text:
“Are you afraid of death?, my friend” asked my co-passenger. Not quite amused by the question and not understanding what he was getting at, I replied with a stern ‘No’. I knew that picking up hitchhikers was a bad idea. But the thought of a long boring journey, alone, made me do what I would not usually have done. I hoped I would not repent it. This new friend was shuffling around in his seat, as if trying to get something out of his pocket. I caught the glitter off a metal object in his coat. I thought about the worst possible situation. This seemed to be it and that object seemed to be a gun.

“What are you doing?”, I shouted at him, startling him and making him fumble a bit more. ”Jesus, why the fuck are you shouting?”, he shouted back. He found what he was looking for. His hand slowly took the gun out of his pocket. I found his use of Jesus and fuck in the same sentence a bit funny.

It was a metal box which had some weed rolled up.

All calm now, the hitchhiker said “If you are not afraid, I don’t think you would mind driving high” and handed me a lit joint. It was an interesting trip that one, sure did not repent it.

title: Feedback: road trip

question: Who asks about being afraid of death?

answer: A hitchhiker that the driver picked up.

question: How is the question about being afraid of death answered?

answer: The driver answers that he isn't afraid of death.

question: Do the two characters know each other?

answer: No. They just met.

question: It there conflict? Is it resolved?

answer: The hitchhiker pulls out a gun while looking for a small metal container of weed. The driver assumes that the hitchhiker is going to shoot him. He doesn't; he just offers to get high.

question: Write a ~5 sentence summary.

answer: A person driving picks up a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker asks the driver if they're afraid to die. The driver replies that they're not, so the hitchhiker reaches into his pocket and pulls out his gun. The driver chastises themselves, knowing it was a bad idea to pick up a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker then pulls out a container of weed and offers it to the driver.


split: train

text:
[(Photo: Voting Machine via Shutterstock)](Photo: Voting Machine via Shutterstock)

_Truthout will never hide stories like this behind a paywall or subscription fee. Help us continue publishing free and uncensored news by making a donation today!_

  _“You’ve heard the old adage ‘follow the money.’ I follow the vote, and wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to … make bad things happen.” — Steve Stigall, CIA cyber-security expert, in remarks to the US Election Assistance Commission_

Primary election rigging in the coming weeks and months is all but assured if American voters and candidates don’t take steps to prevent it now. Evidence that US voting systems are wide open to fraud and manipulation should be taken seriously in light of the unprecedented high-stakes elections we’re facing.

Not in recent history have American voters been presented with such radically polarized candidates, forcing a crucial choice for the direction of our future, and possibly upending long-established centers of power.

Local fixers, insider operatives, rogue hackers and even foreign countries could all rig US elections electronically.

It’s no secret that US primaries have been tightly controlled by the two ruling parties, usually to the benefit of their favored candidates. If this internal manipulation (some might call it rigging) is not publicly condoned, neither is it loudly condemned.

This year, however, the primary season is shaping up to be a battle royal between the political establishment and outsider insurgencies who are challenging the party elites and defying their usual filters, money and manipulations. And it seems all bets are off.

As a brazen Donald Trump kicks down the door of the GOP, tens of millions in super PAC dark cash has (so far) failed to buy the candidacy for a lackluster Jeb Bush. Accusations abound that Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has stacked the deck for Hillary Clinton. Yet nothing – not even corporate media’s censorship or outright hostility toward Bernie Sanders – has blunted his skyrocketing grassroots campaign.

You might ask: What is left, then, for the party powerful to ensure outcomes in 2016? Would any of them be so desperate as to actually rig the final vote count? Could they?

Indeed, they could.

But to be fair, so could a lot of other people. Local fixers, insider operatives, rogue hackers and even foreign countries could all rig US elections – in whole or part, in 50 states and most of the United States’ 3,143 counties – electronically, and _without detection_.

Time and again, the beneficiaries of suspicious primary elections are establishment-favored candidates.

The potential for this vote-rigging cyberwar is the result of an ongoing crisis in US democracy – a silent coup of sorts. Over many decades, US elections have been quietly outsourced to a small group of private voting machine companies, some with extreme partisan ties and criminal records. They have now almost entirely replaced our publicly counted paper ballots with their secretly programmed, easily hacked electronic voting technology.

For example, the Diebold AccuVote-TS Touchscreen voting machine was recently analyzed by Princeton computer security professors. They found that malicious software running on a single voting machine can be installed in as little as one minute, spreading invisibly from machine to machine through a virus, while stealing votes with little risk of detection.

While recent laws have limited essential hand-counting audits – in some cases making them actually illegal – in 18 states voting machines are used that produce no paper ballot at all, making verification of the results impossible.

THREATS TO THE 2016 ELECTIONS

In 2016, Americans will once again cast their votes into this lawless electronic void, and no, we can’t solve the problem before these game-changing primary elections. But shining a light on our voting systems does make a difference – as does getting out to vote: _Voter apathy and ignorance create the ideal conditions for election rigging_. Huge turnout makes election rigging less feasible, particularly when the pre-election polls or exit polls diverge more than 10 percent from actual vote returns. Manipulations usually happen when the spread between candidates is smaller than 10 percent.

_For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, “Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016.”_

What evidence do we have that any election rigging has already taken place? As it happens, extensive documentation exists, compiled over decades by researchers, cyber-security professionals, statistical analysts and even government agencies.

If you haven’t heard about it until now, thank the press. A longstanding mainstream media blackout on this issue has prevented the evidence from reaching the public and vulnerable candidates.

While the investigations into rigging are mostly nonpartisan, the results typically are not. Time and again, the beneficiaries of suspicious primary elections are establishment-favored candidates. In general elections, far-right and extremist Republicans have overwhelmingly raked in the “surprise upset” wins.

WHY WATCH THE PRIMARIES?

The primaries in particular should be a major focal point of scrutiny by all democracy advocates and supporters of grassroots, populist and insurgent candidates in both parties.

See the eye-opening statistical analysis of vote results from 2008 to 2012 compiled by citizen watchdog team Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Results showed a highly suspect, so far inexplicable gain of votes, only in larger precincts, only for Republicans (and in the primaries, only for Mitt Romney), and _only when votes are counted by computers_.

Choquette, an aerospace engineer and Republican, writes, “This substantial effect exceeds reasonable statistical bounds and we calculate that the probability of such election results happening by chance is beyond typical or even extreme.”

The potential smoking gun is that the votes gained by Republicans or “chosen” candidates in each precinct _increase as a function of precinct size (vote tally)_, not the precinct location, whether in cities or rural areas. This makes no obvious sense based on any known demographic. Once you factor in rigging, however, it starts to make a lot of sense; stealing votes from a bigger pool is less likely to be detected.

According to Choquette and Johnson’s findings, Mitt Romney’s ill-gotten gains in 2012 amounted to over 1 million votes “siphoned” or “flipped” from other GOP candidates.

[Instead of the flat line expected for each candidate, this chart shows the votes gained by Mitt Romney in a 2012 California primary race, by siphoning votes from other candidates. This “Vote Flipping” is an exchange of votes between candidates, while keeping the total number of votes intact to deter detection. (Chart: Francois Choquette)](Chart: Francois Choquette)

Instead of the flat line expected for each candidate, this chart shows the votes gained by Mitt Romney in a California primary race, by siphoning votes from other candidates. This “vote flipping” is an exchange of votes between candidates, while keeping the total number of votes intact to deter detection.

[Figure 6 charts the Vote Gained / Votes Lost results for all 50 states in the 2012 GOP primaries. Because candidate Romney has gained votes in the process, his count is shown in green. The other eight candidates who have lost votes to Romney are shown in red. The total number of votes exchanged between the candidates is approximately 1,233,576 votes. (Chart: Francois Choquette)]Figure 6 charts the Vote Gained / Votes Lost results for all 50 states in the 2012 GOP primaries. Because candidate Romney has gained votes in the process, his count is shown in green. The other eight candidates who have lost votes to Romney are shown in red. The total number of votes exchanged between the candidates is approximately 1,233,576 votes. (Chart: Francois Choquette)

Even for the mathematically challenged, the anomalies are evident when you read the report, and certainly lead to some serious head scratching. Choquette, who also co-authored “Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies,” says any high school student with a basic understanding of statistics could verify the work, and he welcomes anyone to run the numbers themselves.

Recently, a Ph.D. statistician took up the challenge. Beth Clarkson of Wichita State University was skeptical at first, but finally announced that she can find no other explanation besides voting machines being used to rig elections to benefit Republicans in the races she analyzed: the 2012 Ohio presidential election, the 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial election and the Kansas Senate elections. Less often, Clarkson found that votes appear to be shifted to Democrats as well, depending on the state and type of voting machine used.

Clarkson is now building a media campaign and suing her county election commissioner in an attempt to audit her county’s 2014 paper voting records, which so far has been denied.

All this new information only bolsters the long-held position of the Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a nonpartisan citizen watchdog organization. EDA finally coined the term “red shift” to describe the persistent pattern of anomalous vote results _predominantly benefitting the right wing_, as described in the 2014 book _Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century_.

RECENT HISTORY OF EARLY PRIMARY RIGGING

_Iowa Caucus 2012:_

In the 2012 Iowa caucus, Mitt Romney, the favored candidate of the Republican Party’s business elite, was declared the winner after a party-controlled vote count.

However, the true winner turned out to be Rick Santorum, an establishment outsider but the favorite of the party’s evangelical and far-right wings.

Romney actually received fewer votes than were posted online by the state GOP, enough to swing the election. The wrong number was exposed by precinct vote counter Edward True. His protest garnered media attention and ultimately overturned the results, but it was too late for Santorum; Romney’s momentum coming out of Iowa made him the “man to beat” going into New Hampshire.

The right-wing libertarian citizen group Watch the Vote was involved in overturning the Iowa caucus results, and was not convinced it was purely human error. They pledge to keep their eye on Iowa in 2016, stating on their website:

  Clearly … the Iowa GOP will be trying to cheat Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee. They will be trying to make Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich “win” or “do well” … but we will be focusing on getting a fair count for everyone.

_South Carolina 2010:_

South Carolina’s bizarre and clearly fraudulent US Senate race in 2010 is the subject of a new documentary on rigged elections, _I Voted?_

The winner, Tea Party-supported Christian evangelical Jim DeMint, won by a landslide thanks to his implausible Democratic opponent, Alvin Greene, whom it seems was served up by the Democratic primary as the ultimate fail-safe opponent.

Greene, described by the press as “incoherent,” was unemployed, accused of a sex offense and living in his father’s basement. He had run no visible campaign, posted not one yard sign, appeared at no Democratic events and couldn’t even explain where he got the $10,400 needed to file as a candidate.

Yet that same Greene had miraculously flayed his opponent in the Democratic primary, a respected former judge, four-term state legislator and National Guardsman, Vic Rawl, by a whopping 18 percent margin.

Voters and campaign workers reported that the ES&S iVotronic Touchscreen voting machines “flipped” votes to Greene all day long.

A glaring 10 percent pro-Rawl disparity was found between the paper absentee ballots, which were hand-counted, and electronic votes counted by the secretly programmed machines.

Rawl’s formal protest and request for a new primary was denied by the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Cynics have attributed this to surreptitious support for DeMint from evangelical Democrats.

However, a disinterest in pursuing justice for candidates whose election might have been stolen has become common practice for the Democratic establishment.

Perhaps, fearing to discourage voters with ugly talk of election rigging, Democratic Party wisdom has consistently valued getting out the vote as a priority over ensuring those votes are actually counted.

_New Hampshire 2008:_

In 2008, election experts, candidates and conspiracy theorists questioned the vote results for both parties, particularly Hillary Clinton’s victory.

In the GOP primary, for example, the campaign for popular libertarian crusader Ron Paul found these discrepancies between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted results to be a red flag:

-   Mitt Romney, Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan: 33.075 percent
-   Mitt Romney, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots: 25.483 percent
-   Ron Paul, Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan: 7.109 percent
-   Ron Paul, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots: 9.221 percent

Again in 2012, Paul’s supporters made a strong case that he was being systemically and egregiously rigged out in the primaries by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and widely broadcast their accusations. Their protest had merit; the RNC apparently even went so far as to change the rules of the nomination process in midstream to block Paul.

In 2008, establishment candidate Clinton was pitted against insurgent Barack Obama, who had won in Iowa and was clearly leading in New Hampshire by a wide margin in pre-election polls, as well as in the exit polls on election night.

Yet the final Democratic results showed a 10 percent variation from the polls, every one of which had Obama winning for an overall average lead of 8.3 percent. But Clinton won by 2.6 percent, unaccountably gaining 10 points overnight.

[New Hampshire Democratic Primary 2008.]New Hampshire Democratic Primary 2008.

A range of professional pre-election polls had been fairly spot-on in their predictions for all other candidates in the same race but had mysteriously miscalled the numbers for Clinton and Obama.

Again, the hand-counted paper ballot results favored Obama, while Clinton won in the districts where electronic voting machines secretly counted ballots.

-   Clinton: statewide optical scan tally: 52.73 percent
-   Obama: statewide optical scan tally: 47.27 percent
-   Clinton: statewide hand-count tally: 46.75 percent
-   Obama: statewide hand-count tally: 53.25 percent

Of course, conspiracy theories proliferated in the void where a public, transparent election should have occurred.

Hillary Clinton’s upset win was imagined by some as a fix perpetrated by rogue elements among her more conservative New Hampshire Democratic backers. Others pointed the finger at Republican operatives who they believe may have orchestrated her victory, judging Obama the stronger horse against Romney (or any other GOP candidate).

As it happens, the Premier Voting Machine company, which controlled over three-quarters of the New Hampshire primary, was actually the same Republican-friendly Diebold Voting Machine Company involved in the controversial upset victory by President George W. Bush over John Kerry in Ohio in 2004. (The company had just switched names.)

Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell, who had publicly pledged to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004, was later mired in widespread accusations of a conspiracy to rig out Kerry late on election night in Ohio. Top cyber-security experts charged that Karl Rove’s online vote-gathering apparatus used a “man in the middle” hack to alter the results, in collusion with the ultra partisan Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush.

The man who built the vote-tabulating system, GOP tech guru Michael Connell, died in a suspicious private plane crash after being subpoenaed and then compelled to testify against Rove. Two election officials were eventually convicted of rigging the Ohio recount.

Programming the counting for the 2008 New Hampshire primary was a little known company called LHS Associates, which used the same infamous GEMS software long proven to be easily manipulated by insiders to alter the outcome of the election and _produce a matching, fraudulent poll tape report_.

And the New Hampshire election officials knew. Computer expert Harri Hursti publicly demonstrated this fraud capacity to the New Hampshire State House Subcommittee on Election Equipment before the 2008 primary. The officials chose to use the fraudulent software anyway.

According to the Election Defense Alliance, had New Hampshire simply chosen to count a 10 percent sample of their ballots in precinct on election night, they could have avoided the need to recount all the Republican and more than half of the Democratic primary ballots by hand a week later, “in adversarial circumstances, and under a cloud of suspicion about chain of custody and the legitimacy of secret vote counting.”

HOW TO PROTECT THE 2016 PRIMARIES

In two of the three early primaries, some steps can be taken to deter or detect fraud.

_Iowa 2016:_

Monitoring the vote count at the Iowa caucus is essential as the parties are piloting a new online cloud-based app for reporting results.

Any new electronic voting system carries a risk of error or malfunction, and online reporting offers the opportunity for rigging the results _en route_ if not carefully compared to the original vote counts at the precinct.

Iowa voters can ensure their votes don’t get lost (or rigged) in the cloud by having many eyes on the ground at the precincts. Take pictures of how many people are present and get a physical count at each location. Use cell phones, video, pen and paper, anything to record the original precinct vote totals, and verify that they match the reported results.

_New Hampshire 2016:_

According to Verified Voting, New Hampshire widely uses the AccuVote-OS optical scanner to count paper ballots. Security concerns listed include quick-to-pick locks, “sensitive” memory cards, and easily introduced viruses causing the server to crash and falsify votes.

But New Hampshire is one of the rare states where hand counting is still a choice available to all towns and cities. Combined with a minimal 10 percent audit of the AccuVote-tallied ballots, machine fraud is likely to be detected or even deterred – but voters would have to demand it.

_South Carolina 2016:_

South Carolina continues to use the infamously riggable ES&S iVotronic Touchscreens, which produce no ballot or paper receipt, and cannot be audited. iVotronic machines were used to rig elections by a conspiracy of government insiders and election officials convicted in Kentucky in 2010, just one example out of many in which these machines were involved in fraud.

Some of the iVotronic machines that will be used in the primary are possibly the same physical machines that were used in Florida’s highly contested Congressional District 13 race for the US Congress in 2006, when they inexplicably lost some 18,000 votes. After that election, Florida sent many of their faulty voting machines to the landfill. Others were sold to the State of South Carolina.

In sum, the 2016 primary in South Carolina cannot be protected. Democracy advocates in the Palmetto State have little recourse except to make these 100 percent non-verifiable systems illegal for future elections.

The good news is that voting machines are failing nationwide, 14 years after states bought most of them with $3.9 billion from the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Most counties no longer have HAVA funds to replace their aged and malfunctioning machines. Citizens now have the chance to examine their voting systems anew, hopefully with the will not to repeat past mistakes.

Concerned voters and public officials should form task forces in every state and election jurisdiction to push for reforms that secure our elections. Only publicly controlled, transparent vote counting fulfills the conditions of democracy – if democracy is what we want.

_Visit the National Election Defense Coalition’s website to learn more about how to reform our elections process._

question: What is the author concerned about?

answer: Vote-rigging behaviors.

question: Who are the anti-establishment candidates in 2016?

answer: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

question: Which elections are often rigged in the United States?

answer: The primaries.

question: Whose candidacy is flailing?

answer: Jeb Bush.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The article discusses rigging of the US elections and how 2016 may turn out differently than elections in the past. It mentions that the electoral system is vulnerable to outside interference, discusses how the primaries are often rigged, and goes over the non-establishment candidates.


text:
Derrick Rose and his sore right hamstring will be a gametime decision Tuesday night in Miami, while Jimmy Butler appears close to a comeback from a strained left knee.

Butler was on the Advocate Center floor doing a light workout with coaches when the media was let in after practice Monday.

He won’t go on the Bulls’ two-game Florida road trip, but we’re getting close to the one month timeline after he hurt his knee in Denver on Feb. 5. Butler worked out before practice, as did forward Nikola Mirotic, who had a surgery mishap after an appendectomy in January. There is no timeline for Mirotic’s return, but he said previously it will be in the regular season.

“Jimmy is going to get some workouts in, play some one-on-one and two-on-two while he’s back here,” Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg said Monday. “And then when we get back the plan is for him to hopefully practice with us and test it and see how he’s...

question: What happened to Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler?

answer: Rose has a sore right hamstring and Butler is recovering from a strained left knee.

question: How is Jimmy Butler's recovery?

answer: He was seen by the media during a light workout with the coaches and appears close to a comeback.

question: When did Butler hurt his knee?

answer: In a game vs Denver on February 5th.

question: What is head coach Fred Hoiberg's plan for Butler?

answer: He wants Butler to work out, play one-on-one and two-on-two. Then he will rejoin practice and hopefully get back into the rotation.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: Jimmy Butler and Derrick Rose are out for the game against the Miami Heat, Rose with a sore right hamstring and Butler recovering with a strained left knee. Butler was seen working out with the coaches before the game and is on the brink of recovery. The plan is for him to participate in workouts and exercises and when he gets healthy enough to practice with the team again, head coach Fred Hoiberg is hopeful he can return to gameplay.


text:
When physicists discovered High Amplitude Luminous Orbs surrounding the heads of all human beings, they wondered why some peoples’ HALOs were stronger than others’ and what caused their intensities to change over time. Using a visual filter, the phenomenon could be seen on a spectrum of intensities, from dim grey to bright gold. This allowed social scientists to establish links between HALO intensity and behavior. For instance, field studies found that visiting the elderly, giving to beggars, or attending religious services typically increased the intensity, while frequenting casinos, bars, or brothels (in the Las Vegas area) generally reduced it. After such findings, the brightness of one’s HALO came to be widely regarded as proof of a person’s moral goodness or iniquity.

HALO viewing devices began selling quickly to the concerned or the curious. Wedding engagements were broken, children got grounded, and the scrupulous checked their HALOs several times a day. Supermarket tabloids published celebrities’ before-and-after photos with captions like, “*What did she do last night,*” while other media had exposés on the darkness of conservative politicians and church leaders. Religious believers, particularly Christians, were statistically shown to have stronger HALOs, however the Supreme Court ruled (5 to 4) that it was not religious discrimination to consider HALO intensity in hiring since agnostics and atheists sometimes had bright HALOs as well. Finally, the Congress, with widespread support, moved to make it a crime “to scan or view others using HALO detecting devices without their consent, or to discriminate against anyone for refusing consent,” condemning such practices as an “invasion of privacy” and the cause of “baseless prejudices based upon unproven technology.” The president signed the bill into law in a closed-door ceremony.

title: The Halo Effect [281 words]

question: Explain why HALO viewing devices are popular?

answer: It is sold to the concerned and the curious. Probably to safeguard yourself and your life against iniquity.

question: In what time period does the story take place?

answer: The Supreme Court, Congress and the President are all still functional, it should be a time period close to the present day.

question: Why would the President sign the bill behind closed doors?

answer: To ensure that his HALO cannot be viewed.

question: Explain why the HALO viewing devices had such a profound impact on the world.

answer: The suggestion from the text is that it can safeguard yourself and your life against iniquity.

question: What is the link between religion and the HALO?

answer: A person's HALO glows brighter when doing certain acts, e.g.  visiting the elderly, giving to beggars, or attending religious services. Whereas frequenting casinos, bars, or brothels reduced its brightness.

question: Write a ~4 sentence summary.

answer: Physicists find High Amplitude Luminous Orbs (HALO's) surrounding the heads of all human beings. Various studies fuels the popular notion that the brightness of a HALO is an indication of a person's moral uprightness. A viewing device is made available to the public that is used extensively and unfairly. Various levels of government take action to prevent the use of these devices including the President.


text:
MARCO WERMAN is an American radio personality. He is a host, reporter and senior producer in public radio.

Biography and background

Werman is the host of Public Radio International's _The World_. He took over as full-time host of the program on January 1, 2013 after years as fill-in host and producer of the Global Hit music segment.[1] Werman has been working in journalism since he was 16 when he worked as a copy boy at the _News and Observer_ in Raleigh, North Carolina. His journalism experience includes documentary photography, print, radio and television. A returned Peace Corps volunteer and a lifelong surfer,[2] Werman got his start in radio while freelancing in Burkina Faso, West Africa, for the BBC World Service, where he later worked as a producer.[3] “Radio impressed me in Africa,” says Werman. “Everyone had one, broadcasts happened in many languages, and in the two coups I witnessed, the radio station was important booty: it and the electrical generator were always the first targets.”

In 1990, he started a new public radio station in the Adirondacks in New York, where he hosted a daily two-hour news and public affairs show for four years. This was followed by a half year stint in Rome, Italy, where he was the correspondent for Monitor Radio. In 1995, he was invited to assist in creating the format for _The World_, where he has worked since. In 1997, he began producing the Global Hit segment, in which musicians and musical trends around the globe are linked and used as a lens to understand the news. This segment has also become a popular podcast as part of the PRI News podcasts.

Werman has been the recipient of awards from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for an original radio drama that he wrote; the Sony Awards for an exposé on child labor in West African gold mines; from the New York Festivals for a BBC documentary on the 1987 assassination of Burkina Faso's president; and the first annual Unity award from the Radio and Television News Directors Association for coverage of diversity issues.

In 2007, he won an Emmy for his story “Libya: Out of the Shadow” on the PBS program _Frontline/World_, about the 2006 total solar eclipse that brought thousands of tourists to Libya just after it had rejoined the community of nations. Werman was the first American television and radio journalist to go to Libya after Muammar al-Gaddafi renounced weapons of mass destruction in December 2003, a move that would lead to Libya losing its pariah state status.

Werman is also the host and a reporter for a new music series for PBS called “Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders,” which he co-created with PBS producer Stephen Talbot. The pilot aired in 2010. A new episode was broadcast on PBS in October 2012. He is also a presenter and interviewer for the PBS Arts online series, “Sound Tracks presents Quick Hits” where he has interviewed Jovanotti, Seu Jorge, Charles Bradley, Milos Karadaglic and Levon Helm.[4]

Werman is host of BBC World Service “Boston Calling”, which explores how the world looks through American eyes, and the myriad and unexpected ways that the world influences the United States.[5]

[1] http://www.pri.org/stories/fyi-from-pri/marco-werman-appointed-as-host-of-pri's-the-world.html

[2] 1

[3] PRI's The World | International news from your public radio station

[4] https://www.pbs.org/soundtracks/

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00y7fqz

title: Marco Werman

question: Summarize some interesting facts about Werman.

answer: Some interesting facts about Werman are that he won an Emmy for his story "Libya: Out of the Shadow." He was the first American television and radio journalist to go to Libya after Muammar al-Gaddafi renounced weapons of mass destruction in December 2003. Werman also hosted and reported for a new music series for PBS called "Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders". Werman has also received many awards for his work.

question: What target population would Werman be the ideal mentor for?

question: How successful was Werman as an American radio personality?

answer: Werman was quite successful as an American radio personality. He hosted a numerous amount of radio stations and was the recipient of many awards. He hosted for music series, television series, and even documentaries. Werman received an Emmy which highlighted the peak of his career. Werman also started a new public radio station on his own and slowly became linked to other podcasts around the globe.


text:
Apple dropped its FairPlay DRM system for music back in 2009, but the remaining segments of the iTunes ecosystem — apps, videos, and iBooks — still utilize versions of the copy-protection scheme. Ways to circumvent the first two have existed for some time, and now the DRM for iBooks has been cracked as well. A post on the _MobileRead_ forums first called attention to an updated version of an OS X and Windows app called Requiem, which had previously been known as a common way to strip FairPlay from iTunes movies and music. We were able to confirm that the app is indeed able to remove the DRM from iBook's ePub files, allowing them to be opened and read on multiple non-iOS devices.

Requiem already has an established cat-and-mouse relationship with Apple, with the DRM-stripping app prompting iTunes updates that stop it from working, only to be followed by additional updates to Requiem, and so forth. While some argue that users should be allowed to create unencumbered copies of digital works that they have purchased, in this case the fact remains that tampering with security mechanisms like FairPlay is a violation of the iTunes Terms and Conditions, and we have no doubt that Apple will be responding with an updated version of iTunes sooner rather than later.

question: In 2009, what did Apple drop?

answer: In 2009, Apple dropped its FairPlay DRM system for music

question: How is Requiem's relation with Apple described?

answer: It is described as an established cat and mouse relationship.

question: What is a violation of the iTunes Terms and Conditions?

answer: Tampering with security mechanisms like FairPlay is a violation of the iTunes Terms and Conditions

question: Which app can remove the DRM from iBook's ePub files?

answer: Windows Requiem

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: Apple's DRM Fairplay system for music utilizes versions of copy protection schemes. Window's app, Requiem, can strip Fairplay and there for Apple and Requiem have a complicated relationship.


text:
WINTER CLOTHES DAY, Tomb-sweeping Day and Hungry Ghost Festival are the days for people to offer sacrifice to their ancestors in China. The Winter Clothes Day falls on the first day of Lunar October.[1] October first of the lunar calendar has come into winter, thus people feel cold, which makes them miss the dead. To protect their ancestors against the cold in the netherworld, people send clothes to them,[2] which's why it is called the Winter Clothes Day. On October first, Chinese people burn clothes made of colorful papers in front of graves to their ancestors to keep them warm.[3] At the same time, the day marks the arrival of the dead of winter. Consequently, it's the day for parents and lovers to send clothes to the livings who they care about. As time goes by, the day becomes the festival for people to offer sacrifice to their ancestors.

__TOC__

Origin

Meng Jiangnu

According to a legend, the origin of the Winter Clothes Day is related to a beautiful and sad love story. In Qin Dynasty, the first emperor of Qin reunited China, and established a new country. However, he lived an extravagant and dissipated life, and recruited labors to build the Great Wall and his own mausoleum. It's said that in Qin Dynasty, there lived a family named Meng who planted a gourd in their yard.[4] The leaves and branches were so long that they stretched over the wall, and into the yard of their neighbor named Jian. Before long, the neighbor named Jiang had a giant gourd in their yard. When the gourd became mature, Meng and Jiang agreed to cut the gourd into two parts for each of them. However, when they cut it, they found an adorable girl there. Both of them love her very much.[5] After discussion, they drew a conclusion that the girl was going to be nurtured by Meng. She was named Meng Jiangnu. When Meng Jiangnu grew up, she was very famous for she's pretty, versatile and obedient. She was the apple of the two families’ eyes. One day, when Meng Jiangnu was trying to pull a fan out of a pool, a young man named Fan Xiliang passed by, and saw her.[6] He came to help her get the fan, and she thanked him. After she looked closely at the handsome youth, she chatted with him favorably. Gradually, they fell in love with each other. With their parents’ permissions, Meng Jiangnu married to Fan Xiliang.

On their wedding night, a contingent of troops broke into their house, and took Fan Xiliang away because he was recruited as a laborer by the first emperor of Qin to build the Great Wall far away.[7] After Fan Xiliang was took away, Meng Jiangnu missed him day and night with great sadness and a heavy heart. On October first, it snowed heavily outside. She thought of that her husband left without taking any warm clothes to defend against the cold when she stared at the candles and the big snowfall, so she wiped tears sadly.[8] Meng Jiangnu missed her husband so much that she had a dream. In her dream, she saw her husband standing on the Great Wall. Grabbing a spear, her husband was clothed in ragged garments in a world of ice and snow. When he fought against enemies, his head was cut off by an enemy, rolling down the Great Wall with blood everywhere. Meng Jiangnu woke up with screaming, and found it a nightmare. She strongly believed the dream meant something bad, therefore, she was determined to send clothes to him and to figure out what had happed. She made winter clothes for her husband overnight, and packed up her luggage, including her husband's winter clothes.[9] After saying goodbye to her parents, she left for the Great Wall to find her husband. Though she suffered a lot, with her determination and help from nice people, she finally reached the Great Wall which was building. Unfortunately, she was told that her husband had died of overwork and his body had buried under the Great Wall.[10] Hearing the news, she was shocked and passed out. After wind woke her up, she couldn't help bursting into crying. She beat the Great Wall hard, and called out her husband's name when she cried. She cried for a while, and then censured the first emperor of Qin Dynasty for his tyrannies. With her accusations, sharp wind blew up, and furious billows rolled and came towards the Great Wall. Suddenly, a loud noise occurred, one part of the Great Wall collapsed, and a skeleton was shown up.[11] Meng Jiangnu stayed with the skeleton and cried for seven days. Then, she burnt the winter clothes that she made for her husband. The ashes of the clothes flew upward with the wind, circled her three times, and finally covered the skeleton steadily.[12] Gradually, the legend of Meng Jiangnu sending winter clothes has evolved into a festival which people call Winter Clothes Day.

Customs

Eating glutinous rice and red beans

In southern China especially Jiangsu Province, China, people eat a bowl of glutinous rice mixed with red beans on the Winter Clothes Day to commemorate a shepherd boy who revolted against a landlord.[13] It's said that a long time ago, an adorable shepherd boy was born in a poor family. His parents couldn't support him, so he made a living by shepherding for a landlord when he was a child.[14] One day, he was so careless that he didn't take good care of the sheep, resulting in that those sheep fell into a valley and died. After hearing the news, the landlord was extremely angry. Consequently, he beat and scolded the shepherd boy constantly. The shepherd boy's begging did not stop the landlord.[15] When the shepherd boy felt that he's going to die because of being beat, he picked up a knife next to him, and killed the landlord. The blood of the shepherd boy made glutinous rice on ground become red. By coincidence, that day was October first.[16] People eat a bowl of glutinous rice mixed with red beans on the Winter Clothing Day to commemorate the shepherd boy.

Fighting a battle with pumpkins

The Bouyei nationality who live in Guizhou Province, China celebrate the Winter Clothes Day by fighting a battle with pumpkins. According to a legend, the purpose of fighting a battle with pumpkins is to please ancestors, to scare ghosts away, and to protect earth. On October first in Chinese lunar calendar, teenagers of the Bouyei nationality choose a pumpkin from their gardens, and thrust the pumpkin with a sharp bamboo pole.[17] When the ceremony of sending ancestors off is over, teenagers burn a bundle of incense and stick them into pumpkins. Once the leader of their village shouts, teenagers run to the wild, with bamboo poles held in their hands, to gather together with others from other villages.[18] When they encounter teenagers from other villages, all of them pretend to abuse each other and to fight with each other with pumpkins. Finally, singing a song, they go back to their own villages smilingly.[19]

Burning winter clothes

On the day before October first in Chinese lunar calendar, the elders lead children and grandchildren to add soils to their ancestors’ graves. The soils should be carried by their clothes rather than baskets. The more soils they added, the more populations their families would have. On October first, in patriarch's leadership, male carried foods and abundant tributes to worship ancestors’ graves, and to offer sacrifice to their ancestors.[20] After the ceremony, what's most important is to burn winter clothes made by colorful paper, including red, yellow, blue, black and purple paper. There is a popular belief in China that if you want to deliver something to the dead, you must burn it completely. Otherwise, the dead could not receive it. This belief is linked with the story of Cai Mo burnt paper.[21] The Winter Clothes Day is not only the day to deliver winter clothes to the dead, but also the day for the livings to prepare for the coming of winter. On that day, women take out winter clothes that they have made for their children and husbands, and ask them to try clothes on. Men are used clearing up fireplaces and chimneys to make sure that fireplaces and chimneys can keep the house warm when winter comes.

The Story of Cai Mo burnt paper

It's also said that burning winter clothes on the Winter Clothes Day originated from a businessman's promotion strategy. According to historical records, paper was invented by a man named Cai Lun in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD).[22] After Cai Lun invented the paper, many people came to his paper factory to purchase the paper. When Cai Lun's sister-in-law named Hui Niang found that papermaking was profitable, she persuaded her husband named Cai Mo to learn papermaking form his brother. However, her husband was not very patient.[23] He set up his own paper factory before he was skilled at making paper, leading to that no one came to his factory to buy paper because of its low quality. Hui Niang tried to help her husband get away from the trouble. Suddenly, an idea occurred to her mind. One night, she pretended to be ill and died. Her husband was extremely sad and guilty for he thought her death partly resulted from his behaviors. He blamed himself when he burnt the paper made by himself.[24] Unexpectedly, a sound coming from the coffin appeared, which scared the people in mourning hall. It was Hui Niang's voice. She said, “Open the coffin, hurry up. I have come back”.[25] When people opened the coffin, Hui Ning jumped out from it and told people, “Paper in this world becomes money in the nether world. I could not come back without my husband burning paper to me. The king of hell originally planned to torture me. Luckily, I used money to bribe him and ghosts. Then, they sent me back to earth”.[26] Then, her husband took two piles of paper to burn to his parents, hoping it could make his parents have a better life in the nether world. After witnessing the function of paper, people in mourning hall started to buy the paper from Cai Mo's paper factory to burn.[27] The story of Hui Niang spread quickly, therefore, unmarketable paper of Cai Mo's paper factory sold out within a few days. The day was October first of the lunar calendar when Hui Niang “returned back from hell”,[28] so people gradually offered sacrifice to their ancestors in front of their graves by burning paper.

Sources

-   《中国家族文化》(“《孟姜女传》与寒衣的由来”P103----P107），Author: 凯祥， Press： 百花洲文艺出版社， 2012-10.
-   《节气时令吃什么》，(“十月初一——寒衣” P187），Author：王明强，Press：江苏科学技术出版社，2013-11-01.
-   《中国传统节日趣闻与传说》，(“寒衣”，P208---P210), Author：严敬群，Press：金盾出版社，2010-08.
-   《图解民俗大全-精编美绘版》，（“关心先人的送寒衣”， P230---P231),Author：万虹， Press：内蒙古文化，2012-5-1.
-   《中国民间传说人物-哭倒长城八百里:孟姜女(双色)》，（“孟姜女哭倒‘魏长城'及‘送寒衣'的来历” P214---P130），Author：强军宏，Press：东北师大，2012-3-1.
-   《中国节日传统文化读本（珍藏版）》，(“寒衣的习俗”P268---P269),Author:严敬群 ，Press:东方出版社，2009-11.
-   《最后的风景》，(“哀哀寒衣 ”，P149---P151），Author：金光 ， Press：大众文艺出版社，2009-04.
-   《中华民俗常识一本通》，(“送寒衣”，P45),Author:张建霞，Press:中国三峡出版社，2011-11.

[1] 《中国传统节日趣闻与传说》(2010-08).“寒衣”(P208---P210） [http://book.duxiu.com/search?sw=%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E8%8A%82%E6%97%A5%E4%BC%A0%E7%BB%9F%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E8%AF%BB%E6%9C%AC&allsw=&searchtype=1&channel=search&bCon=&ecode=utf-8&Field=all.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[2] 《图解民俗大全-精编美绘版》(2012-5-1).“关心先人的送寒衣”( P230---P231)[http://book.duxiu.com/bookDetail.jsp?dxNumber=000008316611&d=ADA167B1A8BA0D42B1B839893E59C631&fenlei=111103&sw=%E3%80%8A%E5%9B%BE%E8%A7%A3%E6%B0%91%E4%BF%97%E5%A4%A7%E5%85%A8-%E7%B2%BE%E7%BC%96%E7%BE%8E%E7%BB%98%E7%89%88.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[3]

[4] 《中国家族文化》(2012-10).“《孟姜女传》与寒衣的由来”（P103----P107）[http://book.duxiu.com/bookDetail.jsp?dxNumber=000006824339&d=9C0629919B6BF25B6EA519CBE1C6DA43&fenlei=11090304&sw=%E3%80%8A%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E5%AE%B6%E6%97%8F%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E3%80%8B.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[5] 《中国民间传说人物-哭倒长城八百里:孟姜女(双色)》(2012-3-1).“孟姜女哭倒‘魏长城'及‘送寒衣'的来历” (P214---P130)[http://book.duxiu.com/bookDetail.jsp?dxNumber=000008283470&d=70F167D0786325058B83417D844A1F22&fenlei=09030307&sw=%E3%80%8A%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E6%B0%91%E9%97%B4%E4%BC%A0%E8%AF%B4%E4%BA%BA%E7%89%A9-%E5%93%AD%E5%80%92%E9%95%BF%E5%9F%8E%E5%85%AB%E7%99%BE%E9%87%8C%3A%E5%AD%9F%E5%A7%9C%E5%A5%B3.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10] 《最后的风景》(2009-04).“哀哀寒衣 ”(P149---P151)[http://book.duxiu.com/bookDetail.jsp?dxNumber=000006858483&d=C96C33C0A489F9F1C072D9E220AEEA7E&fenlei=09031103&sw=%E3%80%8A%E6%9C%80%E5%90%8E%E7%9A%84%E9%A3%8E%E6%99%AF%E3%80%8B.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[11]

[12] 《中华民俗常识一本通》(2011-11).“送寒衣”(P45)[http://book.duxiu.com/search?sw=%E4%B8%AD%E5%8D%8E%E6%B0%91%E4%BF%97%E5%B8%B8%E8%AF%86%E4%B8%80%E6%9C%AC%E9%80%9A&allsw=&searchtype=1&channel=search&bCon=&ecode=utf-8&Field=all.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[13]

[14] 《节气时令吃什么》(2013-11-01).“十月初一——寒衣”( P187)[http://book.duxiu.com/bookDetail.jsp?dxNumber=000012776910&d=74879555AA0A99844B47C39A369AFF89&fenlei=1605050401&sw=%E3%80%8A%E8%8A%82%E6%B0%94%E6%97%B6%E4%BB%A4%E5%90%83%E4%BB%80%E4%B9%88%E3%80%8B.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[15]

[16]

[17] 《中国节日传统文化读本（珍藏版）》(2009-11).“寒衣的习俗”(P268---P269)[http://book.duxiu.com/search?sw=%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E8%8A%82%E6%97%A5%E4%BC%A0%E7%BB%9F%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E8%AF%BB%E6%9C%AC&allsw=&searchtype=1&channel=search&bCon=&ecode=utf-8&Field=all.] Accessed 20 Dec. 2016

[18]

[19]

[20]

[21]

[22]

[23]

[24]

[25]

[26]

[27]

[28]

title: Winter Clothes Day

question: What is the "Winter Clothes Day" for?

answer: The Winter Clothes Day is celebrated by the people to protect their ancestors from the cold in the netherworld.

question: When is "Winter Clothes Day" celebrated?

answer: It is celebrated on the first day of Lunar October.

question: Which legend is the Winter Clothes Day related to?

answer: It is believed the origin of the day is related to a beautiful and sad love story.

question: What do people in China's Jiangsu Province do on this day?

answer: They eat a bowl of glutinous rice mixed with red beans.

question: Write a ~6 sentence summary.

answer:
In China, the Winter Clothes Day is when people offer sacrifice to their ancestors. Legends say the origin of the Day is related to a beautiful and sad love story in the Qin Dynasty. It is celebrated on the first day of Lunar October.

In the Jiangsu Province, people eat a bowl of glutinous rice mixed with red beans. While in the Guizhou Province, they celebrate by fighting a battle with pumpkins. It is also believed in some places that the Day originated as a businessman's promotion strategy.


text:
Posts Tagged: tax refund fraud

A Little Sunshine / Ne'er-Do-Well News — 67 Comments
27
Aug 20

Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part II

Yesterday’s piece told the tale of HIEU MINH NGO, a hacker the U.S. SECRET SERVICE described as someone who caused more material financial harm to more Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal. Ngo was recently deported back to his home country after serving more than seven years in prison for running multiple identity theft services. He now says he wants to use his experience to convince other cybercriminals to use their skills for good. Here’s a look at what happened after he got busted.

[]

Hieu Minh Ngo, 29, in a recent photo.

Part I of this series ended with Ngo in handcuffs after disembarking a flight from his native Vietnam to Guam, where he believed he was going to meet another cybercriminal who’d promised to hook him up with the mother of all consumer data caches.

Ngo had been making more than $125,000 a month reselling ill-gotten access to some of the biggest data brokers on the planet. But the Secret Service discovered his various accounts at these data brokers and had them shut down one by one. Ngo became obsessed with restarting his business and maintaining his previous income. By this time, his ID theft services had earned roughly USD $3 million.

As this was going on, Secret Service agents used an intermediary to trick Ngo into thinking he’d trodden on the turf of another cybercriminal. From Part I:

  The Secret Service contacted Ngo through an intermediary in the United Kingdom — a known, convicted cybercriminal who agreed to play along. The U.K.-based collaborator told Ngo he had personally shut down Ngo’s access to Experian because he had been there first and Ngo was interfering with his business.

  “The U.K. guy told Ngo, ‘Hey, you’re treading on my turf, and I decided to lock you out. But as long as you’re paying a vig through me, your access won’t go away’,” the Secret Service’s MATT O’NEILL recalled.

  After several months of conversing with his apparent U.K.-based tormentor, Ngo agreed to meet him in Guam to finalize the deal. But immediately after stepping off of the plane in Guam, he was apprehended by Secret Service agents.

  “One of the names of his identity theft services was findget[.]me,” O’Neill said. “We took that seriously, and we did like he asked.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Ngo said he spent about two months in a Guam jail awaiting transfer to the United States. A month passed before he was allowed a 10 minute phone call to his family and explain what he’d gotten himself into.

“This was a very tough time,” Ngo said. “They were so sad and they were crying a lot.”

First stop on his prosecution tour was New Jersey, where he ultimately pleaded guilty to hacking into MICROBILT, the first of several data brokers whose consumer databases would power different iterations of his identity theft service over the years.

Next came New Hampshire, where another guilty plea forced him to testify in three different trials against identity thieves who had used his services for years. Among them was Lance Ealy, a serial ID thief from Dayton, Ohio who used Ngo’s service to purchase more than 350 “FULLZ” — a term used to describe a package of everything one would need to steal someone’s identity, including their Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, birth date, address, phone number, email address, bank account information and passwords.

Ealy used Ngo’s service primarily to conduct tax refund fraud with the U.S. INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE (IRS), claiming huge refunds in the names of ID theft victims who first learned of the fraud when they went to file their taxes and found someone else had beat them to it.

Ngo’s cooperation with the government ultimately led to 20 arrests, with a dozen of those defendants lured into the open by O’Neill and other Secret Service agents posing as Ngo.

The Secret Service had difficulty pinning down the exact amount of financial damage inflicted by Ngo’s various ID theft services over the years, primarily because those services only kept records of what customers searched for — not which records they purchased.

But based on the records they did have, the government estimated that Ngo’s service enabled approximately $1.1 billion in new account fraud at banks and retailers throughout the United States, and roughly $64 million in tax refund fraud with the states and the IRS.

“We interviewed a number of Ngo’s customers, who were pretty open about why they were using his services,” O’Neill said. “Many of them told us the same thing: Buying identities was so much better for them than stolen payment card data, because card data could be used once or twice before it was no good to them anymore. But identities could be used over and over again for years.”

O’Neill said he still marvels at the fact that Ngo’s name is practically unknown when compared to the world’s most infamous credit card thieves, some of whom were responsible for stealing hundreds of millions of cards from big box retail merchants.

“I don’t know of anyone who has come close to causing more material harm than Ngo did to the average American,” O’Neill said. “But most people have probably never heard of him.”

Ngo said he wasn’t surprised that his services were responsible for so much financial damage. But he was utterly unprepared to hear about the human toll. Throughout the court proceedings, Ngo sat through story after dreadful story of how his work had ruined the financial lives of people harmed by his services.

“When I was running the service, I didn’t really care because I didn’t know my customers and I didn’t know much about what they were doing with it,” Ngo said. “But during my case, the federal court received like 13,000 letters from victims who complained they lost their houses, jobs, or could no longer afford to buy a home or maintain their financial life because of me. That made me feel really bad, and I realized I’d been a terrible person.”

Even as he bounced from one federal detention facility to the next, Ngo always seemed to encounter ID theft victims wherever he went, including prison guards, healthcare workers and counselors.

“When I was in jail at Beaumont, Texas I talked to one of the correctional officers there who shared with me a story about her friend who lost her identity and then lost everything after that,” Ngo recalled. “Her whole life fell apart. I don’t know if that lady was one of my victims, but that story made me feel sick. I know now that what I was doing was just evil.”

[]

Ngo’s former ID theft service usearching[.]info.

_Continue reading →_

Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm — 304 Comments
10
Apr 20

New IRS Site Could Make it Easy for Thieves to Intercept Some Stimulus Payments

The U.S. federal government is now in the process of sending ECONOMIC IMPACT PAYMENTS by direct deposit to millions of Americans. Most who are eligible for payments can expect to have funds direct-deposited into the same bank accounts listed on previous years’ tax filings sometime next week. Today, the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE (IRS) stood up a site to collect bank account information from the many Americans who don’t usually file a tax return. The question is, will those non-filers have a chance to claim their payments before fraudsters do?

[]

The IRS says the Economic Impact Payment will be $1,200 for individual or head of household filers, and $2,400 for married filing jointly if they are not a dependent of another taxpayer and have a work eligible Social Security number with adjusted gross income up to:

-   $75,000 for individuals
-   $112,500 for head of household filers and
-   $150,000 for married couples filing joint returns

Taxpayers with higher incomes will receive more modest payments (reduced by $5 for each $100 above the $75,000/$112,500/$150,000 thresholds). Most people who who filed a tax return in 2018 and/or 2019 and provided their bank account information for a debit or credit should soon see an Economic Impact Payment direct-deposited into their bank accounts. Likewise, people drawing Social Security payments from the government will receive stimulus payments the same way.

But there are millions of U.S. residents — including low-income workers and certain veterans and individuals with disabilities — who aren’t required to file a tax return but who are still eligible to receive at least a $1,200 stimulus payment. And earlier today, the IRS unveiled a Web site where it is asking those non-filers to provide their bank account information for direct deposits.

However, the possibility that fraudsters may intercept payments to these individuals seems very real, given the relatively lax identification requirements of this non-filer portal and the high incidence of tax refund fraud in years past. Each year, scam artists file phony tax refund requests on millions of Americans, regardless of whether or not the impersonated taxpayer is actually due a refund. In most cases, the victim only finds out when he or she goes to file their taxes and has the return rejected because it has already been filed by scammers.

In this case, fraudsters would simply need to identify the personal information for a pool of Americans who don’t normally file tax returns, which may well include a large number of people who are disabled, poor or simply do not have easy access to a computer or the Internet. Armed with this information, the scammers need only provide the target’s name, address, date of birth and Social Security number, and then supply their own bank account information to claim at least $1,200 in electronic payments.

[]

Page 1 of 2 in the IRS stimulus payment application page for non-filers.

Unfortunately, SSN and DOB data is not secret, nor is it hard to come by. As noted in countless stories here, there are multiple shops in the cybercrime underground that sell SSN and DOB data on tens of millions of Americans for a few dollars per record.

A review of the Web site set up to accept bank account information for the stimulus payments reveals few other mandatory identity checks to complete the filing process. It appears that all applicants need to provide a mobile phone number and verify they can receive text messages at that number, but beyond that the rest of the identity checks seem to be optional. _Continue reading →_

A Little Sunshine / Data Breaches / Tax Refund Fraud — 34 Comments
19
Jul 18

Human Resources Firm ComplyRight Breached

Cloud-based human resources company COMPLYRIGHT said this week that a security breach of its Web site may have jeopardized sensitive consumer information — including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers — from tax forms submitted by the company’s thousands of clients on behalf of employees.

Pompano Beach, Fla-based ComplyRight began mailing breach notification letters to affected consumers late last week, but the form letters are extremely vague about the scope and cause of the breach. Indeed, many readers who received these letters wrote to KrebsOnSecurity asking for more information, as the company hadn’t yet published any details about the breach on its Web site. Also, most of those folks said they’d never heard of ComplyRight and could not remember ever doing business with a company by that name.

[]

Neither ComplyRight nor its parent company TAYLOR CORP. responded to multiple requests for comment this past week. But on Wednesday evening, ComplyRight posted additional facts about the incident on its site, saying a recently completed investigation suggests that fewer than 10 percent of individuals with tax forms prepared on the ComplyRight platform were impacted.

According to ComplyRight’s Web site, some 76,000 organizations — many of them small businesses — use its services to prepare tax forms such as 1099s and W2s on behalf of their employees and/or contractors. While the company didn’t explicitly say which of its cloud services was impacted by the breach, the Web site which handles its tax preparation business is EFILE4BIZ.COM.

ComplyRight says it learned of the breach on May 22, 2018, and that the “unauthorized access” to its site persisted between April 20, 2018 and May 22, 2018. _Continue reading →_

A Little Sunshine / DDoS-for-Hire / Tax Refund Fraud — 84 Comments
16
Apr 18

Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, FACEBOOK last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.

On Thursday, April 12, KrebsOnSecurity spent roughly two hours combing Facebook for groups whose sole purpose appeared to be flouting the company’s terms of service agreement about what types of content it will or will not tolerate on its platform.

[]

One of nearly 120 different closed cybercrime groups operating on Facebook that were deleted late last week. In total, there were more than 300,000 members of these groups. The average age of these groups was two years, but some had existed for up to nine years on Facebook

My research centered on groups whose singular focus was promoting all manner of cyber fraud, but most especially those engaged in identity theft, spamming, account takeovers and credit card fraud. Virtually all of these groups advertised their intent by stating well-known terms of fraud in their group names, such as “botnet helpdesk,” “spamming,” “carding” (referring to credit card fraud), “DDoS” (distributed denial-of-service attacks), “tax refund fraud,” and account takeovers.

Each of these closed groups solicited new members to engage in a variety of shady activities. Some had existed on Facebook for up to nine years; _approximately ten percent of them had plied their trade on the social network for more than four years_.

Here is a spreadsheet (PDF) listing all of the offending groups reported, including: Their stated group names; the length of time they were present on Facebook; the number of members; whether the group was promoting a third-party site on the dark or clear Web; and a link to the offending group. A copy of the same spreadsheet in .csv format is available here.

The biggest collection of groups banned last week were those promoting the sale and use of stolen credit and debit card accounts. The next largest collection of groups included those facilitating account takeovers — methods for mass-hacking emails and passwords for countless online accounts such AMAZON, GOOGLE, NETFLIX, PAYPAL, as well as a host of online banking services.

[]

This rather active Facebook group, which specialized in identity theft and selling stolen bank account logins, was active for roughly three years and had approximately 2,500 members.

In a statement to KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook pledged to be more proactive about policing its network for these types of groups.

“We thank Mr. Krebs for bringing these groups to our attention, we removed them as soon as we investigated,” said PETE VOSS, Facebook’s communications director. “We investigated these groups as soon as we were aware of the report, and once we confirmed that they violated our Community Standards, we disabled them and removed the group admins. We encourage our community to report anything they see that they don’t think should be in Facebook, so we can take swift action.” _Continue reading →_

A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / Tax Refund Fraud / Web Fraud 2.0 — 68 Comments
11
Apr 18

When Identity Thieves Hack Your Accountant

The INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE has been urging tax preparation firms to step up their cybersecurity efforts this year, warning that identity thieves and hackers increasingly are targeting certified public accountants (CPAs) in a bid to siphon oodles of sensitive personal and financial data on taxpayers. This is the story of a CPA in New Jersey whose compromise by malware led to identity theft and phony tax refund requests filed on behalf of his clients.

Last month, KrebsOnSecurity was alerted by security expert ALEX HOLDEN of Hold Security about a malware gang that appears to have focused on CPAs. The crooks in this case were using a Web-based keylogger that recorded every keystroke typed on the target’s machine, and periodically uploaded screenshots of whatever was being displayed on the victim’s computer screen at the time.

If you’ve never seen one of these keyloggers in action, viewing their output can be a bit unnerving. This particular malware is not terribly sophisticated, but nevertheless is quite effective. It not only grabs any data the victim submits into Web-based forms, but also captures any typing — including backspaces and typos as we can see in the screenshot below.

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The malware records everything its victims type (including backspaces and typos), and frequently takes snapshots of the victim’s computer screen.

Whoever was running this scheme had all victim information uploaded to a site that was protected from data scraping by search engines, but the site itself did not require any form of authentication to view data harvested from victim PCs. Rather, the stolen information was indexed by victim and ordered by day, meaning anyone who knew the right URL could view each day’s keylogging record as one long image file.

Those records suggest that this particular CPA — “John,” a New Jersey professional whose real name will be left out of this story — likely had his computer compromised sometime in mid-March 2018 (at least, this is as far back as the keylogging records go for John).

It’s also not clear exactly which method the thieves used to get malware on John’s machine. Screenshots for John’s account suggest he routinely ignored messages from MICROSOFT and other third party Windows programs about the need to apply critical security updates.

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Messages like this one — about critical security updates available for QuickBooks — went largely ignored, according to multiple screenshots from John’s computer.

More likely, however, John’s computer was compromised by someone who sent him a booby-trapped email attachment or link. When one considers just how frequently CPAs must need to open MICROSOFT OFFICE and other files submitted by clients and potential clients via email, it’s not hard to imagine how simple it might be for hackers to target and successfully compromise your average CPA.

The keylogging malware itself appears to have been sold (or perhaps directly deployed) by a cybercriminal who uses the nickname JA_FAR. This individual markets a $50 keylogger product alongside a malware “crypting” service that guarantees his malware will be undetected by most antivirus products for a given number of days after it is used against a victim.

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Ja_far’s sales threads for the keylogger used to steal tax and financial data from hundreds of John’s clients.

It seems likely that ja_far’s keylogger was the source of this data because at one point — early in the morning John’s time — the attacker appears to have accidentally pasted ja_far’s jabber instant messenger address into the victim’s screen instead of his own. In all likelihood, John’s assailant was seeking additional crypting services to ensure the keylogger remained undetected on John’s PC. A couple of minutes later, the intruder downloaded a file to John’s PC from file-sharing site SENDSPACE.COM.

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The attacker apparently messing around on John’s computer while John was not sitting in front of the keyboard.

What I found remarkable about John’s situation was despite receiving notice after notice that the IRS had rejected many of his clients’ tax returns because those returns had already been filed by fraudsters, for at least two weeks John does not appear to have suspected that his compromised computer was likely the source of said fraud inflicted on his clients (or if he did, he didn’t share this notion with any of his friends or family via email).

Instead, John composed and distributed to his clients a form letter about their rejected returns, and another letter that clients could use to alert the IRS and New Jersey tax authorities of suspected identity fraud. _Continue reading →_

Tax Refund Fraud — 65 Comments
19
Feb 18

IRS Scam Leverages Hacked Tax Preparers, Client Bank Accounts

Identity thieves who specialize in tax refund fraud have been busy of late hacking online accounts at multiple tax preparation firms, using them to file phony refund requests. Once the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE processes the return and deposits money into bank accounts of the hacked firms’ clients, the crooks contact those clients posing as a collection agency and demand that the money be “returned.”

In one version of the scam, criminals are pretending to be debt collection agency officials acting on behalf of the IRS. They’ll call taxpayers who’ve had fraudulent tax refunds deposited into their bank accounts, claim the refund was deposited in error, and threaten recipients with criminal charges if they fail to forward the money to the collection agency.

This is exactly what happened to a number of customers at a half dozen banks in Oklahoma earlier this month. ELAINE DODD, executive vice president of the fraud division at the Oklahoma Bankers Association, said many financial institutions in the Oklahoma City area had “a good number of customers” who had large sums deposited into their bank accounts at the same time.

Dodd said the bank customers received hefty deposits into their accounts from the U.S. TREASURY, and shortly thereafter were contacted by phone by someone claiming to be a collections agent for a firm calling itself DEBTCREDIT and using the Web site name DEBTCREDIT[DOT]US.

“We’re having customers getting refunds they have not applied for,” Dodd said, noting that the transfers were traced back to a local tax preparer who’d apparently gotten phished or hacked. Those banks are now working with affected customers to close the accounts and open new ones, Dodd said. “If the crooks have breached a tax preparer and can send money to the client, they can sure enough pull money out of those accounts, too.”

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Several of the Oklahoma bank’s clients received customized notices from a phony company claiming to be a collections agency hired by the IRS.

The domain debtcredit[dot]us hasn’t been active for some time, but an exact copy of the site to which the bank’s clients were referred by the phony collection agency can be found at JCDEBT[DOT]COM — a domain that was registered less than a month ago. The site purports to be associated with a company in New Jersey called DEBT & CREDIT CONSULTING SERVICES, but according to a record (PDF) retrieved from the New Jersey Secretary of State’s office, that company’s business license was revoked in 2010.

“You may be puzzled by an erroneous payment from the Internal Revenue Service but in fact it is quite an ordinary situation,” reads the HTML page shared with people who received the fraudulent IRS refunds. It includes a video explaining the matter, and references a case number, the amount and date of the transaction, and provides a list of personal “data reported by the IRS,” including the recipient’s name, Social Security Number (SSN), address, bank name, bank routing number and account number.

All of these details no doubt are included to make the scheme look official; most recipients will never suspect that they received the bank transfer because their accounting firm got hacked.

The scammers even supposedly assign the recipients an individual “appointed debt collector,” complete with a picture of the employee, her name, telephone number and email address. However, the emails to the domain used in the email address from the screenshot above (debtcredit[dot]com) bounced, and no one answers at the provided telephone number.

Along with the Web page listing the recipient’s personal and bank account information, each recipient is given a “transaction error correction letter” with IRS letterhead (see image below) that includes many of the same personal and financial details on the HTML page. It also gives the recipient instructions on the account number, ACH routing and wire number to which the wayward funds are to be wired.

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A phony letter from the IRS instructing recipients on how and where to wire the money that was deposited into their bank account as a result of a fraudulent tax refund request filed in their name.

_Continue reading →_

Tax Refund Fraud — 53 Comments
24
Nov 17

Name+DOB+SSN=FAFSA Data Gold Mine

KrebsOnSecurity has sought to call attention to online services which expose sensitive consumer data if the user knows a handful of static details about a person that are broadly for sale in the cybercrime underground, such as name, date of birth, and Social Security Number. Perhaps the most eye-opening example of this is on display at FAFSA.ED.GOV, the Web site set up by the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION for anyone interested in applying for federal student financial aid.

UPDATE, NOV. 28, 12:34 P.M. ET: The Education Department says not all of the data elements mentioned below are accessible on a FAFSA applicant if someone merely knows the static details about that person. Read on for their response to this story.

_Original story:_

Short for the FREE APPLICATION FOR FEDERAL STUDENT AID, FAFSA is an extremely lengthy and detailed form required at all colleges that accept and award federal aid to students.

Visitors to the login page for FAFSA have two options: Enter either the student’s FSA ID and password, or choose “enter the student’s information.” Selecting the latter brings up a prompt to enter the student’s first and last name, followed by their date of birth and Social Security Number.

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Anyone who successfully supplies that information on a student who has applied for financial aid through FAFSA then gets to see a virtual colonoscopy of personal information on that individual and their family’s finances — including almost 200 different data elements.

The information returned includes all of these data fields:

1. Student’s Last Name:
2. Student’s First Name:
3. Student’s Middle Initial:
4. Student’s Permanent Mailing Address:
5. Student’s Permanent City:
6. Student’s Permanent State:
7. Student’s Permanent ZIP Code:
8. Student’s Social Security Number:
9. Student’s Date of Birth:
10. Student’s Telephone Number:
11. Student’s Driver’s License Number:
12. Student’s Driver’s License State:
13. Student’s E-mail Address:
14. Student’s Citizenship Status:
15. Student’s Alien Registration Number:
16. Student’s Marital Status:
17. Student’s Marital Status Date:
18. Student’s State of Legal Residence:
19. Was Student a Legal Resident Before January 1, 2012?
20. Student’s Legal Residence Date:
21. Is the Student Male or Female?
22. Register Student With Selective Service System?
23. Drug Conviction Affecting Eligibility?
24. Parent 1 Educational Level:
25. Parent 2 Educational Level:
26. High School or Equivalent Completed?
27a. Student’s High School Name:
27b. Student’s High School City:
27c. Student’s High School State:
28. First Bachelor’s Degree before 2017-2018 School Year?
29. Student’s Grade Level in College in 2017-2018:
30. Type of Degree/Certificate:
31. Interested in Work-study?
32. Student Filed 2015 Income Tax Return?
33. Student’s Type of 2015 Tax Form Used:
34. Student’s 2015 Tax Return Filing Status:
35. Student Eligible to File a 1040A or 1040EZ?
36. Student’s 2015 Adjusted Gross Income:
37. Student’s 2015 U.S. Income Tax Paid:
38. Student’s 2015 Exemptions Claimed:
39. Student’s 2015 Income Earned from Work:
40. Spouse’s 2015 Income Earned from Work:
41. Student’s Total of Cash, Savings, and Checking Accounts:
42. Student’s Net Worth of Current Investments:
43. Student’s Net Worth of Businesses/Investment Farms:
44a. Student’s Education Credits:
44b. Student’s Child Support Paid:
44c. Student’s Taxable Earnings from Need-Based Employment Programs:
44d. Student’s College Grant and Scholarship Aid Reported in AGI:
44e. Student’s Taxable Combat Pay Reported in AGI:
44f. Student’s Cooperative Education Earnings:
45a. Student’s Payments to Tax-Deferred Pensions & Retirement Savings:
45b. Student’s Deductible Payments to IRA/Keogh/Other:
45c. Student’s Child Support Received:
45d. Student’s Tax Exempt Interest Income:
45e. Student’s Untaxed Portions of IRA Distributions:
45f. Student’s Untaxed Portions of Pensions:
45g. Student’s Housing, Food, & Living Allowances:
45h. Student’s Veterans Noneducation Benefits:
45i. Student’s Other Untaxed Income or Benefits:
45j. Money Received or Paid on Student’s Behalf:
46. Student Born Before January 1, 1994?
47. Is Student Married?
48. Working on Master’s or Doctorate in 2017-2018?
49. Is Student on Active Duty in U.S. Armed Forces?
50. Is Student a Veteran?
51. Does Student Have Children He/She Supports?
52. Does Student Have Dependents Other than Children/Spouse?
53. Parents Deceased?/Student Ward of Court?/In Foster Care?
54. Is or Was Student an Emancipated Minor?
55. Is or Was Student in Legal Guardianship?
56. Is Student an Unaccompanied Homeless Youth as Determined by High School/Homeless Liaison?
57. Is Student an Unaccompanied Homeless Youth as Determined by HUD?
58. Is Student an Unaccompanied Homeless Youth as Determined by Director of Homeless Youth Center?
59. Parents’ Marital Status:
60. Parents’ Marital Status Date:
61. Parent 1 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) Social Security Number:
62. Parent 1 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) Last Name:
63. Parent 1 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) First Name Initial:
64. Parent 1 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) Date of Birth:
65. Parent 2 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) Social Security Number:
66. Parent 2 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) Last Name:
67. Parent 2 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) First Name Initial:
68. Parent 2 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) Date of Birth:
69. Parents’ E-mail Address:
70. Parents’ State of Legal Residence:
71. Were Parents Legal Residents Before January 1, 2012?
72. Parents’ Legal Residence Date:
73. Parents’ Number of Family Members in 2017-2018:
74. Parents’ Number in College in 2017-2018 (Parents Excluded):
75. Parents Received Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income?
76. Parents Received SNAP?
77. Parents Received Free/Reduced Price Lunch?
78. Parents Received TANF?
79. Parents Received WIC?
80. Parents Filed 2015 Income Tax Return?
81. Parents’ Type of 2015 Tax Form Used:
82. Parents’ 2015 Tax Return Filing Status:
83. Parents Eligible to File a 1040A or 1040EZ?
84. Is Parent a Dislocated Worker?
85. Parents’ 2015 Adjusted Gross Income:
86. Parents’ 2015 U.S. Income Tax Paid:
87. Parents’ 2015 Exemptions Claimed:
88. Parent 1 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) 2015 Income Earned from Work:
89. Parent 2 (Father’s/Mother’s/Stepparent’s) 2015 Income Earned from Work:
90. Parents’ Total of Cash, Savings, and Checking Accounts:
91. Parents’ Net Worth of Current Investments:
92. Parents’ Net Worth of Businesses/Investment Farms:
93a. Parents’ Education Credits:
93b. Parents’ Child Support Paid:
93c. Parents’ Taxable Earnings from Need-Based Employment Programs:
93d. Parents’ College Grant and Scholarship Aid Reported in AGI:
93e. Parents’ Taxable Combat Pay Reported in AGI:
93f. Parents’ Cooperative Education Earnings:
94a. Parents’ Payments to Tax-Deferred Pensions & Retirement Savings:
94b. Parents’ Deductible Payments to IRA/Keogh/Other:
94c. Parents’ Child Support Received:
94d. Parents’ Tax Exempt Interest Income:
94e. Parents’ Untaxed Portions of IRA Distributions:
94f. Parents’ Untaxed Portions of Pensions:
94g. Parents’ Housing, Food, & Living Allowances:
94h. Parents’ Veterans Noneducation Benefits:
94i. Parents’ Other Untaxed Income or Benefits:
95. Student’s Number of Family Members in 2017-2018:
96. Student’s Number in College in 2017-2018:
97. Student Received Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income?
98. Student Received SNAP?
99. Student Received Free/Reduced Price Lunch?
100. Student Received TANF?
101. Student Received WIC?
102. Is Student or Spouse a Dislocated Worker?
103a. First Federal School Code:
103b. First Housing Plans:
103c. Second Federal School Code:
103d. Second Housing Plans:
103e. Third Federal School Code:
103f. Third Housing Plans:
103g. Fourth Federal School Code:
103h. Fourth Housing Plans:
103i. Fifth Federal School Code:
103j. Fifth Housing Plans:
103k. Sixth Federal School Code:
103l. Sixth Housing Plans:
103m. Seventh Federal School Code:
103n. Seventh Housing Plans:
103o. Eighth Federal School Code:
103p. Eighth Housing Plans:
103q. Ninth Federal School Code:
103r. Ninth Housing Plans:
103s. Tenth Federal School Code:
103t. Tenth Housing Plans:
104. Date Completed:
105. Signed By:
106. Preparer’s Social Security Number:
107. Preparer’s Employer Identification Number (EIN):
108. Preparer’s Signature:

According to the Education Department, nearly 20 million students filled out this form in the 2015/2016 application cycle.

UPDATE: The process described above was based on a demonstration this author saw while sharing a screen with a KrebsOnSecurity reader who had a family member apply for aid through FAFSA. But an Education Department spokesperson took strong exception to my experience, saying that while someone armed with an applicant’s SSN and date of birth would be able to view some of the less sensitive data elements related to an application that has already been submitted and processed, seeing the more sensitive data requires and additional authentication step.

The spokesperson said the data is displayed across several pages that require manual advancement, and that before the pages with financial data are shown the visitor is prompted to supply a username and password that all users are required to create when they start the application process. The agency said that without those credentials, the system should not display the rest of the data.

In cases where a student has saved but not completed an application, the spokesperson said, the applicant is prompted to create a “save key,” or temporary password that needs to be supplied before the financial data is displayed.
_Continue reading →_

Other — 21 Comments
22
May 17

Private Eye Allegedly Used Leaky Goverment Tool in Bid to Find Tax Data on Trump

In March 2017, KrebsOnSecurity warned that thieves who perpetrate tax refund fraud with the U.S. INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE were leveraging a widely-used online student loan tool to find critical data on consumers that allows them to claim huge refunds with the IRS in someone else’s name. This week, it emerged that a Louisiana-based private investigator is being charged with using the same online tool to glean tax data on then-presidential candidate DONALD J. TRUMP.

A story today at DIVERSEEDUCATION.COM points to court filings in the U.S. DISTRICT COURT FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA, in which local private eye JORDAN HAMLETt is accused by federal prosecutors of abusing an automated tool at the U.S. Department of Education website that is designed to make it easier for families to complete the Education Department’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — a lengthy form that serves as the starting point for students seeking federal financial assistance to pay for college or career school.

[Grand jury findings in a sealed case against Louisiana private investigator Jordan Hamlett. ]

Grand jury findings in a sealed case against Louisiana private investigator Jordan Hamlett.

In November 2016, Hamlett — the owner of Baton Rouge-based AVERLOCK INVESTIGATIONS — was indicted on felony charges of trying to glean then President-Elect Trump’s “adjusted gross income,” or AGI, using the FAFSA online tool. In the United States, the AGI is an individual’s total gross income minus specific deductions. Diverse Education’s JAMAAL ABDUL-ALIM cites sources saying the accused may have been trying to get Trump’s tax records.

In any event, he failed, according to prosecutors. Last month, the IRS announced that the Education Department was disabling the FAFSA lookup tool because it was being abused by tax fraudsters.

According to Diverse Education, hints about the case against Hamlett came out earlier this month in an IRS oversight hearing before the U.S. House committee on oversight and government reform. At that hearing, “TIMOTHY P. CAMUS, deputy inspector general for investigations at the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or TIGTA, alluded to the Hamlett case but did not mention Hamlett by name, nor did he indicate that then-presidential candidate Trump was the target,” Abdul-Alim writes. “Instead, Camus only mentioned that TIGTA ‘detected an attempted access to the AGI of a prominent individual.'”

Attempts to reach Hamlett for comment have been unsuccessful so far, and the complaint against him remains sealed. However, KrebsOnSecurity obtained a response on Nov. 10, 2016 from U.S. ATTORNEY J. WALTER GREEN that lays out the basic facts in the case. A copy of that document is here (PDF).

It’s interesting to note that this wasn’t the only time U.S. government authorities detected someone trying to access Trump’s AGI information. According to the government’s response, the alleged unauthorized attempt at Trump’s AGI data being attributed to Hamlett occurred on Sept. 13, 2016.

In TIGTA Deputy Inspector General Camus’ testimony to the House committee (PDF), he said his office detected a second attempt to access the same “prominent individual’s” AGI data via the FAFSA online lookup in November 2016, although the testimony doesn’t say whether that attempt was successful.

Amazingly, it wasn’t until an IRS employee on February 27, 2017 complained that his personal data was stolen via the FAFSA tool that the IRS moved to restrict online access to the service, according to response to committee questioning from IRS CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER S. GINA GARZA. _Continue reading →_

Other — 31 Comments
18
May 17

Fraudsters Exploited Lax Security at Equifax’s TALX Payroll Division

Identity thieves who specialize in tax refund fraud had big help this past tax year from EQUIFAX, one of the nation’s largest consumer data brokers and credit bureaus. The trouble stems from TALX, an Equifax subsidiary that provides online payroll, HR and tax services. Equifax says crooks were able to reset the 4-digit PIN given to customer employees as a password and then steal W-2 tax data after successfully answering personal questions about those employees.

In a boilerplate text sent to several affected customers, Equifax said the unauthorized access to customers’ employee tax records happened between April 17, 2016 and March 29, 2017.

Beyond that, the extent of the fraud perpetrated with the help of hacked TALX accounts is unclear, and Equifax refused requests to say how many consumers or payroll service customers may have been impacted by the authentication weaknesses.

[Equifax's TALX -- now called Equifax Workforce Solutions -- aided tax thieves by relying on outdated and insufficient consumer authentication methods.]

Equifax’s subsidiary TALX — now called Equifax Workforce Solutions — aided tax thieves by relying on outdated and insufficient consumer authentication methods.

Thanks to data breach notification laws in nearly all U.S. states now, we know that so far at least five organizations have received letters from Equifax about a series of incidents over the past year, including defense contractor giant Northrop Grumman; staffing firm Allegis Group; Saint-Gobain Corp.; Erickson Living; and the University of Louisville.

A snippet from TALX’s letter to the New Hampshire attorney general (PDF) offers some insight into the level of security offered by this wholly-owned subsidiary of Equifax. In it, lawyers for TALX downplay the scope of the breach even as they admit the company wasn’t able to tell exactly how much unauthorized access to tax records may have occurred.

“TALX believes that the unauthorized third-party(ies) gained access to the accounts primarily by successfully answering personal questions about the affected employees in order to reset the employees’ pins (the password to the online account portal),” wrote NICHOLAS A. OLDHAM, an attorney representing TALX. “Because the accesses generally appear legitimate (e.g., successful use of login credentials), TALX cannot confirm forensically exactly which accounts were, in fact, accessed without authorization, although TALX believes that only a small percentage of these potentially affected accounts were actually affected.”

ANALYSIS

Generally. Forensically. Exactly. Potentially. Actually. Lots of hand-waving from the TALX/Equifax suits. But Equifax should have known better than to rely on a simple PIN for a password, says AVIVAH LITAN, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc.

“That’s so 1990s,” Litan said. “It’s pretty unbelievable that a company like Equifax would only protect such sensitive data with just a PIN.”

Litan said TALX should have required customers to use stronger two-factor authentication options, such as one-time tokens sent to an email address or mobile device (as Equifax now says TALX is doing — at least with those we know were notified about possible employee account abuse).

The big consumer credit bureaus like Equifax, EXPERIAN, INNOVIS and TRANS UNION are all regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which strives to promote accuracy, fairness and privacy for data used by consumer reporting agencies.  But Litan said there are no federal requirements that credit bureaus use stronger authentication for access to consumer data — such as two-factor authentication.

“There’s about 500 percent more protection for credit card data right now than there is for identity data,” Litan said. “And yet I don’t know of one document from the federal government that spells out how these credit bureaus and other companies have to protect PII (personally identifiable information).” _Continue reading →_

Other — 48 Comments
24
Mar 17

Phishing 101 at the School of Hard Knocks

A recent, massive spike in sophisticated and successful phishing attacks is prompting many universities to speed up timetables for deploying mandatory two-factor authentication (2FA) — requiring a one-time code in addition to a password — for access to student and faculty services online. This is the story of one university that accelerated plans to require 2FA after witnessing nearly twice as many phishing victims in the first two-and-half months of this year than it saw in all of 2015.

[bg]BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY in Ohio has more than 20,000 students and faculty, and like virtually any other mid-sized state school its Internet users are constantly under attack from scammers trying to phish login credentials for email and online services.

BGSU had planned later this summer to make 2FA mandatory for access to the school’s portal — the primary place where students register for classes, pay bills, and otherwise manage their financial relationship to the university.

That is, until a surge in successful phishing attacks resulted in several students having bank accounts and W-2 tax forms siphoned.

On March 1, 2017 all BGSU account holders were required to change their passwords, and on March 15, 2017 two-factor authentication (Duo) protection was placed in front of the MyBGSU portal [full disclosure: Duo is a longtime advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity].

MATT HASCHAK, director of IT security and infrastructure at BGSU, said the number of compromised accounts detected at BGSU has risen from 250 in calendar year 2015 to 1000 in 2016, and to _approximately 400 in the first 75 days of 2017_.

Left unchecked, phishers are on track to steal credentials from nearly 10 percent of the BGSU student body by the end of this year. The university has offered 2FA options for its portal access since June 2016, but until this month few students or faculty were using it, Haschak said.

“We saw very low adoption when it was voluntary,” he said. “And typically the people who adopted it were not my big security risks.”

Haschak said it’s clear that the scale and size of the phishing problem is hardly unique to BGSU.

“As I keep preaching to our campus community, this is not unique to BGSU,” Haschak said. “I’ve been talking a lot lately to my counterparts at universities in Ohio and elsewhere, and we’re all getting hit with these attacks very heavily right now. Some of the phishing scams are pretty good, but unfortunately some are god-awful, and I think people are just not thinking or they’re too busy in their day, they receive something on their phone and they just click it.”

Last month, an especially tricky phishing scam fooled several students who are also employed at the university into giving away their BGSU portal passwords, after which the thieves changed the victims’ direct deposit information so that their money went to accounts controlled by the phishers.

In other scams, the phishers would change the routing number for a bank account tied to a portal user, and then cancel that student’s classes near the beginning of a semester — thus kicking off a fraudulent refund.

One of the victims even had a fraudulent tax refund request filed in her name with the IRS as a result, Haschak said.

“They went in and looked at her W-2 information, which is also available via the portal,” he said. _Continue reading →_

question: Who is Hieu Minh Ngo?

answer: A hacker, who is described by the U.S. Secret Service as someone who caused more material financial harm to Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal.

question: Was Ngo imprisoned? If yes, why?

answer: Yes, he was imprisoned for running multiple identity theft services.

question: How old is Ngo?

answer: Ngo is 29-years-old.

question: Ngo is a native of?

answer: Ngo is a native of Vietnam.

question: Write a ~5 sentence summary.

answer:
A hacker named Hieu Minh Ngo, 29, is deported back to his native Vietnam after serving more than seven years in jail. Ngo was running multiple identity theft services. He was making $125,000 a month by reselling ill-gotten access to some of the biggest data brokers on the planet.

A security breach at COMPLYRIGHT's website may have jeopardized the sensitive consumer information of citizens.

The essay further gives detailed information on tax refund frauds.


text:
WATFORD FC need to expand their stadium capacity or risk being forced to move to a bigger site out of the borough, according to the Mayor of Watford.

The Premier League club is in “serious” talks with Watford Borough Council as it looks to add extra seats to its Vicarage Road stadium.

It can currently accommodate 21,577 fans – but proposals are being drawn up to potentially increase this to either 25,000 or 30,000.

Mayor of Watford Dorothy Thornhill, a Hornets fan herself, has been discussing this with the club about this for the last couple of years.

She said: “The current stadium hasn’t got the capacity to house a Premier League club.

“I want the club to remain in the borough so it makes perfect sense that we try and do everything we can to meet the club’s aspirations.

“We have to compete with the big boys in some way, and we are just a small town. Fans don’t want to be traipsing off to another town to see their team play.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s a genuine desire to crack on with this as soon as a decision has been found.”

“True to Watford’s motto we will be bold and go for it.”

Plans also include building a new multi-storey car park on the old Farm Terrace Allotment site, which would also be used by staff at Watford General Hospital.

These proposals first need to go to West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust for approval, before going to Watford Borough Council’s planning committee later this year.

Mayor Thornhill, who is due to stand down in May after 16 years at the helm, added: “We’ll be mindful of neighbours and the immediate location.

“The club are going to have to put their heads together to come up with a plan which works for everyone.”

question: Which football club is talked about in the article?

answer: Watford FC.

question: What does Watford FC need to do?

answer: Expand their stadium capacity.

question: Who is saying this must be done?

answer: The Mayor of Watford.

question: How many fans can the stadium accomodate?

answer: 21,577.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: The article discusses the need for the Watford FC to expand their stadium capacity at the urging of the Mayor of Watford.