Category Archives: Sen. Ron Wyden

Change Healthcare Breach Hits 100M Americans

Change Healthcare says it has notified approximately 100 million Americans that their personal, financial and healthcare records may have been stolen in a February 2024 ransomware attack that caused the largest ever known data breach of protected health information.

Image: Tamer Tuncay, Shutterstock.com.

A ransomware attack at Change Healthcare in the third week of February quickly spawned disruptions across the U.S. healthcare system that reverberated for months, thanks to the company’s central role in processing payments and prescriptions on behalf of thousands of organizations.

In April, Change estimated the breach would affect a “substantial proportion of people in America.” On Oct 22, the healthcare giant notified the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources (HHS) that “approximately 100 million notices have been sent regarding this breach.”

A notification letter from Change Healthcare said the breach involved the theft of:

-Health Data: Medical record #s, doctors, diagnoses, medicines, test results, images, care and treatment;
-Billing Records: Records including payment cards, financial and banking records;
-Personal Data: Social Security number; driver’s license or state ID number;
-Insurance Data: Health plans/policies, insurance companies, member/group ID numbers, and Medicaid-Medicare-government payor ID numbers.

The HIPAA Journal reports that in the nine months ending on September 30, 2024, Change’s parent firm United Health Group had incurred $1.521 billion in direct breach response costs, and $2.457 billion in total cyberattack impacts.

Those costs include $22 million the company admitted to paying their extortionists — a ransomware group known as BlackCat and ALPHV — in exchange for a promise to destroy the stolen healthcare data.

That ransom payment went sideways when the affiliate who gave BlackCat access to Change’s network said the crime gang had cheated them out of their share of the ransom. The entire BlackCat ransomware operation shut down after that, absconding with all of the money still owed to affiliates who were hired to install their ransomware.

A breach notification from Change Healthcare.

A few days after BlackCat imploded, the same stolen healthcare data was offered for sale by a competing ransomware affiliate group called RansomHub.

“Affected insurance providers can contact us to prevent leaking of their own data and [remove it] from the sale,” RansomHub’s victim shaming blog announced on April 16. “Change Health and United Health processing of sensitive data for all of these companies is just something unbelievable. For most US individuals out there doubting us, we probably have your personal data.”

It remains unclear if RansomHub ever sold the stolen healthcare data. The chief information security officer for a large academic healthcare system affected by the breach told KrebsOnSecurity they participated in a call with the FBI and were told a third party partner managed to recover at least four terabytes of data that was exfiltrated from Change by the cybercriminal group. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Change Healthcare’s breach notification letter offers recipients two years of credit monitoring and identity theft protection services from a company called IDX. In the section of the missive titled “Why did this happen?,” Change shared only that “a cybercriminal accessed our computer system without our permission.”

But in June 2024 testimony to the Senate Finance Committee, it emerged that the intruders had stolen or purchased credentials for a Citrix portal used for remote access, and that no multi-factor authentication was required for that account.

Last month, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill that would require HHS to develop and enforce a set of tough minimum cybersecurity standards for healthcare providers, health plans, clearinghouses and businesses associates. The measure also would remove the existing cap on fines under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which severely limits the financial penalties HHS can issue against providers.

According to the HIPAA Journal, the biggest penalty imposed to date for a HIPPA violation was the paltry $16 million fine against the insurer Anthem Inc., which suffered a data breach in 2015 affecting 78.8 million individuals. Anthem reported revenues of around $80 billion in 2015.

A post about the Change breach from RansomHub on April 8, 2024. Image: Darkbeast, ke-la.com.

There is little that victims of this breach can do about the compromise of their healthcare records. However, because the data exposed includes more than enough information for identity thieves to do their thing, it would be prudent to place a security freeze on your credit file and on that of your family members if you haven’t already.

The best mechanism for preventing identity thieves from creating new accounts in your name is to freeze your credit file with Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. This process is now free for all Americans, and simply blocks potential creditors from viewing your credit file. Parents and guardians can now also freeze the credit files for their children or dependents.

Since very few creditors are willing to grant new lines of credit without being able to determine how risky it is to do so, freezing your credit file with the Big Three is a great way to stymie all sorts of ID theft shenanigans. Having a freeze in place does nothing to prevent you from using existing lines of credit you may already have, such as credit cards, mortgage and bank accounts. When and if you ever do need to allow access to your credit file — such as when applying for a loan or new credit card — you will need to lift or temporarily thaw the freeze in advance with one or more of the bureaus.

All three bureaus allow users to place a freeze electronically after creating an account, but all of them try to steer consumers away from enacting a freeze. Instead, the bureaus are hoping consumers will opt for their confusingly named “credit lock” services, which accomplish the same result but allow the bureaus to continue selling access to your file to select partners.

If you haven’t done so in a while, now would be an excellent time to review your credit file for any mischief or errors. By law, everyone is entitled to one free credit report every 12 months from each of the three credit reporting agencies. But the Federal Trade Commission notes that the big three bureaus have permanently extended a program enacted in 2020 that lets you check your credit report at each of the agencies once a week for free.

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.

Image: Shutterstock, Arthimides.

Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. helps its users remove their personal information from the clutches of consumer data brokers, and from people-search services online. Backed by millions of dollars in litigation financing, Atlas so far this year has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes more than 20,000 New Jersey law enforcement officers who are signed up for Atlas services.

Atlas alleges all of these data brokers have ignored repeated warnings that they are violating Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey statute allowing law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers. Daniel’s Law was passed in 2020 after the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge — his mother.

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slighted dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.

Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Google Android and Apple mobile devices.

Babel Street can offer this tracking capability by consuming location data and other identifying information that is collected by many websites and broadcast to dozens and sometimes hundreds of ad networks that may wish to bid on showing their ad to a particular user.

This image, taken from a video recording Atlas made of its private investigator using Babel Street to show all of the unique mobile IDs seen over time at a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. Each red dot represents one mobile device.

In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have already faced significant harassment and death threats.

Atlas said the investigator encountered Babel Street while testing hundreds of data broker tools and services to see if personal information on its users was being sold. They soon discovered Babel Street also bundles people-search services with its platform, to make it easier for customers to zero in on a specific device.

The investigator contacted Babel Street about possibly buying home addresses in certain areas of New Jersey. After listening to a sales pitch for Babel Street and expressing interest, the investigator was told Babel Street only offers their service to the government or to “contractors of the government.”

“The investigator (truthfully) mentioned that he was contemplating some government contract work in the future and was told by the Babel Street salesperson that ‘that’s good enough’ and that ‘they don’t actually check,’” Atlas shared in an email with reporters.

KrebsOnSecurity was one of five media outlets invited to review screen recordings that Atlas made while its investigator used a two-week trial version of Babel Street’s LocateX service. References and links to reporting by other publications, including 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times, will appear throughout this story.

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

The findings outlined in Atlas’s lawsuit against Babel Street also illustrate how mobile location data is set to massively complicate several hot-button issues, from the tracking of suspected illegal immigrants or women seeking abortions, to harassing public servants who are already in the crosshairs over baseless conspiracy theories and increasingly hostile political rhetoric against government employees.

WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

While the Atlas investigator had access to its trial account at Babel Street, they were able to successfully track devices belonging to several plaintiffs named or referenced in the lawsuit. They did so by drawing a digital polygon around the home address or workplace of each person in Babel Street’s platform, which focused exclusively on the devices that passed through those addresses each day.

Each red dot in this Babel Street map represents a unique mobile device that has been seen since April 2022 at a Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles, Calif. Image: Atlas Data Privacy Corp.

One unique feature of Babel Street is the ability to toggle a “night” mode, which makes it relatively easy to determine within a few meters where a target typically lays their head each night (because their phone is usually not far away).

Atlas plaintiffs Scott and Justyna Maloney are both veteran officers with the Rahway, NJ police department who live together with their two young children. In April 2023, Scott and Justyna became the target of intense harassment and death threats after Officer Justyna responded to a routine call about a man filming people outside of the Motor Vehicle Commission in Rahway.

The man filming the Motor Vehicle Commission that day is a social media personality who often solicits police contact and then records himself arguing about constitutional rights with the responding officers.

Officer Justyna’s interaction with the man was entirely peaceful, and the episode appeared to end without incident. But after a selectively edited video of that encounter went viral, their home address and unpublished phone numbers were posted online. When their tormentors figured out that Scott was also a cop (a sergeant), the couple began receiving dozens of threatening text messages, including specific death threats.

According to the Atlas lawsuit, one of the messages to Mr. Maloney demanded money, and warned that his family would “pay in blood” if he didn’t comply. Sgt. Maloney said he then received a video in which a masked individual pointed a rifle at the camera and told him that his family was “going to get [their] heads cut off.”

Maloney said a few weeks later, one of their neighbors saw two suspicious individuals in ski masks parked one block away from the home and alerted police. Atlas’s complaint says video surveillance from neighboring homes shows the masked individuals circling the Maloney’s home. The responding officers arrested two men, who were armed, for unlawful possession of a firearm.

According to Google Maps, Babel Street shares a corporate address with Google and the consumer credit reporting bureau TransUnion.

Atlas said their investigator was not able to conclusively find Scott Maloney’s iPhone in the Babel Street platform, but they did find Justyna’s. Babel Street had nearly 100,000 hits for her phone over several months, allowing Atlas to piece together an intimate picture of Justyna’s daily movements and meetings with others.

An Atlas investigator visited the Maloneys and inspected Justyna’s iPhone, and determined the only app that used her device’s location data was from the department store Macy’s.

In a written response to questions, Macy’s said its app includes an opt-in feature for geo-location, “which allows customers to receive an enhanced shopping experience based on their location.”

“We do not store any customer location information,” Macy’s wrote. “We share geo-location data with a limited number of partners who help us deliver this enhanced app experience. Furthermore, we have no connection with Babel Street” [link added for context].

Justyna’s experience highlights a stark reality about the broad availability of mobile location data: Even if the person you’re looking for isn’t directly identifiable in platforms like Babel Street, it is likely that at least some of that person’s family members are. In other words, it’s often trivial to infer the location of one device by successfully locating another.

The terms of service for Babel Street’s Locate X service state that the product “may not be used as the basis for any legal process in any country, including as the basis for a warrant, subpoena, or any other legal or administrative action.” But Scott Maloney said he’s convinced by their experience that not even law enforcement agencies should have access to this capability without a warrant.

“As a law enforcement officer, in order for me to track someone I need a judge to sign a warrant – and that’s for a criminal investigation after we’ve developed probable cause,” Mr. Maloney said in an interview. “Data brokers tracking me and my family just to sell that information for profit, without our consent, and even after we’ve explicitly asked them not to is deeply disturbing.”

Mr. Maloney’s law enforcement colleagues in other states may see things differently. In August, The Texas Observer reported that state police plan to spend more than $5 million on a contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from the tech firm PenLink. Tangles is an AI-based web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep and dark web, and it has a premier feature called WebLoc that can be used to geofence mobile devices.

The Associated Press reported last month that law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cell phone tracking tool called Fog Reveal — at times without warrants — that gives them the ability to follow people’s movements going back many months.

It remains unclear precisely how Babel Street is obtaining the abundance of mobile location data made available to users of its platform. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But according to a document (PDF) obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology directorate, Babel Street re-hosts data from the commercial phone tracking firm Venntel.

On Monday, the Substack newsletter All-Source Intelligence unearthed documents indicating that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics.

“Venntel has also been a data partner of the police surveillance contractor Fog Data Science, whose product has been described as ‘mass surveillance on a budget,'” All-Source’s Jack Poulson wrote. “Venntel was also reported to have been a primary data source of the controversial ‘Locate X’ phone tracking product of the American data fusion company Babel Street.”

MAID IN HELL

The Mobile Advertising ID or MAID — the unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to each mobile device — was originally envisioned as a way to distinguish individual mobile customers without relying on personally identifiable information such as phone numbers or email addresses.

However, there is now a robust industry of marketing and advertising companies that specialize in assembling enormous lists of MAIDs that are “enriched” with historical and personal information about the individual behind each MAID.

One of many vendors that “enrich” MAID data with other identifying information, including name, address, email address and phone number.

Atlas said its investigator wanted to know whether they could find enriched MAID records on their New Jersey law enforcement customers, and soon found plenty of ad data brokers willing to sell it.

Some vendors offered only a handful of data fields, such as first and last name, MAID and email address. Other brokers sold far more detailed histories along with their MAID, including each subject’s social media profiles, precise GPS coordinates, and even likely consumer category.

How are advertisers and data brokers gaining access to so much information? Some sources of MAID data can be apps on your phone such as AccuWeather, GasBuddy, Grindr, and MyFitnessPal that collect your MAID and location and sell that to brokers.

A user’s MAID profile and location data also is commonly shared as a consequence of simply using a smartphone to visit a web page that features ads. In the few milliseconds before those ads load, the website will send a “bid request” to various ad exchanges, where advertisers can bid on the chance to place their ad in front of users who match the consumer profiles they’re seeking. A great deal of data can be included in a bid request, including the user’s precise location (the current open standard for bid requests is detailed here).

The trouble is that virtually anyone can access the “bidstream” data flowing through these so-called “realtime bidding” networks, because the information is simultaneously broadcast in the clear to hundreds of entities around the world.

The result is that there are a number of marketing companies that now enrich and broker access to this mobile location information. Earlier this year, the German news outlet netzpolitik.org purchased a bidstream data set containing more than 3.6 billion data points, and shared the information with the German daily BR24. They concluded that the data they obtained (through a free trial, no less) made it possible to establish movement profiles — some of them quite precise — of several million people across Germany.

A screenshot from the BR24/Netzpolitik story about their ability to track millions of Germans, including many employees of the German Federal Police and Interior Ministry.

Politico recently covered startling research from universities in New Hampshire, Kentucky and St. Louis that showed how the mobile advertising data they acquired allowed them to link visits from investigators with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to insiders selling stock before the investigations became public knowledge.

The researchers in that study said they didn’t attempt to use the same methods to track regulators from other agencies, but that virtually anyone could do it.

Justin Sherman, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology, called the research a “shocking demonstration of what happens when companies can freely harvest Americans’ geolocation data and sell it for their chosen price.”

“Politicians should understand how they, their staff, and public servants are threatened by the sale of personal data—and constituent groups should realize that talk of data broker ‘controls’ or ‘best practices” is designed by companies to distract from the underlying problems and the comprehensive privacy and security solutions, Sherman wrote for Lawfare this week.

A BIDSTREAM DRAGNET?

The Orwellian nature of modern mobile advertising networks may soon have far-reaching implications for women’s reproductive rights, as more states move to outlaw abortion within their borders. The 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court discarded the federal right to abortion, and 14 states have since enacted strict abortion bans.

Anti-abortion groups are already using mobile advertising data to advance their cause. In May 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin used precise geolocation data to direct ads to women it suspected of seeking abortions.

As it stands, there is little to stop antiabortion groups from purchasing bidstream data (or renting access to a platform like Babel Street) and using it to geofence abortion clinics, potentially revealing all mobile devices transiting through these locations.

Atlas said its investigator geofenced an abortion clinic and was able to identify a likely employee at that clinic, following their daily route to and from that individual’s home address.

A still shot from a video Atlas shared of its use of Babel Street to identify and track an employee traveling each day between their home and the clinic.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which the Idaho Capital Sun reports is defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission.” Tennessee now has a similar law, and GOP lawmakers in five other states introduced abortion trafficking bills that failed to advance this year, the Sun reports.

Atlas said its investigator used Babel Street to identify and track a person traveling from their home in Alabama — where abortion is now illegal — to an abortion clinic just over the border in Tallahassee, Fla. — and back home again within a few hours. Abortion rights advocates and providers are currently suing Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, seeking to block him from prosecuting people who help patients travel out-of-state to end pregnancies.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group, said she’s extremely concerned about dragnet surveillance of people crossing state lines in order to get abortions.

“Specifically, Republican officials from states that have outlawed abortion have made it clear that they are interested in targeting people who have gone to neighboring states in order to get abortions, and to make it more difficult for people who are seeking abortions to go to neighboring states,” Galperin said. “It’s not a great leap to imagine that states will do this.”

APPLES AND GOOGLES

Atlas found that for the right price (typically $10-50k a year), brokers can provide access to tens of billions of data points covering large swaths of the US population and the rest of the world.

Based on the data sets Atlas acquired — many of which included older MAID records — they estimate they could locate roughly 80 percent of Android-based devices, and about 25 percent of Apple phones. Google refers to its MAID as the “Android Advertising ID,” (AAID) while Apple calls it the “Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFA).

What accounts for the disparity between the number of Android and Apple devices that can be found in mobile advertising data? In April 2021, Apple shipped version 14.5 of its iOS operating system, which introduced a technology called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that requires apps to get affirmative consent before they can track users by their IDFA or any other identifier.

Apple’s introduction of ATT had a swift and profound impact on the advertising market: Less than a year later Facebook disclosed that the iPhone privacy feature would decrease the company’s 2022 revenues by about $10 billion.

Source: cnbc.com.

Google runs by far the world’s largest ad exchange, known as AdX. The U.S. Department of Justice, which has accused Google of building a monopoly over the technology that places ads on websites, estimates that Google’s ad exchange controls 47 percent of the U.S. market and 56 percent globally.

According to recent figures, Google’s Android is also the dominant mobile operating system worldwide, with more than 72 percent of the market. In the U.S., however, iPhone users claim approximately 55 percent of the market, according to TechRepublic.

In response to requests for comment, Google said it does not send real time bidding requests to Babel Street, nor does it share precise location data in bid requests. The company added that its policies explicitly prohibit the sale of data from real-time bidding, or its use for any purpose other than advertising.

Google said its MAIDs are randomly generated and do not contain IP addresses, GPS coordinates, or any other location data, and that its ad systems do not share anyone’s precise location data.

“Android has clear controls for users to manage app access to device location, and reset or delete their advertising ID,” Google’s written statement reads. “If we learn that someone, whether an app developer, ad tech company or anyone else, is violating our policies, we take appropriate action. Beyond that, we support legislation and industry collaboration to address these types of data practices that negatively affect the entire mobile ecosystem, including all operating systems.”

In a written statement shared with reporters, Apple said Location Services is not on by default in its devices. Rather, users must enable Location Services and must give permission to each app or website to use location data. Users can turn Location Services off at any time, and can change whether apps have access to location at any time. The user’s choices include precise vs. approximate location, as well as a one-time grant of location access by the app.

“We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, and build privacy protections into each of our products and services to put the user in control of their data,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We minimize personal data collection, and where possible, process data only on users’ devices.”

Zach Edwards is a senior threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm SilentPush who has studied the location data industry closely. Edwards said Google and Apple can’t keep pretending like the MAIDs being broadcast into the bidstream from hundreds of millions of American devices aren’t making most people trivially trackable.

“The privacy risks here will remain until Apple and Google permanently turn off their mobile advertising ID schemes and admit to the American public that this is the technology that has been supporting the global data broker ecosystem,” he said.

STATES ACT, WHILE CONGRESS DITHERS

According to Bloomberg Law, between 2019 and 2023, threats against federal judges have more than doubled. Amid increasingly hostile political rhetoric and conspiracy theories against government officials, a growing number of states are seeking to pass their own versions of Daniel’s Law.

Last month, a retired West Virginia police officer filed a class action lawsuit against the people-search service Whitepages for listing their personal information in violation of a statute the state passed in 2021 that largely mirrors Daniel’s Law.

In May 2024, Maryland passed the Judge Andrew F. Wilkinson Judicial Security Act — named after a county circuit court judge who was murdered by an individual involved in a divorce proceeding over which he was presiding. The law allows current and former members of the Maryland judiciary to request their personal information not be made available to the public.

Under the Maryland law, personal information can include a home address; telephone number, email address; Social Security number or federal tax ID number; bank account or payment card number; a license plate or other unique vehicle identifier; a birth or marital record; a child’s name, school, or daycare; place of worship; place of employment for a spouse, child, or dependent.

The law firm Troutman Pepper writes that “so far in 2024, 37 states have begun considering or have adopted similar privacy-based legislation designed to protect members of the judiciary and, in some states, other government officials involved in law enforcement.”

Atlas alleges that in response to requests to have data on its New Jersey law enforcement clients scrubbed from consumer records sold by LexisNexis, the data broker retaliated by freezing the credit of approximately 18,500 people, and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

In addition, Atlas said LexisNexis started returning failure codes indicating they had no record of these individuals, resulting in denials when officers attempted to refinance loans or open new bank accounts.

The data broker industry has responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, and challenging the constitutionality of the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment.

Attorneys for the data broker industry argued in their motion to dismiss that there is “no First Amendment doctrine that exempts a content-based restriction from strict scrutiny just because it has some nexus with a privacy interest.”

Atlas’s lawyers responded that data covered under Daniel’s Law — personal information of New Jersey law enforcement officers — is not free speech. Atlas notes that while defending against comparable lawsuits, the data broker industry has argued that home address and phone number data are not “communications.”

“Data brokers should not be allowed to argue that information like addresses are not ‘communications’ in one context, only to turn around and claim that addresses are protectable communications,” Atlas argued (PDF). “Nor can their change of course alter the reality that the data at issue is not speech.”

The judge overseeing the challenge is expected to rule on the motion to dismiss within the next few weeks. Regardless of the outcome, the decision is likely to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states could limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminal charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and government records that fuel the people-search industry.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Congress’ failure to regulate data brokers, and the administration’s continued opposition to bipartisan legislation that would limit data sales to law enforcement, have created this current privacy crisis.

“Whether location data is being used to identify and expose closeted gay Americans, or to track people as they cross state lines to seek reproductive health care, data brokers are selling Americans’ deepest secrets and exposing them to serious harm, all for a few bucks,” Wyden said in a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times.

Sen. Wyden said Google also deserves blame for refusing to follow Apple’s lead by removing companies’ ability to track phones.

“Google’s insistence on uniquely tracking Android users – and allowing ad companies to do so as well – has created the technical foundations for the surveillance economy and the abuses stemming from it,” Wyden said.

Georgetown Law’s Justin Sherman said the data broker and mobile ad industries claim there are protections in place to anonymize mobile location data and restrict access to it, and that there are limits to the kinds of invasive inferences one can make from location data. The data broker industry also likes to tout the usefulness of mobile location data in fighting retail fraud, he said.

“All kinds of things can be inferred from this data, including people being targeted by abusers, or people with a particular health condition or religious belief,” Sherman said. “You can track jurors, law enforcement officers visiting the homes of suspects, or military intelligence people meeting with their contacts. The notion that the sale of all this data is preventing harm and fraud is hilarious in light of all the harm it causes enabling people to better target their cyber operations, or learning about people’s extramarital affairs and extorting public officials.”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Privacy experts say disabling or deleting your device’s MAID will have no effect on how your phone operates, except that you may begin to see far less targeted ads on that device.

Any Android apps with permission to use your location should appear when you navigate to the Settings app, Location, and then App Permissions. “Allowed all the time” is the most permissive setting, followed by “Allowed only while in use,” “Ask every time,” and “Not allowed.”

Android users can delete their ad ID permanently, by opening the Settings app and navigating to Privacy > Ads. Tap “Delete advertising ID,” then tap it again on the next page to confirm. According to the EFF, this will prevent any app on your phone from accessing the ad ID in the future.

Image: eff.org

By default, Apple’s iOS requires apps to ask permission before they can access your device’s IDFA. When you install a new app, it may ask for permission to track you. When prompted to do so by an app, select the “Ask App Not to Track” option. Apple users also can set the “Allow apps to request to track” switch to the “off” position, which will block apps from asking to track you.

Apple’s Privacy and Ad Tracking Settings.

Apple also has its own targeted advertising system which is separate from third-party tracking enabled by the IDFA. To disable it, go to Settings, Privacy, and Apple Advertising, and ensure that the “Personalized Ads” setting is set to “off.”

Finally, if you’re the type of reader who’s the default IT support person for a small group of family or friends (bless your heart), it would be a good idea to set their devices not to track them, and to disable any apps that may have location data sharing turned on 24/7.

There is a dual benefit to this altruism, which is clearly in the device owner’s best interests. Because while your device may not be directly trackable via advertising data, making sure they’re opted out of said tracking also can reduce the likelihood that you are trackable simply by being physically close to those who are.

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.

Image: Shutterstock, Arthimides.

Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. helps its users remove their personal information from the clutches of consumer data brokers, and from people-search services online. Backed by millions of dollars in litigation financing, Atlas so far this year has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes more than 20,000 New Jersey law enforcement officers who are signed up for Atlas services.

Atlas alleges all of these data brokers have ignored repeated warnings that they are violating Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey statute allowing law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers. Daniel’s Law was passed in 2020 after the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge — his mother.

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slighted dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.

Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Google Android and Apple mobile devices.

Babel Street can offer this tracking capability by consuming location data and other identifying information that is collected by many websites and broadcast to dozens and sometimes hundreds of ad networks that may wish to bid on showing their ad to a particular user.

This image, taken from a video recording Atlas made of its private investigator using Babel Street to show all of the unique mobile IDs seen over time at a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. Each red dot represents one mobile device.

In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have already faced significant harassment and death threats.

Atlas said the investigator encountered Babel Street while testing hundreds of data broker tools and services to see if personal information on its users was being sold. They soon discovered Babel Street also bundles people-search services with its platform, to make it easier for customers to zero in on a specific device.

The investigator contacted Babel Street about possibly buying home addresses in certain areas of New Jersey. After listening to a sales pitch for Babel Street and expressing interest, the investigator was told Babel Street only offers their service to the government or to “contractors of the government.”

“The investigator (truthfully) mentioned that he was contemplating some government contract work in the future and was told by the Babel Street salesperson that ‘that’s good enough’ and that ‘they don’t actually check,’” Atlas shared in an email with reporters.

KrebsOnSecurity was one of five media outlets invited to review screen recordings that Atlas made while its investigator used a two-week trial version of Babel Street’s LocateX service. References and links to reporting by other publications, including 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times, will appear throughout this story.

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

The findings outlined in Atlas’s lawsuit against Babel Street also illustrate how mobile location data is set to massively complicate several hot-button issues, from the tracking of suspected illegal immigrants or women seeking abortions, to harassing public servants who are already in the crosshairs over baseless conspiracy theories and increasingly hostile political rhetoric against government employees.

WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

While the Atlas investigator had access to its trial account at Babel Street, they were able to successfully track devices belonging to several plaintiffs named or referenced in the lawsuit. They did so by drawing a digital polygon around the home address or workplace of each person in Babel Street’s platform, which focused exclusively on the devices that passed through those addresses each day.

Each red dot in this Babel Street map represents a unique mobile device that has been seen since April 2022 at a Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles, Calif. Image: Atlas Data Privacy Corp.

One unique feature of Babel Street is the ability to toggle a “night” mode, which makes it relatively easy to determine within a few meters where a target typically lays their head each night (because their phone is usually not far away).

Atlas plaintiffs Scott and Justyna Maloney are both veteran officers with the Rahway, NJ police department who live together with their two young children. In April 2023, Scott and Justyna became the target of intense harassment and death threats after Officer Justyna responded to a routine call about a man filming people outside of the Motor Vehicle Commission in Rahway.

The man filming the Motor Vehicle Commission that day is a social media personality who often solicits police contact and then records himself arguing about constitutional rights with the responding officers.

Officer Justyna’s interaction with the man was entirely peaceful, and the episode appeared to end without incident. But after a selectively edited video of that encounter went viral, their home address and unpublished phone numbers were posted online. When their tormentors figured out that Scott was also a cop (a sergeant), the couple began receiving dozens of threatening text messages, including specific death threats.

According to the Atlas lawsuit, one of the messages to Mr. Maloney demanded money, and warned that his family would “pay in blood” if he didn’t comply. Sgt. Maloney said he then received a video in which a masked individual pointed a rifle at the camera and told him that his family was “going to get [their] heads cut off.”

Maloney said a few weeks later, one of their neighbors saw two suspicious individuals in ski masks parked one block away from the home and alerted police. Atlas’s complaint says video surveillance from neighboring homes shows the masked individuals circling the Maloney’s home. The responding officers arrested two men, who were armed, for unlawful possession of a firearm.

According to Google Maps, Babel Street shares a corporate address with Google and the consumer credit reporting bureau TransUnion.

Atlas said their investigator was not able to conclusively find Scott Maloney’s iPhone in the Babel Street platform, but they did find Justyna’s. Babel Street had nearly 100,000 hits for her phone over several months, allowing Atlas to piece together an intimate picture of Justyna’s daily movements and meetings with others.

An Atlas investigator visited the Maloneys and inspected Justyna’s iPhone, and determined the only app that used her device’s location data was from the department store Macy’s.

In a written response to questions, Macy’s said its app includes an opt-in feature for geo-location, “which allows customers to receive an enhanced shopping experience based on their location.”

“We do not store any customer location information,” Macy’s wrote. “We share geo-location data with a limited number of partners who help us deliver this enhanced app experience. Furthermore, we have no connection with Babel Street” [link added for context].

Justyna’s experience highlights a stark reality about the broad availability of mobile location data: Even if the person you’re looking for isn’t directly identifiable in platforms like Babel Street, it is likely that at least some of that person’s family members are. In other words, it’s often trivial to infer the location of one device by successfully locating another.

The terms of service for Babel Street’s Locate X service state that the product “may not be used as the basis for any legal process in any country, including as the basis for a warrant, subpoena, or any other legal or administrative action.” But Scott Maloney said he’s convinced by their experience that not even law enforcement agencies should have access to this capability without a warrant.

“As a law enforcement officer, in order for me to track someone I need a judge to sign a warrant – and that’s for a criminal investigation after we’ve developed probable cause,” Mr. Maloney said in an interview. “Data brokers tracking me and my family just to sell that information for profit, without our consent, and even after we’ve explicitly asked them not to is deeply disturbing.”

Mr. Maloney’s law enforcement colleagues in other states may see things differently. In August, The Texas Observer reported that state police plan to spend more than $5 million on a contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from the tech firm PenLink. Tangles is an AI-based web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep and dark web, and it has a premier feature called WebLoc that can be used to geofence mobile devices.

The Associated Press reported last month that law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cell phone tracking tool called Fog Reveal — at times without warrants — that gives them the ability to follow people’s movements going back many months.

It remains unclear precisely how Babel Street is obtaining the abundance of mobile location data made available to users of its platform. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But according to a document (PDF) obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology directorate, Babel Street re-hosts data from the commercial phone tracking firm Venntel.

On Monday, the Substack newsletter All-Source Intelligence unearthed documents indicating that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics.

“Venntel has also been a data partner of the police surveillance contractor Fog Data Science, whose product has been described as ‘mass surveillance on a budget,'” All-Source’s Jack Poulson wrote. “Venntel was also reported to have been a primary data source of the controversial ‘Locate X’ phone tracking product of the American data fusion company Babel Street.”

MAID IN HELL

The Mobile Advertising ID or MAID — the unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to each mobile device — was originally envisioned as a way to distinguish individual mobile customers without relying on personally identifiable information such as phone numbers or email addresses.

However, there is now a robust industry of marketing and advertising companies that specialize in assembling enormous lists of MAIDs that are “enriched” with historical and personal information about the individual behind each MAID.

One of many vendors that “enrich” MAID data with other identifying information, including name, address, email address and phone number.

Atlas said its investigator wanted to know whether they could find enriched MAID records on their New Jersey law enforcement customers, and soon found plenty of ad data brokers willing to sell it.

Some vendors offered only a handful of data fields, such as first and last name, MAID and email address. Other brokers sold far more detailed histories along with their MAID, including each subject’s social media profiles, precise GPS coordinates, and even likely consumer category.

How are advertisers and data brokers gaining access to so much information? Some sources of MAID data can be apps on your phone such as AccuWeather, GasBuddy, Grindr, and MyFitnessPal that collect your MAID and location and sell that to brokers.

A user’s MAID profile and location data also is commonly shared as a consequence of simply using a smartphone to visit a web page that features ads. In the few milliseconds before those ads load, the website will send a “bid request” to various ad exchanges, where advertisers can bid on the chance to place their ad in front of users who match the consumer profiles they’re seeking. A great deal of data can be included in a bid request, including the user’s precise location (the current open standard for bid requests is detailed here).

The trouble is that virtually anyone can access the “bidstream” data flowing through these so-called “realtime bidding” networks, because the information is simultaneously broadcast in the clear to hundreds of entities around the world.

The result is that there are a number of marketing companies that now enrich and broker access to this mobile location information. Earlier this year, the German news outlet netzpolitik.org purchased a bidstream data set containing more than 3.6 billion data points, and shared the information with the German daily BR24. They concluded that the data they obtained (through a free trial, no less) made it possible to establish movement profiles — some of them quite precise — of several million people across Germany.

A screenshot from the BR24/Netzpolitik story about their ability to track millions of Germans, including many employees of the German Federal Police and Interior Ministry.

Politico recently covered startling research from universities in New Hampshire, Kentucky and St. Louis that showed how the mobile advertising data they acquired allowed them to link visits from investigators with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to insiders selling stock before the investigations became public knowledge.

The researchers in that study said they didn’t attempt to use the same methods to track regulators from other agencies, but that virtually anyone could do it.

Justin Sherman, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology, called the research a “shocking demonstration of what happens when companies can freely harvest Americans’ geolocation data and sell it for their chosen price.”

“Politicians should understand how they, their staff, and public servants are threatened by the sale of personal data—and constituent groups should realize that talk of data broker ‘controls’ or ‘best practices” is designed by companies to distract from the underlying problems and the comprehensive privacy and security solutions, Sherman wrote for Lawfare this week.

A BIDSTREAM DRAGNET?

The Orwellian nature of modern mobile advertising networks may soon have far-reaching implications for women’s reproductive rights, as more states move to outlaw abortion within their borders. The 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court discarded the federal right to abortion, and 14 states have since enacted strict abortion bans.

Anti-abortion groups are already using mobile advertising data to advance their cause. In May 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin used precise geolocation data to direct ads to women it suspected of seeking abortions.

As it stands, there is little to stop antiabortion groups from purchasing bidstream data (or renting access to a platform like Babel Street) and using it to geofence abortion clinics, potentially revealing all mobile devices transiting through these locations.

Atlas said its investigator geofenced an abortion clinic and was able to identify a likely employee at that clinic, following their daily route to and from that individual’s home address.

A still shot from a video Atlas shared of its use of Babel Street to identify and track an employee traveling each day between their home and the clinic.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which the Idaho Capital Sun reports is defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission.” Tennessee now has a similar law, and GOP lawmakers in five other states introduced abortion trafficking bills that failed to advance this year, the Sun reports.

Atlas said its investigator used Babel Street to identify and track a person traveling from their home in Alabama — where abortion is now illegal — to an abortion clinic just over the border in Tallahassee, Fla. — and back home again within a few hours. Abortion rights advocates and providers are currently suing Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, seeking to block him from prosecuting people who help patients travel out-of-state to end pregnancies.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group, said she’s extremely concerned about dragnet surveillance of people crossing state lines in order to get abortions.

“Specifically, Republican officials from states that have outlawed abortion have made it clear that they are interested in targeting people who have gone to neighboring states in order to get abortions, and to make it more difficult for people who are seeking abortions to go to neighboring states,” Galperin said. “It’s not a great leap to imagine that states will do this.”

APPLES AND GOOGLES

Atlas found that for the right price (typically $10-50k a year), brokers can provide access to tens of billions of data points covering large swaths of the US population and the rest of the world.

Based on the data sets Atlas acquired — many of which included older MAID records — they estimate they could locate roughly 80 percent of Android-based devices, and about 25 percent of Apple phones. Google refers to its MAID as the “Android Advertising ID,” (AAID) while Apple calls it the “Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFA).

What accounts for the disparity between the number of Android and Apple devices that can be found in mobile advertising data? In April 2021, Apple shipped version 14.5 of its iOS operating system, which introduced a technology called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that requires apps to get affirmative consent before they can track users by their IDFA or any other identifier.

Apple’s introduction of ATT had a swift and profound impact on the advertising market: Less than a year later Facebook disclosed that the iPhone privacy feature would decrease the company’s 2022 revenues by about $10 billion.

Source: cnbc.com.

Google runs by far the world’s largest ad exchange, known as AdX. The U.S. Department of Justice, which has accused Google of building a monopoly over the technology that places ads on websites, estimates that Google’s ad exchange controls 47 percent of the U.S. market and 56 percent globally.

According to recent figures, Google’s Android is also the dominant mobile operating system worldwide, with more than 72 percent of the market. In the U.S., however, iPhone users claim approximately 55 percent of the market, according to TechRepublic.

In response to requests for comment, Google said it does not send real time bidding requests to Babel Street, nor does it share precise location data in bid requests. The company added that its policies explicitly prohibit the sale of data from real-time bidding, or its use for any purpose other than advertising.

Google said its MAIDs are randomly generated and do not contain IP addresses, GPS coordinates, or any other location data, and that its ad systems do not share anyone’s precise location data.

“Android has clear controls for users to manage app access to device location, and reset or delete their advertising ID,” Google’s written statement reads. “If we learn that someone, whether an app developer, ad tech company or anyone else, is violating our policies, we take appropriate action. Beyond that, we support legislation and industry collaboration to address these types of data practices that negatively affect the entire mobile ecosystem, including all operating systems.”

In a written statement shared with reporters, Apple said Location Services is not on by default in its devices. Rather, users must enable Location Services and must give permission to each app or website to use location data. Users can turn Location Services off at any time, and can change whether apps have access to location at any time. The user’s choices include precise vs. approximate location, as well as a one-time grant of location access by the app.

“We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, and build privacy protections into each of our products and services to put the user in control of their data,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We minimize personal data collection, and where possible, process data only on users’ devices.”

Zach Edwards is a senior threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm SilentPush who has studied the location data industry closely. Edwards said Google and Apple can’t keep pretending like the MAIDs being broadcast into the bidstream from hundreds of millions of American devices aren’t making most people trivially trackable.

“The privacy risks here will remain until Apple and Google permanently turn off their mobile advertising ID schemes and admit to the American public that this is the technology that has been supporting the global data broker ecosystem,” he said.

STATES ACT, WHILE CONGRESS DITHERS

According to Bloomberg Law, between 2019 and 2023, threats against federal judges have more than doubled. Amid increasingly hostile political rhetoric and conspiracy theories against government officials, a growing number of states are seeking to pass their own versions of Daniel’s Law.

Last month, a retired West Virginia police officer filed a class action lawsuit against the people-search service Whitepages for listing their personal information in violation of a statute the state passed in 2021 that largely mirrors Daniel’s Law.

In May 2024, Maryland passed the Judge Andrew F. Wilkinson Judicial Security Act — named after a county circuit court judge who was murdered by an individual involved in a divorce proceeding over which he was presiding. The law allows current and former members of the Maryland judiciary to request their personal information not be made available to the public.

Under the Maryland law, personal information can include a home address; telephone number, email address; Social Security number or federal tax ID number; bank account or payment card number; a license plate or other unique vehicle identifier; a birth or marital record; a child’s name, school, or daycare; place of worship; place of employment for a spouse, child, or dependent.

The law firm Troutman Pepper writes that “so far in 2024, 37 states have begun considering or have adopted similar privacy-based legislation designed to protect members of the judiciary and, in some states, other government officials involved in law enforcement.”

Atlas alleges that in response to requests to have data on its New Jersey law enforcement clients scrubbed from consumer records sold by LexisNexis, the data broker retaliated by freezing the credit of approximately 18,500 people, and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

In addition, Atlas said LexisNexis started returning failure codes indicating they had no record of these individuals, resulting in denials when officers attempted to refinance loans or open new bank accounts.

The data broker industry has responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, and challenging the constitutionality of the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment.

Attorneys for the data broker industry argued in their motion to dismiss that there is “no First Amendment doctrine that exempts a content-based restriction from strict scrutiny just because it has some nexus with a privacy interest.”

Atlas’s lawyers responded that data covered under Daniel’s Law — personal information of New Jersey law enforcement officers — is not free speech. Atlas notes that while defending against comparable lawsuits, the data broker industry has argued that home address and phone number data are not “communications.”

“Data brokers should not be allowed to argue that information like addresses are not ‘communications’ in one context, only to turn around and claim that addresses are protectable communications,” Atlas argued (PDF). “Nor can their change of course alter the reality that the data at issue is not speech.”

The judge overseeing the challenge is expected to rule on the motion to dismiss within the next few weeks. Regardless of the outcome, the decision is likely to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states could limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminal charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and government records that fuel the people-search industry.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Congress’ failure to regulate data brokers, and the administration’s continued opposition to bipartisan legislation that would limit data sales to law enforcement, have created this current privacy crisis.

“Whether location data is being used to identify and expose closeted gay Americans, or to track people as they cross state lines to seek reproductive health care, data brokers are selling Americans’ deepest secrets and exposing them to serious harm, all for a few bucks,” Wyden said in a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times.

Sen. Wyden said Google also deserves blame for refusing to follow Apple’s lead by removing companies’ ability to track phones.

“Google’s insistence on uniquely tracking Android users – and allowing ad companies to do so as well – has created the technical foundations for the surveillance economy and the abuses stemming from it,” Wyden said.

Georgetown Law’s Justin Sherman said the data broker and mobile ad industries claim there are protections in place to anonymize mobile location data and restrict access to it, and that there are limits to the kinds of invasive inferences one can make from location data. The data broker industry also likes to tout the usefulness of mobile location data in fighting retail fraud, he said.

“All kinds of things can be inferred from this data, including people being targeted by abusers, or people with a particular health condition or religious belief,” Sherman said. “You can track jurors, law enforcement officers visiting the homes of suspects, or military intelligence people meeting with their contacts. The notion that the sale of all this data is preventing harm and fraud is hilarious in light of all the harm it causes enabling people to better target their cyber operations, or learning about people’s extramarital affairs and extorting public officials.”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Privacy experts say disabling or deleting your device’s MAID will have no effect on how your phone operates, except that you may begin to see far less targeted ads on that device.

Any Android apps with permission to use your location should appear when you navigate to the Settings app, Location, and then App Permissions. “Allowed all the time” is the most permissive setting, followed by “Allowed only while in use,” “Ask every time,” and “Not allowed.”

Android users can delete their ad ID permanently, by opening the Settings app and navigating to Privacy > Ads. Tap “Delete advertising ID,” then tap it again on the next page to confirm. According to the EFF, this will prevent any app on your phone from accessing the ad ID in the future.

Image: eff.org

By default, Apple’s iOS requires apps to ask permission before they can access your device’s IDFA. When you install a new app, it may ask for permission to track you. When prompted to do so by an app, select the “Ask App Not to Track” option. Apple users also can set the “Allow apps to request to track” switch to the “off” position, which will block apps from asking to track you.

Apple’s Privacy and Ad Tracking Settings.

Apple also has its own targeted advertising system which is separate from third-party tracking enabled by the IDFA. To disable it, go to Settings, Privacy, and Apple Advertising, and ensure that the “Personalized Ads” setting is set to “off.”

Finally, if you’re the type of reader who’s the default IT support person for a small group of family or friends (bless your heart), it would be a good idea to set their devices not to track them, and to disable any apps that may have location data sharing turned on 24/7.

There is a dual benefit to this altruism, which is clearly in the device owner’s best interests. Because while your device may not be directly trackable via advertising data, making sure they’re opted out of said tracking also can reduce the likelihood that you are trackable simply by being physically close to those who are.

Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports

Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.

The vulnerability in Experian’s website was exploitable after one applied to see their credit file via annualcreditreport.com.

In December, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to the cashing out of compromised identities.

“I want to try and help to put a stop to it and make it more difficult for [ID thieves] to access, since [Experian is] not doing shit and regular people struggle,” Kushnir wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity explaining his motivations for reaching out. “If somehow I can make small change and help to improve this, inside myself I can feel that I did something that actually matters and helped others.”

Kushnir said the crooks learned they could trick Experian into giving them access to anyone’s credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian’s identity verification process.

Following Kushnir’s instructions, I sought a copy of my credit report from Experian via annualcreditreport.com — a website that is required to provide all Americans with a free copy of their credit report from each of the three major reporting bureaus, once per year.

Annualcreditreport.com begins by asking for your name, address, SSN and birthday. After I supplied that and told Annualcreditreport.com I wanted my report from Experian, I was taken to Experian.com to complete the identity verification process.

Normally at this point, Experian’s website would present four or five multiple-guess questions, such as “Which of the following addresses have you lived at?”

Kushnir told me that when the questions page loads, you simply change the last part of the URL from “/acr/oow/” to “/acr/report,” and the site would display the consumer’s full credit report.

But when I tried to get my report from Experian via annualcreditreport.com, Experian’s website said it didn’t have enough information to validate my identity. It wouldn’t even show me the four multiple-guess questions. Experian said I had three options for a free credit report at this point: Mail a request along with identity documents, call a phone number for Experian, or upload proof of identity via the website.

But that didn’t stop Experian from showing me my full credit report after I changed the Experian URL as Kushnir had instructed — modifying the error page’s trailing URL from “/acr/OcwError” to simply “/acr/report”.

Experian’s website then immediately displayed my entire credit file.

Even though Experian said it couldn’t tell that I was actually me, it still coughed up my report. And thank goodness it did. The report contains so many errors that it’s probably going to take a good deal of effort on my part to straighten out.

Now I know why Experian has NEVER let me view my own file via their website. For example, there were four phone numbers on my Experian credit file: Only one of them was mine, and that one hasn’t been mine for ages.

I was so dumbfounded by Experian’s incompetence that I asked a close friend and trusted security source to try the method on her identity file at Experian. Sure enough, when she got to the part where Experian asked questions, changing the last part of the URL in her address bar to “/report” bypassed the questions and immediately displayed her full credit report. Her report also was replete with errors.

KrebsOnSecurity shared Kushnir’s findings with Experian on Dec. 23, 2022. On Dec. 27, 2022, Experian’s PR team acknowledged receipt of my Dec. 23 notification, but the company has so far ignored multiple requests for comment or clarification.

By the time Experian confirmed receipt of my report, the “exploit” Kushnir said he learned from the identity thieves on Telegram had been patched and no longer worked. But it remains unclear how long Experian’s website was making it so easy to access anyone’s credit report.

In response to information shared by KrebsOnSecurity, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he was disappointed — but not at all surprised — to hear about yet another cybersecurity lapse at Experian.

“The credit bureaus are poorly regulated, act as if they are above the law and have thumbed their noses at Congressional oversight,” Wyden said in a written statement. “Just last year, Experian ignored repeated briefing requests from my office after you revealed another cybersecurity lapse the company.”

Sen. Wyden’s quote above references a story published here in July 2022, which broke the news that identity thieves were hijacking consumer accounts at Experian.com just by signing up as them at Experian once more, supplying the target’s static, personal information (name, DoB/SSN, address) but a different email address.

From interviews with multiple victims who contacted KrebsOnSecurity after that story, it emerged that Experian’s own customer support representatives were actually telling consumers who got locked out of their Experian accounts to recreate their accounts using their personal information and a new email address. This was Experian’s advice even for people who’d just explained that this method was what identity thieves had used to lock them in out in the first place.

Clearly, Experian found it simpler to respond this way, rather than acknowledging the problem and addressing the root causes (lazy authentication and abhorrent account recovery practices). It’s also worth mentioning that reports of hijacked Experian.com accounts persisted into late 2022. That screw-up has since prompted a class action lawsuit against Experian.

Sen. Wyden said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) need to do much more to protect Americans from screw-ups by the credit bureaus.

“If they don’t believe they have the authority to do so, they should endorse legislation like my Mind Your Own Business Act, which gives the FTC power to set tough mandatory cybersecurity standards for companies like Experian,” Wyden said.

Sadly, none of this is terribly shocking behavior for Experian, which has shown itself a completely negligent custodian of obscene amounts of highly sensitive consumer information.

In April 2021, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how identity thieves were exploiting lax authentication on Experian’s PIN retrieval page to unfreeze consumer credit files. In those cases, Experian failed to send any notice via email when a freeze PIN was retrieved, nor did it require the PIN to be sent to an email address already associated with the consumer’s account.

A few days after that April 2021 story, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that an Experian API was exposing the credit scores of most Americans.

It’s bad enough that we can’t really opt out of companies like Experian making $2.6 billion each quarter collecting and selling gobs of our personal and financial information. But there has to be some meaningful accountability when these monopolistic companies engage in negligent and reckless behavior with the very same consumer data that feeds their quarterly profits. Or when security and privacy shortcuts are found to be intentional, like for cost-saving reasons.

And as we saw with Equifax’s consolidated class-action settlement in response to letting state-sponsored hackers from China steal data on nearly 150 million Americans back in 2017, class-actions and more laughable “free credit monitoring” services from the very same companies that created the problem aren’t going to cut it.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

It is easy to adopt a defeatist attitude with the credit bureaus, who often foul things up royally even for consumers who are quite diligent about watching their consumer credit files and disputing any inaccuracies.

But there are some concrete steps that everyone can take which will dramatically lower the risk that identity thieves will ruin your financial future. And happily, most of these steps have the side benefit of costing the credit bureaus money, or at least causing the data they collect about you to become less valuable over time.

The first step is awareness. Find out what these companies are saying about you behind your back. Keep in mind that — fair or not — your credit score as collectively determined by these bureaus can affect whether you get that loan, apartment, or job. In that context, even small, unintentional errors that are unrelated to identity theft can have outsized consequences for consumers down the road.

Each bureau is required to provide a free copy of your credit report every year. The easiest way to get yours is through annualcreditreport.com.

Some consumers report that this site never works for them, and that each bureau will insist they don’t have enough information to provide a report. I am definitely in this camp. Thankfully, a financial institution that I already have a relationship with offers the ability to view your credit file through them. Your mileage on this front may vary, and you may end up having to send copies of your identity documents through the mail or website.

When you get your report, look for anything that isn’t yours, and then document and file a dispute with the corresponding credit bureau. And after you’ve reviewed your report, set a calendar reminder to recur every four months, reminding you it’s time to get another free copy of your credit file.

If you haven’t already done so, consider making 2023 the year that you freeze your credit files at the three major reporting bureaus, including Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. It is now free to people in all 50 U.S. states to place a security freeze on their credit files. It is also free to do this for your partner and/or your dependents.

Freezing your credit means no one who doesn’t already have a financial relationship with you can view your credit file, making it unlikely that potential creditors will grant new lines of credit in your name to identity thieves. Freezing your credit file also means Experian and its brethren can no longer sell peeks at your credit history to others.

Anytime you wish to apply for new credit or a new job, or open an account at a utility or communications provider, you can quickly thaw a freeze on your credit file, and set it to freeze automatically again after a specified length of time.

Please don’t confuse a credit freeze (a.k.a. “security freeze”) with the alternative that the bureaus will likely steer you towards when you ask for a freeze: “Credit lock” services.

The bureaus pitch these credit lock services as a way for consumers to easily toggle their credit file availability with push of a button on a mobile app, but they do little to prevent the bureaus from continuing to sell your information to others.

My advice: Ignore the lock services, and just freeze your credit files already.

One final note. Frequent readers here will have noticed that I’ve criticized these so-called “knowledge-based authentication” or KBA questions that Experian’s website failed to ask as part of its consumer verification process.

KrebsOnSecurity has long assailed KBA as weak authentication because the questions and answers are drawn largely from consumer records that are public and easily accessible to organized identity theft groups.

That said, given that these KBA questions appear to be the ONLY thing standing between me and my Experian credit report, it seems like maybe they should at least take care to ensure that those questions actually get asked.

Senators Urge FTC to Probe ID.me Over Selfie Data

Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me.

In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the Senators charge that ID.me’s CEO Blake Hall has offered conflicting statements about how his company uses the facial scan data it collects on behalf of the federal government and many states that use the ID proofing technology to screen applicants for unemployment insurance.

The lawmakers say that in public statements and blog posts, ID.me has frequently emphasized the difference between two types of facial recognition: One-to-one, and one-to-many. In the one-to-one approach, a live video selfie is compared to the image on a driver’s license, for example. One-to-many facial recognition involves comparing a face against a database of other faces to find any potential matches.

Americans have particular reason to be concerned about the difference between these two types of facial recognition, says the letter to the FTC, signed by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.):

“While one-to-one recognition involves a one-time comparison of two images in order to confirm an applicant’s identity, the use of one-to-many recognition means that millions of innocent people will have their photographs endlessly queried as part of a digital ‘line up.’ Not only does this violate individuals’ privacy, but the inevitable false matches associated with one-to-many recognition can result in applicants being wrongly denied desperately-needed services for weeks or even months as they try to get their case reviewed.”

“This risk is especially acute for people of color: NIST’s Facial Recognition Vendor Test found that many facial recognition algorithms have rates of false matches that are as much as 100 times higher for individuals from countries in West Africa, East Africa and East Asia than for individuals from Eastern European countries. This means Black and Asian Americans could be disproportionately likely to be denied benefits due to a false match in a one-to-many facial recognition system.”

The lawmakers say that throughout the latter half of 2021, ID.me published statements and blog posts stating it did not use one-to-many facial recognition and that the approach was “problematic” and “tied to surveillance operations.” But several days after a Jan. 16, 2022 post here about the IRS’s new facial ID requirement went viral and prompted a public backlash, Hall acknowledged in a LinkedIn posting that ID.me does use one-to-many facial recognition.

“Within days, the company edited the numerous blog posts and white papers on its website that previously stated the company did not use one-to-many to reflect the truth,” the letter alleges. “According to media reports, the company’s decision to correct its prior misleading statements came after mounting internal pressure from its employees.”

Cyberscoop’s Tonya Riley published excerpts from internal ID.me employee Slack messages wherein some expressed dread and unease with the company’s equivocation on its use of one-to-many facial recognition.

In February, the IRS announced it would no longer require facial scans or other biometric data from taxpayers seeking to create an account at the agency’s website. The agency also pledged that any biometric data shared with ID.me would be permanently deleted.

But the IRS still requires new account applicants to sign up with either ID.me or Login.gov, a single sign-on solution already used to access 200 websites run by 28 federal agencies. It also still offers the option of providing a live selfie for verification purposes, although the IRS says this data will be deleted automatically.

Asked to respond to concerns raised in the letter from Senate lawmakers, ID.me instead touted its successes in stopping fraud.

“Five state workforce agencies have publicly credited ID.me with helping to prevent $238 billion dollars in fraud,” the statement reads. “Conditions were so bad during the pandemic that the deputy assistant director of the FBI called the fraud ‘an economic attack on the United States.’ ID.me played a critical role in stopping that attack in more than 20 states where the service was rapidly adopted for its equally important ability to increase equity and verify individuals left behind by traditional options. We look forward to cooperating with all relevant government bodies to clear up any misunderstandings.”

As Cyberscoop reported on Apr. 14, the House Oversight and Reform Committee last month began an investigation into ID.me’s practices, with committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) saying the committee’s questions to the company would help shape policy on how the government wields facial recognition technology.

A copy of the letter the senators sent to the FTC is here (PDF).

Fake Emergency Search Warrants Draw Scrutiny from Capitol Hill

On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and is now asking technology companies and federal agencies for information about the frequency of such schemes.

At issue are forged “emergency data requests,” (EDRs) sent through hacked police or government agency email accounts. Tech companies usually require a search warrant or subpoena before providing customer or user data, but any police jurisdiction can use an EDR to request immediate access to data without a warrant, provided the law enforcement entity attests that the request is related to an urgent matter of life and death.

As Tuesday’s story showed, hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. After all, there are roughly 18,000 distinct police organizations in the United States alone, and many thousands of government and police agencies worldwide.

Criminal hackers exploiting that ambiguity are enjoying remarkable success rates gaining access to the data they’re after, and some are now selling EDRs as a service to other crooks online.

This week’s piece included confirmation from social media platform Discord about a fraudulent EDR they recently processed. On Wednesday, Bloomberg published a story confirming that both Apple and Meta/Facebook have recently complied with fake EDRs.

Today, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who said he was moved to action after reading this week’s coverage.

“Recent news reports have revealed an enormous threat to Americans’ safety and national security,” Wyden said in a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity. “I’m particularly troubled by the prospect that forged emergency orders may be coming from compromised foreign law enforcement agencies, and then used to target vulnerable individuals.”

“I’m requesting information from tech companies and multiple federal agencies to learn more about how emergency data requests are being abused by hackers,” Wyden’s statement continues. “No one wants tech companies to refuse legitimate emergency requests when someone’s safety is at stake, but the current system has clear weaknesses that need to be addressed. Fraudulent government requests are a significant concern, which is why I’ve already authored legislation to stamp out forged warrants and subpoenas.”

Tuesday’s story showed how fraudulently obtained EDRs were a tool used by members of LAPSUS$, the data extortion group that recently hacked Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta and Samsung. And it tracked the activities of a teenage hacker from the United Kingdom who was reportedly arrested multiple times for sending fake EDRs.

That was in March 2021, but there are similar fake EDR services on offer today. One example can be found on Telegram, wherein a member who favors the handle “Bug” has for the past month been selling access to various police and government email accounts.

All of the access Bug is currently offering was allegedly stolen from non-U.S. police and government email accounts, including a police department in India; a government ministry of the United Arab Emirates; the Brazilian Secretariat of Education; and Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education.

On Mar. 30, Bug posted a sales thread to the cybercrime forum Breached[.]co saying he could be hired to perform fake EDRs on targets at will, provided the account was recently active.

“I am doing LE Emergency Data Requests for snapchat, twitter, ig [Instagram] and many others,” Bug wrote. “Information we can get: emails, IPs, phone numbers, photos. Account must be active in the last week else we get rejected as shown below. Have gotten information only on Snapchat, Twitter and IG so far.”

An individual using the nickname “Bug” has been selling access to government and police email accounts for more than a month. Bug posted this sales thread on Wednesday.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. This post will be updated in the event they respond.

The current scourge of fraudulent EDRs illustrates the dangers of relying solely on email to process legal requests for privileged subscriber data. In July 2021, Sen. Wyden and others introduced new legislation to combat the growing use of counterfeit court orders by scammers and criminals. The bill calls for funding for state and tribal courts to adopt widely available digital signature technology that meets standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Forged court orders, usually involving copy-and-pasted signatures of judges, have been used to authorize illegal wiretaps and fraudulently take down legitimate reviews and websites by those seeking to conceal negative information and past crimes,” the lawmakers said in a statement introducing their bill.

The Digital Authenticity for Court Orders Act would require federal, state and tribal courts to use a digital signature for orders authorizing surveillance, domain seizures and removal of online content.

IRS To Ditch Biometric Requirement for Online Access

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said today it will be transitioning away from requiring biometric data from taxpayers who wish to access their records at the agency’s website. The reversal comes as privacy experts and lawmakers have been pushing the IRS and other federal agencies to find less intrusive methods for validating one’s identity with the U.S. government online.

Late last year, the login page for the IRS was updated with text advising that by the summer of 2022, the only way for taxpayers to access their records at irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that collects biometric data — such as live facial scans using a mobile device or webcam.

The IRS first announced its partnership with ID.me in November, but the press release received virtually no attention. On Jan. 19, KrebsOnSecurity published the story IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access, detailing a rocky experience signing up for IRS access via ID.me. That story immediately went viral, bringing this site an almost unprecedented amount of traffic. A tweet about it quickly garnered more than two million impressions.

It was clear most readers had no idea these new and more invasive requirements were being put in place at the IRS and other federal agencies (the Social Security Administration also is steering new signups to ID.me).

ID.me says it has approximately 64 million users, with 145,000 new users signing up each day. Still, the bulk of those users are people who have been forced to sign up with ID.me as a condition of receiving state or federal financial assistance, such as unemployment insurance, child tax credit payments, and pandemic assistance funds.

In the face of COVID, dozens of states collectively lost tens of billions of dollars at the hands of identity thieves impersonating out-of-work Americans seeking unemployment insurance. Some 30 states and 10 federal agencies now use ID.me to screen for ID thieves applying for benefits in someone else’s name.

But ID.me has been problematic for many legitimate applicants who saw benefits denied or delayed because they couldn’t complete ID.me’s verification process.  Critics charged the IRS’s plan would unfairly disadvantage people with disabilities or limited access to technology or Internet, and that facial recognition systems tend to be less accurate for people with darker skin.

Many readers were aghast that the IRS would ask people to hand over their biometric and personal data to a private company that begin in 2010 as a way to help veterans, teachers and other public servants qualify for retail discounts. These readers had reasonable questions: Who has (or will have) access to this data? Why should it be stored indefinitely (post-verification)? What happens if ID.me gets breached?

The Washington Post reported today that in a meeting with lawmakers, IRS officials said they were considering another identity verification option that wouldn’t use facial recognition. At the same time, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) challenged the Treasury Department and IRS to reconsider the biometric requirements.

In a statement published today, the IRS said it was transitioning away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts.

“The transition will occur over the coming weeks in order to prevent larger disruptions to taxpayers during filing season,” the IRS said. “During the transition, the IRS will quickly develop and bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition. The IRS will also continue to work with its cross-government partners to develop authentication methods that protect taxpayer data and ensure broad access to online tools.”

“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig wrote. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The statement further stressed that the transition announced today does not interfere with the taxpayer’s ability to file their return or pay taxes owed. “During this period, the IRS will continue to accept tax filings, and it has no other impact on the current tax season,” the IRS said. “People should continue to file their taxes as they normally would.”

It remains unclear what other service or method the IRS will use going forward to validate the identities of new account signups. Wyden and others have urged the IRS to use Login.gov, a single sign-on service that Congress required federal agencies to use in 2015.

“Login.gov is already used to access 200 websites run by 28 Federal agencies and over 40 million Americans have accounts,” Wyden wrote in a letter to the IRS today. “Unfortunately, login.gov has not yet reached its full potential, in part because many agencies have flouted the Congressional mandate that they use it, and because successive Administrations have failed to prioritize digital identity. The cost of this inaction has been billions of dollars in fraud, which has in turn fueled a black market for stolen personal data, and enabled companies like ID.me to commercialize what should be a core government service.”

Login.gov is run by the U.S. General Services Administration, which told The Post that it was “committed to not deploying facial recognition…or any other emerging technology for use with government benefits and services until a rigorous review has given us confidence that we can do so equitably and without causing harm to vulnerable populations.”

When Security Takes a Backseat to Productivity

“We must care as much about securing our systems as we care about running them if we are to make the necessary revolutionary change.” -CIA’s Wikileaks Task Force.

So ends a key section of a report the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency produced in the wake of a mammoth data breach in 2016 that led to Wikileaks publishing thousands of classified documents stolen from the agency’s offensive cyber operations division. The analysis highlights a shocking series of security failures at one of the world’s most secretive organizations, but the underlying weaknesses that gave rise to the breach also unfortunately are all too common in many organizations today.

The CIA produced the report in October 2017, roughly seven months after Wikileaks began publishing Vault 7 — reams of classified data detailing the CIA’s capabilities to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. But the report’s contents remained shrouded from public view until earlier this week, when heavily redacted portions of it were included in a letter by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to the Director of National Intelligence.

The CIA acknowledged its security processes were so “woefully lax” that the agency probably would never have known about the data theft had Wikileaks not published the stolen documents online. What kind of security failures created an environment that allegedly allowed a former CIA employee to exfiltrate so much sensitive data? Here are a few, in no particular order:

  • Failing to rapidly detect security incidents.
  • Failing to act on warning signs about potentially risky employees.
  • Moving too slowly to enact key security safeguards.
  • A lack of user activity monitoring or robust server audit capability.
  • No effective removable media controls.
  • No single person empowered to ensure IT systems are built and maintained securely throughout their lifecycle.
  • Historical data available to all users indefinitely.

Substitute the phrase “cyber weapons” with “productivity” or just “IT systems” in the CIA’s report and you might be reading the post-mortem produced by a security firm hired to help a company recover from a highly damaging data breach.

A redacted portion of the CIA’s report on the Wikileaks breach.

DIVIDED WE STAND, UNITED WE FALL

A key phrase in the CIA’s report references deficiencies in “compartmentalizing” cybersecurity risk. At a high level (not necessarily specific to the CIA), compartmentalizing IT environments involves important concepts such as:

  • Segmenting one’s network so that malware infections or breaches in one part of the network can’t spill over into other areas.
  • Not allowing multiple users to share administrative-level passwords
  • Developing baselines for user and network activity so that deviations from the norm stand out more prominently.
  • Continuously inventorying, auditing, logging and monitoring all devices and user accounts connected to the organization’s IT network.

“The Agency for years has developed and operated IT mission systems outside the purview and governance of enterprise IT, citing the need for mission functionality and speed,” the CIA observed. “While often fulfilling a valid purpose, this ‘shadow IT’ exemplifies a broader cultural issue that separates enterprise IT from mission IT, has allowed mission system owners to determine how or if they will police themselves.”

All organizations experience intrusions, security failures and oversights of key weaknesses. In large enough enterprises, these failures likely happen multiple times each day. But by far the biggest factor that allows small intrusions to morph into a full-on data breach is a lack of ability to quickly detect and respond to security incidents.

Also, because employees tend to be the most abundant security weakness in any organization, instituting some kind of continuing security awareness training for all employees is a good idea. Some security experts I know and respect dismiss security awareness programs as a waste of time and money, observing that no matter how much training a company does, there will always be some percentage of users who will click on anything.

That may or may not be accurate, but even if it is, at least the organization then has a much better idea which employees probably need more granular security controls (i.e. more compartmentalizing) to keep them from becoming a serious security liability.

Sen. Wyden’s letter (PDF), first reported on by The Washington Post, is worth reading because it points to a series of continuing security weaknesses at the CIA, many of which have already been addressed by other federal agencies, including multi-factor authentication for domain names and access to classified/sensitive systems, and anti-spam protections like DMARC.

FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among the largest the FCC has ever levied, critics say the penalties don’t go far enough to deter wireless carriers from continuing to sell customer location data.

The FCC proposed fining T-Mobile $91 million; AT&T faces more than $57 million in fines; Verizon is looking at more than $48 million in penalties; and the FCC said Sprint should pay more than $12 million.

An FCC statement (PDF) said “the size of the proposed fines for the four wireless carriers differs based on the length of time each carrier apparently continued to sell access to its customer location information without reasonable safeguards and the number of entities to which each carrier continued to sell such access.”

The fines are only “proposed” at this point because the carriers still have an opportunity to respond to the commission and contest the figures. The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier this week that the FCC was considering the fines.

The commission said it took action in response to a May 2018 story broken by The New York Times, which exposed how a company called Securus Technologies had been selling location data on customers of virtually any major mobile provider to law enforcement officials.

That same month, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that LocationSmart — a data aggregation firm working with the major wireless carriers — had a free, unsecured demo of its service online that anyone could abuse to find the near-exact location of virtually any mobile phone in North America.

In response, the carriers promised to “wind down” location data sharing agreements with third-party companies. But in 2019, Joseph Cox at Vice.com showed that little had changed, detailing how he was able to locate a test phone after paying $300 to a bounty hunter who simply bought the data through a little-known third-party service.

Gigi Sohn is a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy and a former senior adviser to former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler in 2015. Sohn said this debacle underscores the importance of having strong consumer privacy protections.

“The importance of having rules that protect consumers before they are harmed cannot be overstated,” Sohn said. “In 2016, the Wheeler FCC adopted rules that would have prevented most mobile phone users from suffering this gross violation of privacy and security. But [FCC] Chairman Pai and his friends in Congress eliminated those rules, because allegedly the burden on mobile wireless providers and their fixed broadband brethren would be too great. Clearly, they did not think for one minute about the harm that could befall consumers in the absence of strong privacy protections.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the FCC’s inaction on wireless location data sharing, likewise called for more string consumer privacy laws, calling the proposed punishment “comically inadequate fines that won’t stop phone companies from abusing Americans’ privacy the next time they can make a quick buck.”

“Time and again, from Facebook to Equifax, massive companies take reckless disregard for Americans’ personal information, knowing they can write off comparatively tiny fines as the cost of doing business,” Wyden said in a written statement. “The only way to truly protect Americans’ personal information is to pass strong privacy legislation like my Mind Your Own Business Act [PDF] to put teeth into privacy laws and hold CEOs personally responsible for lying about protecting Americans’ privacy.”