Bank of America Telephone Access Security Hole

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2012/11/even-a-vpn-service-cant-protect-your-privacy-if-youre-using-bank-of-america/

by rasengan • 14 years ago

100 58 14 years ago

privateinternetaccess.com

georgeorwell4• 14 years ago

The responsible thing to do in this situation is to keep escalating at the bank until somebody listens. "Bank of America supervisor" implies a manager at a call centre. A few more escalations and you reach some pretty senior people with actual authority to change things.

A zero-day involving actual dollars (BoA) is a lot different than a zero-day involving email addresses (AT&T, recently). If this exploit makes withdrawals possible, and it sounds like it does, then you're making it easy to seriously mess up someone's life before it's fixed.

josh26006• 14 years ago

This is a feature...

This is basically a lookup which authenticates users based on caller ID (the password is the ssn). This is the same as when your carrier changed your voicemail password to be your phone number (and self-authenticate on inbound calls).

The problem everyone is looking at effects 100% of customers but the bank (mistakenly) believes the barriers to entry are high.

The important takeaway is this: You cannot have a secure service that is authenticated with a phone number.

Phone numbers have been, and will continue to be, an invalid source of identity. In fact, considering a phone number as a signaling agent in a Web of Trust is a terrible decision to make. Time and again we hear of these exploits which wouldn't happen without terrible assumptions.

PSA: YOUR PHONE NUMBER IS SPOOFABLE; IT TAKES 10 SECONDS. DO NOT BUILD SYSTEMS THAT TRUST YOUR PHONE NUMBER AS IDENTITY.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

I am no expert but I think the problem is assuming that the caller ID of the incoming call to the bank is authentic.

I'm curious if you could break a similar system that assumed that receipt of an outgoing call made to the customer's phone number was validation of identity.

mibbitier• 14 years ago

Wouldn't it be fairly trivial to have an automated system to call the caller back (Verify that they aren't spoofing the caller ID)?

  1. Caller phones in
  2. System looks at caller ID, and says "We will now call
     you right back to verify you are who you say you are"
  3. Caller hangs up and has to wait for call.

Surely that system would need a much higher level of hacking to be able to intercept the call.

jhull• 14 years ago

how does this affect systems in africa and asia where mobile banking is widespread. tons of money transfer is done by sending it via text messages. any idea how they handle this? is spoofing a text message totally different?

gqwubtx• 14 years ago

I just tried this on my account. There's no way to steal money with it. Only view account balance and transactions.

Also it looks like BofA has responded to basically the same issue but with credit cards: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44231957/ns/business-consumer_ne...

“Our objective is to balance customers' need for convenience and quick access to general information with industry best protection of their accounts,” wrote Betty Reiss at Bank of America. “In addition to at least two levels of authentication required to access very limited information over our automated system, we have additional security controls in place to detect potential abuse of our automated systems. We understand that there will always be individuals who are trying to beat the system, and we're constantly looking at measures to better protect and service our customers.”

MichaelGG5• 14 years ago

Except some systems, such as PayPal, determine authorization to a bank account by making a couple of small transactions and requiring you to confirm the amount. So read-only access to statements does allow you to get more access to the account via other parties. (I found this out after someone I gave read-only access on my account started making withdrawals via PayPal.)

driverdan2• 14 years ago

The responsible thing to do is to close your BoA account and open an account with a bank that puts security before convenience.

sillysaurus• 14 years ago

You're confusing identities. We're talking about the responsibility of the person who is disclosing the vulnerability, not whether it's responsible for a person to have a BoA account.

mullingitover3• 14 years ago

> "Bank of America supervisor" implies a manager at a call centre.

Hahahaha, yep. And that's as far as you'll get.

I've worked at a call center that serviced a lot of big companies. Rest assured you will never, ever speak to an actual manager at a call center (call center managers aren't trained to interact with customers, they mostly do scheduling and deal with attendance policy). You'll get a "Level 2 rep" who's just another rep who has some authority to grant exceptions to policy in certain cases.

Also, if you call the corporate HQ and demand to speak to the president of the company, they'll route your call right back to that level 2 rep in the call center. Most companies go out of their way to ensure that the leadership is protected from the inevitable lunatic customers.

georgeorwell4• 14 years ago

I made it to level 5 once with my bank when a merchant was ripping me off. It was the kind of thing where they could only promise a callback within the week because the person was generally busy not answering customer calls and didn't have anything to do with the call centre. That guy fixed the problem when everyone under him said they couldn't.

If it wasn't a bank, I would say forget about this approach. But based on my own limited experience, I have this belief that retail banks are nowhere near as atrocious as PayPal or your typical telecom or insurance company.

Even if escalation through customer-facing channels didn't pan out, I guess I would like to see more than a public exposé on a blog and YouTube from someone who "is a long-time advocate of privacy and the conservation of the personal realm" and who previously was involved with Mt. Gox. There is no indication that they exhausted all possible avenues before going public with the information, and I'm quite sure there's more to do than simply give up once you reach level 2.

It seems like the author, thieves, and a fraction of a percent of BoA customers are the only ones who benefit from this. His actual core business at the moment is based on safeguarding people's privacy; this kind of thing only makes me want to run far far away.

plaguuuuuu• 14 years ago

I managed to hit my bank's internal security team this one time. Pretty cool to chat to them at the time although they mentioned as little as humanly possible about their policies for obvious reasons :)

My account basically got itself into an invalid state where I couldn't verify using my pin or log in online. Must have slipped through the cracks in business logic somewhere because I combined credit and debit onto a single card and created a 6 number PIN. Called customer service, got escalated to higher level, then a few hours later called by someone from the internal team.. which worried me slightly.. but was fine in the end.

chayesfss• 14 years ago

Hate to pile on but security & boa don't go together too well http://www.gosecureauth.com/blog/easily-bypass-bank-of-ameri...

csmatt• 14 years ago

It's not just BofA. I know of at least one other popular bank that uses the last four of one's SSN as the default password. They may also require a DOB, but that's simple enough.

bo1024• 14 years ago

So if this was on a website instead of via phone the authors would presumably be facing criminal charges or years in prison, right?

JacobAldridge• 14 years ago

Well, they used a proxy to log into their own account, so probably not. Had they tried to demonstrate this using someone else's SSN, then yup - lock 'em up!

driverdan2• 14 years ago

The laws apply to any electronic access or communications, including phone. In this case they accessed their own account so no laws have been broken.

smsm424• 14 years ago

If they stole data from 100K bank accounts using SSN generator and then sent those to the press - yes, probably. Since they instead accessed their own account to which they were authorized to connect anyway - no, not right.

lcusack• 14 years ago

On a related note - can anyone give me perspective on the quality of their VPN service?

gfosco• 14 years ago

I use PIA for my VPN and like it very much. Lots of different places to connect to, runs fast enough to do torrents, no complaints here.

badsecurityhole• 14 years ago

This is more dangerous than it sounds. As the blog post points out you can only get account balance and last transactions. Here's what's really dangerous: the last transactions.

Say you have one more piece of information: account # and routing #. This can be obtained from any check the person has written. Now you can link their account to your account from your bank's website. Your bank will make some small deposits into their account that you will have to verify. Now you use the security hole discussed in this post and you can find out what the amount of those small deposits was. You have now successfully linked their account to your account and you can withdraw their entire account balance into your account from your bank's website.

Now go to your local bank branch and withdraw your entire account in cash and walk away. So yes, this security hole is bad.

jrabone• 14 years ago

That is very bad. The small deposit + verification is exactly how Paypal used to do account linking - I don't know if they've since added extra steps.

mikeash2• 14 years ago

It's how everything I've ever used for ACH transfers does account linking, from Paypal to other banks. They assume, and mostly rightfully so, that if you can view an account's recent transactions, you control the account.

nacs• 14 years ago

Google also does this method of verification for their Adsense payments -- just type in the amount deposited and your account can now receive payments from Google.

ams61102• 14 years ago

...and then prepare for the FBI to show up at your door. You can't open a bank account without producing several pieces of ID bearing you current address. Not discounting the apparent stupidity of BofA relying on caller ID for auhthentication, but it's not quite that easy. Moving money from one account to another leaves a trail.

Still a really bad situation though.

mikegioia• 14 years ago

It isn't too difficult to set up a bank account in someone else's name without them knowing. It happens with credit cards all the time.

tedivm• 14 years ago

You can easily open up a bank account without ever interacting with a person- some banks, like ING Direct, are almost completely online.

smsm424• 14 years ago

Current address can change. The only reason my bank knows my current address is because I've repeatedly informed them, and it took about half a year and some effort from my side to have them update all accounts and records with the correct address. So the FBI has a good chance of scaring some innocent men living in a rental apartment that was used by some bad guy two years ago. In one place I lived, I regularly got payment demands from various credit companies to the name of somebody that (I suspect) lived there 2 years ago at least (I knew who lived there before me, and that wasn't the bad credit person). So address doesn't give much.

smsm424• 14 years ago

I had once a check stolen. No money was taken, since the bank got suspicious and called me and I told it's not authorized, so they did not pay anything. But I had to close that account and open a new one, because having the check the thief has account # and routing # (the latter is public anyway) so he can initiate electronic transactions from my account without asking anybody. I myself did so on many billing sites - you just given them account number and payment is processed, my bank has no idea if I authorized it or not (in those cases I did, but the bank has no way to verify it).

Security of this system doesn't even deserve the name, the only resort it to catch it after the fact and rely on the bank rolling back the transaction.

Aloha• 14 years ago

First, its not off CID, its off ANI (ANI is what is passed to the remote endpoint when you call a toll free number), not that you cant spoof ANI - but often it can be a little harder, as its used in billing on the telco side.

Second, every bank does something like this, I can access my credit card by phone with just the last four digits of my account number, and by calling in from my phone. I can do the same thing with my BofA account number in lieu of my SSN.

Third, again, every bank is like this to some extent - every CC I have, if I call in from my number, and key in the last for digits of my credit card, I can get info. I should also point that knowing someones Tel Number, Account Number and/or CC number is a considerable amount of info to have.

philsnow• 14 years ago

"Second, every bank does something like this"

I can't tell if your implying that this makes the practice somehow less bad, but I hope not.

"I should also point that knowing someones Tel Number, Account Number and/or CC number is a considerable amount of info to have."

It's a considerable amount of information for a random stranger to have, but _not_ for an attacker.

georgeorwell4• 14 years ago

Just because I had no idea what your acronyms meant:

CID: Caller ID

ANI: Automatic Number Identification

http://www.egyed.com/faq/cid.htm

If this is a widespread vulnerability, why is it left open? Also, my bank wants a 13-digit access card number and a 4-digit PIN, which is secure enough for me.

mikeash2• 14 years ago

Credit cards are a vastly different scenario than bank accounts. To a first approximation, unauthorized credit card access poses zero risk to the cardholder. Bank accounts are vastly different in that respect. Can you access your checking/savings account like this, not just your credit cards?

ams61102• 14 years ago

Since they hacked it via a common CID spoofing site, that would seem to indicate that it is using caller ID.

thechut• 14 years ago

This is the same sort of exploit used in the "Phone hacking" scandal that News of the World and other newspapers got in trouble for. Except in that case they were hacking voicemail boxes not bank accounts. This is pretty serious and not exactly a novel idea, very surprised that BoA hasn't encountered this problem yet.

shaaaaawn• 14 years ago

So the worst case scenario that this maybe non-repeatable process might result in someone: 1) accessing more of your data and 2) maybe perform fraudulent transactions that will be detected and/or reported; investigated; and refunded. Uptown problems.

smsm424• 14 years ago

From what I understand, knowing somebody's name, SSN, address and DOB would allow you to impersonate him/her at 90% of places. In 90% of the rest, they'd require some password but if you sound convincing enough and desperate enough and claim you forgot the password, they'd give you some information they're not supposed to in exchange for the pieces from above. SSN especially is treated like it's super-secret even though practically everybody asks you for it - banks, employers, car dealers, credit cards, lenders, etc. Government loves to ask DOB for some reason like it's a big secret - even though looking for congrats of anybody's facebook page allows to know DOB for like 90% of people.

In general, this whole system does not collapse only because overwhelming majority of people are honest and don't even think about cheating it. Which I think is good, but still I am a bit scared when I think about how fragile it is.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

I am both amused and annoyed at now having to enter my US postal ZIP code when using my credit card at some gas stations. If someone stole my wallet, they'd have that information already as it is on my driver's license.

sneak3• 14 years ago

Don't use your license address as your billing address.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

> SSN especially is treated like it's super-secret even though practically everybody asks you for it - banks, employers, car dealers, credit cards, lenders, etc.

Ironically, the IRS doesn't. I know of someone who had to authenticate himself to the IRS (I think when getting a new social security card) and was prepared to give them his SSN, when the agent scolded him, 'Your SSN isn't a means of identification'.

If only they knew!

> Government loves to ask DOB for some reason like it's a big secret - even though looking for congrats of anybody's facebook page allows to know DOB for like 90% of people.

DOB is public record (by one means or another) for almost any US resident.

Bank of America Telephone Access Security Hole

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