming side typically come from a mix of other countries in the region, including Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. And it’s interesting looking at these scams from a language perspective, because you have them writing in English that’s also influenced by [people who speak] French and Arabic. So that explains why the emails often are written in poor English whereas to them it seems normal.

BK: Let’s talk about the romance scams. How does online dating fraud fit into the BEC scam?

RT: [The fraudsters] will impersonate both men and women who are single, divorced or widowed. But their primary target is female widows who are active on social media sites.

BK: And in most of these cases the object of the phony affection is what? To create a relationship so that the other person feels comfortable accepting money or moving money on behalf of their significant other, right?

RT: Yes, they end up being recruited as money mules. Or maybe they’re groomed in order to set up a bank account for their lovers. We’ve dealt with multiple cases where we see a money mule account coming through and then look that person up on social media and quickly able to see they were friends with a clearly fake profile or a profile that we’ve already identified as a BEC scammer. So there is a very strong tie between these BEC scams and romance scams.

BK: Are all of the romance scam victims truly unwitting, do you think?

RT: With the mules who don’t one hundred percent know what they’re doing, they might be [susceptible to the suggestion] hey, could you open this account for me. The second type of mule can be on the payroll [of the scam organization] and getting a cut of the money for assisting in the wiring of money [to the fraudsters’ accounts.]

BK: I saw in one of your tweets you mentioned personally interacting with some of these BEC scammers.

RT: Yeah, a few weeks ago I was running a romance scammer who reached out and added me as a friend on Facebook. The story they were telling was that this person was a single mom with a kid aged 43 looking for companionship. By day 4 [of back and forth conversations] they were asking me to send them iTunes gift cards.

BK: Hah! So what happened then?

RT: I went to my local grocery store, which was all too willing to help. When you’re trying to catch scammers, it doesn’t cost the store a dime to give you non-activated iTunes gift cards.

BK: That sounds like fun. Beyond scamming the scammers to learn more about their operations and who they are, can you talk about what you and other members of the BEC working group have been trying to accomplish to strategically fight this kind of fraud?

RT: What we found was with BEC fraud it’s really hard to find ownership, because there’s no one entity that’s responsible for shutting it down. There are a lot of moving parts to the BEC scam, including lots of romance scam social media accounts, multiple email providers, and bank accounts tied to money mules that get pulled into these scams.

The feds get a lot of flack for not making arrests, the private sector gets criticized for not doing more, and a lot of people are placing the blame on social media for not doing more. But the truth is that in order to address BEC as a whole we all have to work together on that. It’s like the old saying: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

BK: So the primary goal of the group was to figure out ways to get better and faster at shutting down the resources used by these fraudsters?

RT: Correct. The main [focus] we set when starting this group was the sheer length of time it takes for law enforcement to put together a subpoena, which can take up to 30 days to process and get the requested information back that allows you to see who was logged into what account, when and from where. At the same time, these bad actors can stand up a bunch of new accounts each day. So the question was how do we figure out a good way to start whacking the email accounts and moving much faster than the subpoena process allows.

The overall goal of the BEC group has been to put everyone in the same room, [including] social media and email providers and security companies, so that we can attack this problem from all sides at once.

BK: I see. In other words, making it easier for companies that have a role to play to be proactive in shutting down resources that are used by the BEC scammers.

RT: Exactly. And so far we have helped to close hundreds of accounts, helped contribute directly or indirectly to dozens of arrests, and prevented millions of dollars in fraud.

BK: At the same time, this work must feel like a somewhat Sisyphean task. I mean, it costs the bad guys almost nothing to set up new accounts, and there seem to be no limit to the number of people participating in various aspects of these scams.

RT: That’s true, and even with 530 people from dozens of companies and organizations in this BEC working group now it sometimes doesn’t feel like we’re making enough of an impact. But the way I look at it is for each account we get taken down, that’s someone’s father or mother who’s not being scammed and losing their inheritance to a Nigerian scammer.

The one thing I’m proud of is we’ve now operated for three years and have had very few snafus. It’s been very cool to watch the amount of trust that organizations have put into this group and to be along for the ride there in seeing so many competitors actually working together.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Anyone interested in helping in the fight against BEC fraud and related scams should check out the Web site 419eater.com, which includes a ton of helpful resources for learning more. My favorite section of the site is the Letters Archive, which features often hilarious email threads between the scammers and “scam baiters” — volunteers dedicated to stringing the scammers along and exposing them publicly.

Related reading:

Business Email Compromise: Putting a Wisconsin Case Under the Microscope

Spy Service Exposes Nigerian Yahoo Boys

Yahoo Boys Have 419 Facebook Friends

Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Where Did That Scammer Get Your Email Address?

from Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/10/how-do-you-fight-a-12b-fraud-problem-one-scammer-at-a-time/

[amberdscott2]

How Do You Fight a $12B Fraud Problem? One Scammer at a Time

The fraudsters behind the often laughable Nigerian prince email scams have long since branched out into far more serious and lucrative forms of fraud, including account takeovers, phishing, dating scams, and malware deployment. Combating such a multifarious menace can seem daunting, and it calls for concerted efforts to tackle the problem from many different angles. This post examines the work of a large, private group of volunteers dedicated to doing just that.

According to the most recent statistics from the FBI‘s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the most costly form of cybercrime stems from a complex type of fraud known as the “Business Email Compromise” or BEC scam. A typical BEC scam involves phony e-mails in which the attacker spoofs a message from an executive at a company or a real estate escrow firm and tricks someone into wiring funds to the fraudsters.

The FBI says BEC scams netted thieves more than $12 billion between 2013 and 2018. However, BEC scams succeed thanks to help from a variety of seemingly unrelated types of online fraud — most especially dating scams. I recently interviewed Ronnie Tokazowski, a reverse engineer at New York City-based security firm Flashpoint and something of an expert on BEC fraud.

Tokazowski is an expert on the subject thanks to his founding in 2015 of the BEC Mailing List, a private discussion group comprising more than 530 experts from a cross section of security firms, Internet and email providers and law enforcement agents that is dedicated to making life more difficult for scammers who perpetrate these schemes.

Earlier this month, Tokazowski was given the JD Falk award by the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) for his efforts in building and growing the BEC List (loyal readers here may recognize the M3AAWG name: KrebsOnSecurity received a different award from M3AAWG in 2014). M3AAWG presents its JD Falk Award annually to recognize “a project that helps protect the internet and embodies a spirit of volunteerism and community building.”

Here are some snippets from our conversation:

Brian Krebs (BK): You were given the award by M3AAWG in part for your role in starting the BEC mailing list, but more importantly for the list’s subsequent growth and impact on the BEC problem as a whole. Talk about why and how that got started and evolved.

Ronnie Tokazowski (RT): The why is that there’s a lot of money being lost to this type of fraud. If you just look at the financial losses across cybercrime — including ransomware, banking trojans and everything else — BEC is number one. Something like 63 percent of fraud losses reported to the FBI are related to it.

When we started the list around Christmas of 2015, it was just myself and one FBI agent. When we had our first conference in May 2016, there were about 20 people attending to try to figure out how to tackle all of the individual pieces of this type of fraud.

Fast forward to today, and the group now has about 530 people, we’ve now held three conferences, and collectively the group has directly or indirectly contributed to over 100 arrests for people involved in BEC scams.

BK: What did you discover as the group began to coalesce?

RT: As we started getting more and more people involved, we realized BEC was much broader than just phishing emails. These guys actually maintain vast networks of money mules, technical and logistical infrastructure, as well as tons of romance scam accounts that they have to maintain over time.

BK: I want to ask you more about the romance scam aspect of BEC fraud in just a moment, because that’s one of the most fascinating cogs in this enormous crime machine. But I’m curious about what short-term goals the group set in identifying the individuals behind these extremely lucrative scams?

RT: We wanted to start a collaboration group to fight BEC, and really a big part of that involved just trying to social engineer the actors and get them to click on links that we could use to find out more about them and where they’re coming from.

BK: And where are they coming from? When I’ve written about BEC scams previously and found most of them trace back to criminals in Nigeria, people often respond that this is just a stereotype, prejudice, or over-generalization. What’s been your experience?

RT: Right. A lot of people think Nigeria is just a scapegoat. However, when we trace back phone numbers, IP addresses and language usage, the vast majority of that is coming out of Nigeria.

BK: Why do you think so much of this type of fraud comes out of Nigeria?

RT: Well, corruption is a big problem there, but also there’s this subculture where doing this type of wire fraud isn’t seen as malicious exactly. There’s not only a lot of poverty there, but also a very strong subculture there to support this type of fraud, and a lot of times these actors justify their actions by seeing it as attacking organizations, and not the people behind those organizations. I think also because they rationalize that individuals who are victimized will ultimately get their money back. But of course in a lot of cases, they don’t.

BK: Is that why so many of these Nigerian prince, romance and BEC scams aren’t exactly worded in proper English and tend to read kind of funny sometimes?

RT: While a lot of the scammers are typically from Nigeria, the people doing the actual spamming side typically come from a mix of other countries in the region, including Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. And it’s interesting looking at these scams from a language perspective, because you have them writing in English that’s also influenced by [people who speak] French and Arabic. So that explains why the emails often are written in poor English whereas to them it seems normal.

BK: Let’s talk about the romance scams. How does online dating fraud fit into the BEC scam?

RT: [The fraudsters] will impersonate both men and women who are single, divorced or widowed. But their primary target is female widows who are active on social media sites.

BK: And in most of these cases the object of the phony affection is what? To create a relationship so that the other person feels comfortable accepting money or moving money on behalf of their significant other, right?

RT: Yes, they end up being recruited as money mules. Or maybe they’re groomed in order to set up a bank account for their lovers. We’ve dealt with multiple cases where we see a money mule account coming through and then look that person up on social media and quickly able to see they were friends with a clearly fake profile or a profile that we’ve already identified as a BEC scammer. So there is a very strong tie between these BEC scams and romance scams.

BK: Are all of the romance scam victims truly unwitting, do you think?

RT: With the mules who don’t one hundred percent know what they’re doing, they might be [susceptible to the suggestion] hey, could you open this account for me. The second type of mule can be on the payroll [of the scam organization] and getting a cut of the money for assisting in the wiring of money [to the fraudsters’ accounts.]

BK: I saw in one of your tweets you mentioned personally interacting with some of these BEC scammers.

RT: Yeah, a few weeks ago I was running a romance scammer who reached out and added me as a friend on Facebook. The story they were telling was that this person was a single mom with a kid aged 43 looking for companionship. By day 4 [of back and forth conversations] they were asking me to send them iTunes gift cards.

BK: Hah! So what happened then?

RT: I went to my local grocery store, which was all too willing to help. When you’re trying to catch scammers, it doesn’t cost the store a dime to give you non-activated iTunes gift cards.

BK: That sounds like fun. Beyond scamming the scammers to learn more about their operations and who they are, can you talk about what you and other members of the BEC working group have been trying to accomplish to strategically fight this kind of fraud?

RT: What we found was with BEC fraud it’s really hard to find ownership, because there’s no one entity that’s responsible for shutting it down. There are a lot of moving parts to the BEC scam, including lots of romance scam social media accounts, multiple email providers, and bank accounts tied to money mules that get pulled into these scams.

The feds get a lot of flack for not making arrests, the private sector gets criticized for not doing more, and a lot of people are placing the blame on social media for not doing more. But the truth is that in order to address BEC as a whole we all have to work together on that. It’s like the old saying: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

BK: So the primary goal of the group was to figure out ways to get better and faster at shutting down the resources used by these fraudsters?

RT: Correct. The main [focus] we set when starting this group was the sheer length of time it takes for law enforcement to put together a subpoena, which can take up to 30 days to process and get the requested information back that allows you to see who was logged into what account, when and from where. At the same time, these bad actors can stand up a bunch of new accounts each day. So the question was how do we figure out a good way to start whacking the email accounts and moving much faster than the subpoena process allows.

The overall goal of the BEC group has been to put everyone in the same room, [including] social media and email providers and security companies, so that we can attack this problem from all sides at once.

BK: I see. In other words, making it easier for companies that have a role to play to be proactive in shutting down resources that are used by the BEC scammers.

RT: Exactly. And so far we have helped to close hundreds of accounts, helped contribute directly or indirectly to dozens of arrests, and prevented millions of dollars in fraud.

BK: At the same time, this work must feel like a somewhat Sisyphean task. I mean, it costs the bad guys almost nothing to set up new accounts, and there seem to be no limit to the number of people participating in various aspects of these scams.

RT: That’s true, and even with 530 people from dozens of companies and organizations in this BEC working group now it sometimes doesn’t feel like we’re making enough of an impact. But the way I look at it is for each account we get taken down, that’s someone’s father or mother who’s not being scammed and losing their inheritance to a Nigerian scammer.

The one thing I’m proud of is we’ve now operated for three years and have had very few snafus. It’s been very cool to watch the amount of trust that organizations have put into this group and to be along for the ride there in seeing so many competitors actually working together.

———————————————————————————————————————————————–

Anyone interested in helping in the fight against BEC fraud and related scams should check out the Web site 419eater.com, which includes a ton of helpful resources for learning more. My favorite section of the site is the Letters Archive, which features often hilarious email threads between the scammers and “scam baiters” — volunteers dedicated to stringing the scammers along and exposing them publicly.

Related reading:

Business Email Compromise: Putting a Wisconsin Case Under the Microscope

Spy Service Exposes Nigerian Yahoo Boys

Yahoo Boys Have 419 Facebook Friends

Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Where Did That Scammer Get Your Email Address?

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/10/how-do-you-fight-a-12b-fraud-problem-one-scammer-at-a-time/

[democratsunited-blog]

Seven Up in a Chaotic Democratic Primary in New York’s Nineteenth

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4556

Seven Up in a Chaotic Democratic Primary in New York’s Nineteenth

Early Wednesday, in the small city of Kingston, New York, on the western bank of the Hudson River, Jeff Beals, a former C.I.A. intelligence officer and U.S. diplomat, and one of seven candidates in next week’s Democratic primary to represent New York’s Nineteenth Congressional District, was sitting in a café called Outdated. “The soul of the Democratic Party is what’s on the ballot on Tuesday,” he told me, leaning across the table. Beals, who is forty-one, and who now works as a high-school history teacher in Woodstock, has distinguished himself by focussing on one issue: the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics. He has also made himself the Party rogue. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee suggested that he raise between one and two million dollars, and asked him to sign a memorandum of understanding promising to keep them apprised of his financial plans and coffers and to spend three out of every four dollars on “paid communications.” Beals refused, and he went on to win endorsements from the People for Bernie Sanders and the Justice Democrats (a national group formed by Sanders staffers). In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the district by eight points. If Beals gets even half of those Sanders supporters, he believes he will win. “My campaign is the story of how when you stand up for a really strong progressive platform that truly takes on the donor class, and the corporatization of our politics, you find something shocking—the donors aren’t there for you, but the people are,” he said.

Tuesday’s primary is one of the most competitive and bizarre in the country. The Nineteenth—a horseshoe of eleven rural counties around Albany—is one of the House’s rare swing districts. Wealthy, liberal towns dot the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River Valley, but the Nineteenth is mostly white and working class.

Obama won the district by six per cent in 2012, and Trump won by ten per cent in 2016. In the 2016 Congressional election, the Republican John Faso, a lawyer and former state assemblyman, defeated the Democrat Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who had moved to the district from Brooklyn, by nine points. Bankrolled by four super PACs that contributed a total of $6.7 million, Faso’s campaign flooded the airwaves with attack ads, calling Teachout a “liberal carpetbagger” and “a professor.” In office, he has backed many of President Trump’s positions, voting against the Affordable Care Act and supporting budget proposals that would gut the Environmental Protection Agency.

The enthusiasm to beat Faso largely explains why seven candidates, none of whom have run for office before, remain in the race. They are a full bank of fresh blood, each one seemingly more genial and accomplished than the last. Erin Collier, a thirty-four-year-old economist who has worked on agriculture projects for U.S.A.I.D., grew up on a family farm in Cooperstown, New York. She’s the only female candidate, and has received endorsements from the New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Emily’s List. Gareth Rhodes is a twenty-nine-year-old former press aide for Governor Andrew Cuomo. He is also a district native, from a farm in a religious Bruderhof community in Ulster County. Rhodes spent the last year visiting the district’s hundred and sixty-three towns in a 1999 Winnebago that he bought off Craigslist. The strategy has been a success; several people I met remarked on the fact that he was making an effort to learn about voters’ concerns—health care, the environment, and immigration. Dave Clegg is a longtime local civil-rights trial lawyer and an ordained deacon in the United Methodist Church. As if to one-up Rhodes, he just completed a two-hundred-mile bike tour of the district.

The other three contestants are the biggest fundraisers. Antonio Delgado, the only candidate of color, is at the top with nearly $2.3 million. He is a corporate lawyer who grew up in Schenectady, just north of the district, earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, attended Harvard Law School, started a hip-hop record label in Los Angeles, and, most recently, was a litigator for a corporate-lobbying firm in New York. Pat Ryan graduated from West Point and served two combat tours in Iraq; he has since worked as a tech entrepreneur. Brian Flynn is a businessman who contributed six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to his own campaign. He has been criticized by Beals, in particular, for claiming to be a small businessman when, in fact, he was the president of a company worth $149 million. The Washington Examiner, a conservative publication, recently noted that Flynn was wearing a Rolex in one of his ads, in which he says, “Billionaires and corporations have rigged the system against us.” I asked him about the watch. “The Dalai Lama has fifteen Rolexes,” he told me.

Polls have revealed no clear leader, but Rhodes received some important endorsements last week: from the Times editorial board and seven labor unions. That could be more than enough to guarantee a victory. Although this district has outsized national significance, no more than ten per cent of its registered Democrats are expected to vote.“Eight thousand votes is a guaranteed, stone-cold lock,” Mike Hein, the Ulster County executive and a prominent state Democrat, told me on Tuesday afternoon. I was tagging along with Rhodes on a door-knocking excursion in Kingston. We had run into Hein in the middle of a residential street lined with old Victorians with sagging porches. “That’s a razor-thin number, especially when we are talking about things like global safety, our entire economy, our world position, children being caged, separated from their parents—this horrific series of things that we’re facing as a nation,” Hein said. “It’s going to come down here.” He smiled and his eyes widened. “This could be the district that flips the house.”

At breakfast, Beals, who, in his excitement, didn’t touch his bowl of oatmeal, contemplated the amount of money—nearly ten million dollars—being thrown at such a tiny primary. “Think about how insane and outrageous that is,” he said. “Take all three guys running who have spent over a million dollars each. Think about how much money they’re basically giving, or paying, for every vote.” Beals ended up raising slightly more than three hundred thousand dollars. (“That’s still a lot of money!”) He looked away wistfully. “Imagine if all the money that had been gathered for this race had been put into a fund to develop New York Nineteen,” he said. “It’s a tragic waste.”

The upside of seven candidates is a sort of wacky, down-home sweetness. For a meet-and-greet on Tuesday night, the Rhinebeck Town Hall was packed with so many people that some were hanging through the windows; others were listening from behind the brick building. One attendee, Kayo Iwama, a Bard College music professor, said it was the first political event of her life. “The candidate base is so rich, and I was confused, and I realized how important it was to get a sense of each candidate, and what they were like in person, given the political situation,” she said. The crowd, mostly gray-haired and sensibly attired, was enthusiastic: clapping, whooping, asking lots of tough questions. “I think I speak for almost everyone here when I say that our top priority is electing someone who can beat Faso,” Emily Houpt, a fifty-seven-year-old art teacher told me.

Yvette Rogers, a local Democratic organizer who moderated the event, asked each candidate why they thought that they were the one for that job. Dave Clegg got a big laugh with his response. “This is my deacon side,” he said, pointing to the right half of his body, “concerned with justice and compassion. And this is my trial-lawyer side, willing to cut your heart out and eat it in front of you.” He also got the loudest, longest ovation of the night when he announced that six hundred members, including clergy, of the United Methodist Church had brought a formal complaint against Jeff Sessions over his “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, arguing that it violated church rules and possibly constituted child abuse. (Sessions is a devout United Methodist member.)

A woman in a flowy blue dress asked Delgado about his funding. “We’ve been sold up the river a lot of times by politicians. I was looking at your record today, and you sound really good, but somebody told me that you worked for a big lobbyist corporation,” she said. Delgado spoke eloquently about what his career had meant to his working-class parents, about how, after graduating from Harvard Law, he had worked with disenfranchised youth in Los Angeles for five years. But he wasn’t making any money, and his parents were scratching their heads. So he took a job with a prestigious law firm; he was one of only two or three African-American attorneys out of two hundred employees. “It was a momentous occasion for my family,” he said. “What I learned there were skill sets that too few folks from my community get.” He added, “My diverse set of experiences put me in a position to be a real champion, a real advocate, for our shared progressive values.” When he finished, she asked again, “And you’re not taking money from big business?” He said he was not; of course, corporations are not allowed to donate to campaigns. Outside, as the sky turned pink, I asked Delgado about that moment. “Look, I’m empathetic to that,” he said, wearily. “There is corruption in our system. The sensitivity is warranted.” His press aide, who was recording our conversation, reminded him to discuss his role at the firm. He nodded, then looked back at me, holding my gaze. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a lobbyist. I’m a litigator.”

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