Russian hacking

[tetley]

Well joy,

I just got my identity stolen. Okay, it probably already got stolen a long time ago. They just tried to hack into my checking and credit cards today. I can tell you exactly what happened. To. Me.

First, I was affected by the Yahoo hack. They were able to read all my emails. Fortunately, I kept a lot of my more sensitive stuff more secure than that, but some of my less secure accounts use the same password as my Yahoo. But what sucks is, for a lot of my other accounts on other websites, my username is my email. And my email is my Yahoo. So the hackers got my Yahoo email and password, and somehow were able to find a bunch of other websites where my username was my email, plus using my same password. Amazon. Walmart. Fortunately, Ebay and Paypal were different. My Amazon and Walmart were really old accounts that I never use.

Fast-forward to today. I get a text message saying that my password on Amazon was successfully reset. Um, really? What Amazon password? I drop everything and handle that. I log onto Amazon and I'm watching items go into my shopping cart right before my very eyes. $1000 worth of stuff. As the orders complete, Amazon sends confirmation to my Yahoo account. The hacker DELETES those emails--also right before my very eyes. Fortunately, some of them only went to my Trash folder, so I was able to salvage them. The hacker enrolled me in Amazon Prime, and obtained an Amazon credit card--using my SOCIAL (?!?!??). I called the credit card company--some bank I never heard of--they asked for my birthdate and last 4 of social. When I gave it to them, they had the CORRECT information. Long story short, lots of changed passwords, closed accounts, fraud alerts posted to the credit bureaus and some checking account bureau I just today heard of. Called the police. The orders from Amazon all got cancelled, of course.

Now, the Russian hacking part: the hacker, of course, had to give Amazon a different shipping address for all his merchandise. The address? *redacted. interferes with investigation*

A shipping firm. To Russia. The hacker was trying to send Amazon stuff to this shipping firm, who forwarded it on to Russia.


Anyone still believe the Russian hacking is not real?


edit: removing specific information that could be actioned upon

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

Tetley, I don't think that's what they mean by "Russian hacking". The argument in the press currently is that hacking is being done institutionally, by the Russian government, against the US gov't and US power grid. There's absolutely no reason to believe it does not happen, of course it happens, the question is "what actual effect did it have" before it was stopped.

I'm not happy about it, no one should be. I'm not getting my panties in a bunch, though, because of Stuxnet. Our government is complicit in this type of warfare, governments hit each other with it all the time. Crying about it to the press has a pretty clear motive of manipulation of public opinion. I sure as hell hope we have our big boy pants on, because this is a Pandora's box that isn't closing any time soon.

Sucks that happened to you, though. Really bad deal.

Sometimes I look at http://map.norsecorp.com/#/ and wonder to myself whose life just got messed up with a single little ping.

 

[tetley]

"what actual effect did it have

"Did"?

 

[Kyriakos]

Terrible what happened, Tetley, but yeah, unless you are a high-ranking US politician, you aren't the target of the "russian hacking" getting press these days.

 

[red_elk]

A shipping firm. To Russia.

Ukrainian shipping company.
Which also delivers parcels to EU, Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Baltic States.

Anyone still believe the Russian hacking is not real?

I believe you've proven something entirely different than what you've said.

 

[warpus]

Russian hackers once hacked my smart toaster and now it only makes toast with a Gorbatchev stain like burn mark on each piece of toast.

Honestly though, hackers hail from all corners of the world. But not all of them are on the payroll of national governments.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

 

[Kyriakos]

Russian hackers once hacked my smart toaster and now it only makes toast with a Gorbatchev stain like burn mark on each piece of toast.

Honestly though, hackers hail from all corners of the world. But not all of them are on the payroll of national governments.

That isn't a Gorbachev stain, but the form of a trillion alien ideograms * as they get seen in our own 3d space. Your situation, therefore, is really far more serious.

*They mean a single "word", but this isn't for this thread.

 

[tetley]

Yahoo was hacked by Russia, my Yahoo was hacked and there is money laundering and merchandise laundering going to Russia, but it's not Russian hacking. Or it's just "completely unrelated" because only high-ranking officials are having it happen to them.

Suffice to say that I'm not going to share more information about it, because it would interfere with law enforcement. But law enforcement doesn't know of any Russian hacking either, of course. It's just all politically motivated, you know.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

Yahoo was hacked by Russia, my Yahoo was hacked and there is money laundering and merchandise laundering going to Russia, but it's not Russian hacking. Or it's just "completely unrelated" because only high-ranking officials are having it happen to them.

Suffice to say that I'm not going to share more information about it, because it would interfere with law enforcement. But law enforcement doesn't know of any Russian hacking either, of course. It's just all politically motivated, you know.

This is absolutely a matter of international relations! RUSSIA is the hecker after all! Ofcourse if USA is doing that its for DEMOCRACY.
RUSSIA has no interest in you or your belongings obviously. Russian (or domestic) criminals are different matter though but USA are doing more hostile cyber activity then anyone else. As you sow so you reap. That being said I sympathise with you as this can happen to anyone.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

Russian hackers once hacked my smart toaster and now it only makes toast with a Gorbatchev stain like burn mark on each piece of toast.

Sounds more like CIA cover up...

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Anyone who steals my identity would probably be trying to figure out how to give it back.

 

[Verbose]

Might be relevant:
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russia-hacker-superpower-56704

Not So Newfangled
Lost in the debate about Russian influence in the U.S. presidential election is the fact Russian hackers have been active for a long time. Littering the illicit pages of the dark web, Russian hacking programs today make possible most of the world’s financial-sector break-ins. Increasingly, Russian hackers have acted with political motivations, but their bread and butter is and has always been theft and corporate espionage.
[---]
Skills and Opportunity
Russian hacking came of age as the Internet economy developed in the 1990s. It was a time when capabilities outpaced security. Shopping and banking were early online growth areas, and hackers saw Western banks and consumers using credit cards as easy targets.

For Russians with the necessary skills, preying on these services was an attractive way to make money in stormy times. While rocket scientists and weapons experts found government and international support, programmers were largely overlooked.

“The U.S.S.R. had the largest engineering community in the world,” says Andrey Soldatov, author of The Red Web and an expert on cyber security and the Russian security services. “They existed to support the Soviet military-industrial complex, and after its collapse, many of these experts and their children, found themselves left high and dry.”
[---]
The Community
Beyond raw technical skill, the secret behind the success of the Russian-speaking hacker community is informationsharing, says Dmitry Volkov, an expert in cyber forensics at the Moscow-based Group IB cyber security firm. Compared to other large hacker communities, such as the German and Spanish-speaking ones, the Russian community has been the most open.

Fifteen years ago, an aspiring hacker needed simply to join a forum and ask questions.

“You could ask anything,” Volkov says. “For example: which type of program should I use to steal money from a bank? And if I am targeting a specific Western bank, what kind of additional security measures does that bank have in place, and how do I get around them?”

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

Yahoo was hacked by Russia, my Yahoo was hacked and there is money laundering and merchandise laundering going to Russia, but it's not Russian hacking. Or it's just "completely unrelated" because only high-ranking officials are having it happen to them.

Suffice to say that I'm not going to share more information about it, because it would interfere with law enforcement. But law enforcement doesn't know of any Russian hacking either, of course. It's just all politically motivated, you know.

I don't think anyone's trying to be insensitive toward you. You're just as important as people who work in government. There's just a difference here I'm not sure you're seeing. "A person in Russia" hacking accounts and sharing data on Pirate Bay or some other deep web nest of organized crime is not the same thing as the government, the intelligence agencies of Russia, doing it. There are capable, nefarious people all over the world, criminals who steal identities and reap financial gain, and some of those are certainly in Russia (as well as the USA, Brazil, parts of Africa, Europe, China, et.al.) but we don't refer to those as "Russian hacking" just because that criminal is (at least at the time) in Russia.

When it's discussed in the media, "Russian hacking" does absolutely infer the Russian government's involvement. These orders may or may not come from the highest positions, as Putin himself, just as Stuxnet may or may not have come from the highest level of US government, the implication being a development under G.W. Bush and an acceptance of procedure under B. Obama.

 

[red_elk]

Yahoo was hacked by Russia, my Yahoo was hacked and there is money laundering and merchandise laundering going to Russia, but it's not Russian hacking. Or it's just "completely unrelated" because only high-ranking officials are having it happen to them.

Suffice to say that I'm not going to share more information about it, because it would interfere with law enforcement. But law enforcement doesn't know of any Russian hacking either, of course. It's just all politically motivated, you know.

If that shipping firm is the only evidence of Russian hacking you have, I can tell you it's rather testifies against it.
The last thing I would use for delivering parcels to Russia, is Ukrainian shipping company.

 

[tetley]

Edward Snowden told the public half-truths. Yes, the NSA is compiling information on the American public. That is true--and Snowden took that information and handed it to the Russians. Minor detail he left out.

And then Americans have this idea from watching TV that it's just some high-level political intrigue that doesn't affect us. Hello: try, Russia has your street address, your birthdate, your social security number, your cell number. And they can use it to create credit accounts in your name and send the money to Russia. I really don't give a rat's behind what the media says when I'm seeing it unfold right in front of my own two eyes.

And no, I don't expect the foreigners on this board who actually want Americans to get robbed to ever admit Russian hacking exists. A criminal never just admits that he did the crime.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

And no, I don't expect the foreigners on this board who actually want Americans to get robbed to ever admit Russian hacking exists. A criminal never just admits that he did the crime.

I can only imagine that you are pretty stressed at this time since you ignore that everyone here admited that Russians are indeed very capable of hacking. No one here as far as I know wants Americans to get robbed but I can imagine there are few people here who wish that Americans would stop sending weapons to parties in civil war, support regime changes for the dubious geopolitical benefits and supressing people for the corporative interests around the globe (all that done with result of millions of people dead and cripled) as well as spying on their allies as if they were an adversaries. You are not dying and you wont get crippled -- you are the lucky one.

 

[Vectors]

Edward Snowden told the public half-truths. Yes, the NSA is compiling information on the American public. That is true--and Snowden took that information and handed it to the Russians. Minor detail he left out.

And then Americans have this idea from watching TV that it's just some high-level political intrigue that doesn't affect us. Hello: try, Russia has your street address, your birthdate, your social security number, your cell number. And they can use it to create credit accounts in your name and send the money to Russia. I really don't give a rat's behind what the media says when I'm seeing it unfold right in front of my own two eyes.

And no, I don't expect the foreigners on this board who actually want Americans to get robbed to ever admit Russian hacking exists. A criminal never just admits that he did the crime.

It isn't the Russian government, it is hackers who the government turns a blind eye to as they screw over the citizens of Russia's biggest rival

 

[red_elk]

And no, I don't expect the foreigners on this board who actually want Americans to get robbed to ever admit Russian hacking exists. A criminal never just admits that he did the crime.

Russian hacking exists. It's everywhere.
And since I'm Russian, I'm obviously a criminal and want Americans to be robbed.

Seriously, you don't know who did it. The only evidence you shared, points indirectly to Ukraine. But I guess you want to play drama queen and blame Russian government, so go ahead.

 

[innonimatu]

And no, I don't expect the foreigners on this board who actually want Americans to get robbed to ever admit Russian hacking exists. A criminal never just admits that he did the crime.

You are looking for blaming others for your own negligence. It is well known that Yahoo was hacked at least twice since 2011 with hundreds of thousands of passwords compromised in the first breach, and millions in the second. There are sites such as haveibeenpwned.com that allow you to check whether your account has been compromised, and others that also make available all salted passwords. Its very easy to break those passwords that were weak by brute force, and depending on the site some can be easily decrypted. Your compromised account information has been published and available for anyone with an interest to see in the internet for years now. Anyone could have hacked your account this year, and you can be certain that whomever originally breached yahoo is long past exploiting that data. It's now being reused by petty criminals and fraudsters from all over the world.

I have observed there are indeed proportionally more hack attempts from eastern Europe (anything east of Germany/Austria, really). But you were not a victim of "russian hacking", or any other nationality hacking. You were a victim of your own negligence, criminals that may happen to be based in Russia, and perhaps Yahoo's failures in admitting breaches and properly informing people. I don't know how Yahoo dealt with those breaches, but I recall hearing one former US official who worked in these issues say bad things about Yahoo's handling of those incidents, namely a long delay in disclosing them.