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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoops dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a breach at a Virginia-based government technology contractor that saw access to several of its systems put up for sale in the cybercrime underground, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The contractor claims the access being auctioned off was to old test systems that do not have direct connections to its government partner networks.

In mid-August, a member of a popular Russian-language cybercrime forum offered to sell access to the internal network of a U.S. government IT contractor that does business with more than 20 federal agencies, including several branches of the military. The seller bragged that he had access to email correspondence and credentials needed to view databases of the client agencies, and set the opening price at six bitcoins (~USD $60,000).

A review of the screenshots posted to the cybercrime forum as evidence of the unauthorized access revealed several Internet addresses tied to systems at the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that manages the nation’s naturalization and immigration system.

Other domains and Internet addresses included in those screenshots pointed to Miracle Systems LLC, an Arlington, Va. based IT contractor that states on its site that it serves 20+ federal agencies as a prime contractor, including the aforementioned agencies.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Miracle Systems CEO Sandesh Sharda confirmed that the auction concerned credentials and databases were managed by his company, and that an investigating agent from the Secret Service was in his firm’s offices at that very moment looking into the matter.

But he maintained that the purloined data shown in the screenshots was years-old and mapped only to internal test systems that were never connected to its government agency clients.

“The Secret Service came to us and said they’re looking into the issue,” Sharda said. “But it was all old stuff [that was] in our own internal test environment, and it is no longer valid.”

Still, Sharda did acknowledge information shared by Wisconsin-based security firm Hold Security, which alerted KrebsOnSecurity to this incident, indicating that at least eight of its internal systems had been compromised on three separate occasions between November 2018 and July 2019 by Emotet, a malware strain usually distributed via malware-laced email attachments that typically is used to deploy other malicious software.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the Department of Transportation. A spokesperson for the NIH said the agency had investigated the activity and found it was not compromised by the incident.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:43PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:43PM (#893152) Journal

    They are interested in whether foreign enemy spies penetrated systems. If so, then how. And can they use that "how" to do the same to our allies?

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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