Hacker Stole Data of Over 70% Bulgarian Citizens from Tax Agency Servers

Jul 17, 2019

Eastern European country Bulgaria has suffered the biggest
data breach in its history that compromised personal and financial
information of 5 million adult citizens out of its total population
of 7 million people.

According to multiple sources in local Bulgarian media ^[1], an unknown hacker
earlier this week emailed them download links to 11GB of stolen
data which included taxpayer’s personal identifiable numbers,
addresses, and financial data.

In a brief statement
released Monday, the National Revenue Agency (NRA) of Bulgaria said
the stolen data originates from the country’s tax reporting
service.
^[2]

The NRA also indicated that the Ministry of the Interior and the
State Agency for National Security (SANS) have started taking an
assessment of the potential vulnerability in NRA’s systems that
attackers might have exploited to breach into its databases.

It appears that until now, the hacker, who claimed to be a
Russian man, has only released 57 out of a total of 110 compromised
databases, which is about 21GB in total.

In a follow-up announcement ^[3], the NRA said almost 20
days ago, the attacker unauthorizedly accessed about 3 percent of
the information contained in their databases.

“Currently, e-services for citizens and businesses are functioning
normally, with the exception of the VAT refund service paid abroad,
as well as by the revenue office. Unregulated access to sensitive
information is limited,” the NRA said.

As consequences of the incident, Bulgaria’s NRA tax agency is now
facing a fine of up to 20 million euros (nearly £18 million) or 4%
of the agency’s annual turnover over the data breach, said Prof.
Veselin Tselkov, a member of the Commission for Personal Data
Protection.

Suspected Hacker Arrested

Bulgarian police have also arrested a
20-year-old “white hacker” as the main suspect for the NRA data
breach after authorities raided his home and office in the capital
Sofia and seized his computers containing encrypted data, according
to a local media.

The arrested suspect, Christian Boykov, is a cybersecurity
expert who has been training officers of the GCDPC for fighting
organized cybercrime.

Boykov was in the news two years ago, when he found a vulnerability
in the website of the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) and
contacted “Lords of the Air,” a popular TV show to tell the story
only after the ministry ignored his initial disclosure.

After that incident, Boikov was hired as an ethical hacker by
the global cybersecurity company “TAD Group,” and at the moment of
arrest, he was an employee of the company, where his job
responsibility was to pentest the systems in the state agencies and
private companies for potential vulnerabilities.

Since the investigation is still ongoing, at this moment, it’s
not clear if he is behind the NRA data breach. However, the Sofia
City Prosecutor’s Office accused Boykov of unauthorized access to a
computer system that is part of the critical infrastructure of the
state.

His lawyers say there is no evidence against the boy, but if
proven guilty, Boikov—who has no past criminal record—could face up
to 8 years in prison.

^[4]

References

^{^}
media
(btvnovinite.bg)
^{^}
statement
(nap.bg)
^{^}
announcement
(nap.bg)
^{^}
arrested a 20-year-old
(www.mediapool.bg)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Hacker Stole Data of Over 70% Bulgarian Citizens from Tax Agency Servers

Suspected Hacker Arrested

References

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