Month: February 2012

Adventures in Spam Land: Phishing Attempt Allegedly From “IRS.com”

Legal Disclaimer:
The article below describes my attempts to understand the origin of a fraud attempt made against my organization this morning. The article is not meant to defame any legitimate businesses whose domains may have been spoofed by a third party.

This article is for information/entertainment purposes only, and is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind! Any links or references to external sites are publicly available and provided solely for the convenience of the reader.

All third party content in this article is property of its respective copyright holders. I am not affiliated with any of the sites linked, and make no guarantees or warranties pertaining to these sites or their contents.

It’s tax season again, and for information security professionals, it means a whole slew of new phishing and identity theft attempts!

This morning, “webmaster@irs.com” sent 13 emails to my organization to advise the recipients that our tax appeal was rejected. Of those attempts, 3 got through before the Bayesian spam filter kicked in and blocked the rest.

Dear business tax payer, 

Hereby you are informed that your Tax Return Appeal id#0565677 has been DECLINED.  If you believe the IRS did not properly assess your case due to a misunderstanding of the situation, be ready to clarify and support your position. You can access the rejection report and re-submit your appeal by using the following link Online Tax Appeal [link omitted].

Internal Revenue Service 

 

Telephone Assistance for Businesses:

Toll-Free, 1-800-XXX-XXXX
Hours of Operation: Monday – Friday, 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. your local time (Alaska & Hawaii follow Pacific Time).

Just for fun, I decided to see how far down the rabbit hole leads:

Source IP: 87.120.210.83 (Host in Bulgaria)

Domain Registrar Information for irs.com:

Registration Service Provided By:
DOTTED VENTURES
Contact: +1.4159629700
Website: http://www.dottedventures.com
Domain Name: IRS.COM

Registrant:
Banks.com
222 Kearny Street, Suite 550
San Francisco, CA, 94108
Tel. +415.9629700
Creation Date: 28-Jan-1999
Expiration Date: 04-Dec-2014


Domain servers in listed order:
ns10.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns11.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns12.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns13.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns14.dnsmadeeasy.com
ns15.dnsmadeeasy.com

Administrative Contact:
Banks.com
222 Kearny Street, Suite 550
San Francisco, CA, 94108
Tel. +415.9629700
Creation Date: 28-Jan-1999
Expiration Date: 04-Dec-2014

Billing Contact:
Banks.com
222 Kearny Street, Suite 550
San Francisco, CA, 94108
Tel. +415.9629700
Creation Date: 28-Jan-1999
Expiration Date: 04-Dec-2014

As it turns out, irs.com is an HTTP redirect to banks.com/taxes.

At the very bottom of the page, they made it a point to put in the following disclaimer:

“This site is in no way associated with or endorsed by the United States Treasury Department or the Internal Revenue Service.”

 

Instead of putting it in plain text, it was actually an image with the ALT text description, “Disclaimer.” The only reason I can think of that someone would want to do that is to omit it from search engine spidering, but I would be hard pressed to think of a legitimate reason why a business would try to obfuscate the contents of a disclaimer like that!

There’s also a Better Business Bureau logo at the bottom. I went to bbb.org expecting to find a slew of fraud complains. Instead, I found that they’ve actually got an A+ rating!

Questionable SEO choices notwithstanding, I won’t speculate further on the legitimacy of Banks.com, Inc, but I will contact the proper authorities (the IRS) and let them sort it out.

Next steps:

The best thing to do with an email claiming to be from the IRS is to forward it to phishing@irs.gov. The IRS’ information security team will review it and take further action from there. 

Disabling SSL v2 in Server 2008 x64 and Server 2008 R2

Disclaimer: Always back up your registry prior to making changes!

Incorrect entries can cause unexpected behavior, and may even render your operating system unusable! I disclaim any responsibility for damages, loss of data or any other issues resulting from registry changes.

While this worked for me, every environment is different, so use this at your own risk!

I recently assisted a client with getting a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine in compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.

PCI compliance is very important for eCommerce sites and anyone handling credit card information.

We used a 3rd party testing tool that scanned for open ports, SSL version support, as well as allowed encryption/cipher combinations. The first few tests failed due to SSL 2.0 support in Server 2008 R2/IIS7.5.

I found an article on Microsoft’s support site which described how to disable IIS protocols by modifying the registry (this can’t be done through IIS Manager):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/187498

Here’s where it gets confusing. I followed the instructions and browsed to:

HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols

As the article points out, the “SSL 1.0,” “SSL 2.0,” “SSL 3.0” subkeys are typically there. Note the use of the word Typically rather than Always, meaning that sometimes they’re bloody well NOT there, as was the case with my server!

The article goes on to say, “create a new DWORD value in the server subkey of the protocol.” I have big problem with this phrasing given the ubiquity of the word, “Server.” The instructions do not explicitly tell you to create a new subkey under “SSL 2.0” called “Server” and to place the DWORD in there, so naturally, I wrongly assumed that the DWORD went in “SSL 2.0” instead, which didn’t work.

After a little digging, I came across another a post on the IIS.net forums by a user named Pawel Dolny who did a much better job of explaining things:

http://forums.iis.net/p/1151822/1879690.aspx

When you follow his article, be sure to create subkeys called “Server” and “Client” in each of the SSL protocol keys, then add a DWORD in each called “Enabled” with a value of “0” to disable it (or 1 to enable it, as would be the case for SSL 3.0).

He also covers enabling/disabling ciphers. Once you’ve rebooted, you can test your site to verify the changes:

https://www.wormly.com/test_ssl

I hope this helps someone!

Chess is a Great Teacher: Life Lessons from Chess Grandmaster Henrik Danielsen

Note 10/30/2018: This post refers to a series of over 100 internet blitz games recorded and published by Henrik Danielsen. While his channel was lost due to his email account being hacked, I elected to republish the original post for posterity.

I discovered Mr. Danielsen’s work on his YouTube channel. His self-styled variant of the Bird’s Opening called the “Polar Bear System” is very interesting to watch, but perhaps more interesting for me was his live-game commentary.

So what does Chess have to do with IT Management? More than you might think! Understanding how components work together, making the most of strengths and weaknesses, planning ahead, perseverance in the face of adversity, execution and timing are all critical in the IT field, but also happen to be central themes in Chess!

In the process of watching his games, I collected little snippets of wisdom he imparts along the way. Amazingly, he does this while playing Live opponents in Blitz games (3 minute timer)!

Here are some of my favorites:

“Every young child is elastic, so keep your position elastic!”  (Live Blitz #106)

Are you keeping an open mind when it comes to evaluating new technologies? Is your production network capable of scaling to meet the demands of future growth, even if it grows quicker than what you’d originally anticipated? The most important thing to remember about change is that it’s going to happen, with or without you; either learn to adapt or be left behind!

 

“If you know where you’re going, you can get there very fast.”(Paraphrased in many of Live Blitz games)

No matter what you do to prevent them, problems will occur. Knowing your way around your management tools and network is the key to solving issues quickly!

 

“Everything has it’s own Rhythm…try to use the Rhythms that are successful.” (Live Blitz #51)

To me, this speaks to the importance of forming good habits. Whether it’s maintaining a healthy work/life balance, continual professional growth and learning or proactively managing your infrastructure (checking backups, testing fail-over capability, keeping up with documentation etc.).

 

“..It’s like you have to keep the pillow in front of his face and not let him breath.” (Hunting with the Polar Bear #2)

This one’s a bit sadistic, but a touch humorous as well, so I just had to throw it in :). The point he’s trying to get across is that you can’t let up when you’ve got your objective on the run!

 

“…remember our thoughts and our feelings are creating our reality, so you better think big, and you better be positive about your life.” (Live Blitz #81-82)

Set realistic stretch goals, determine what steps you’ll need to take to achieve them, then set a timeline for completion. Most importantly, stay positive!