Rabbit Holes
As a hacker, we often go down rabbit holes of information when doing our thing. This could be trying to fully understand a protocol, spending too much time attempting to exploit a service or creating relational data for OSINT gathering. This regards the latter.
Please note that all of the information I’m posting is available online, without charge and without the need of circumventing any security protocols. Also, I am not drawing any conclusions on particular people, companies or the practices thereof. I am merely stating my opinion and providing proof of things I’ve seen.
I’m not here to ruin people’s lives nor should you. I’ve blacked out private information however it should be known that this is very easily obtainable. Lastly, I’ve left out a lot of other information I had discovered about persons involved as it doesn’t pertain to the story at hand.
Recently, I’ve received the following letter in the post:
As you can see, it has the City of Ottawa logo on the top right. If you read through this, you can see that this is optional and being offered by a company called Service Line Warranties of Canada (SLWC). I immediately thought that this was spam and that they were using the City of Ottawa logo without permission in the attempts to fool people into thinking this was a city service. After all, when I run a phishing campaign for my customers, that’s what I do.
I went to the City of Ottawa website and read through the statement there. One thing caught my eye though. See if you can spot it:
The city is receiving compensation for use of the City of Ottawa logo. I’ll be honest: I think this is shitty behaviour since people who aren’t keen on phishing-type attacks may think that this is an official City of Ottawa program. Shitty, but not illegal. Let’s dig in more into SLWC…
I went to the hxxps://www.plansforottawa.ca website which, after a few redirects, plopped me at hxxps://www.slofc.ca with obvious “ottawa” items in the URI. I scrolled through the page and ended up with my eyes on the items highlighted below:
The office listed for SLWC is listed in the United States and that they are operating on behalf of a company in British Columbia. Maybe the parent company is in the ‘States and their Canadian presence is in B.C. but why is it a different company in Canada? I don’t know anything about business registrations so let’s just move on.
More digging provided me with information on a council meeting from North Middlesex County, just outside of London, Ontario. Looking through the file was an introductory letter followed by a sales slide deck.
Here we can see that a person by the name of Elise (who appears to work in Toronto) is introducing herself. Let’s examine the slides in the PDF and see what we see…
As you can see in the “Marketing Approach” slide presented by Elise, the Municipality involved must endorse the service and their logo is to appear on all letters. My opinion is that they are doing this in the hopes that less savvy people will assume that their marketing material is officially from the city. Again, just an opinion.
Now there’s a new domain present. We’ll get to that later. Let’s keep looking through the document offered to the County of North Middlesex.
If something goes awry with you (the consumer) and SLWC, it appears that you’ll be limited to Small Claims courts. Let’s see what else we can find with our Sales Representative…
On one of the SLWC websites, we can see the Sales Representative who gave the presentation to Middlesex County. Like most people, especially those in sales roles, Elise is on LinkedIn:
Here she is. It’s interesting that she works for “HomeServe USA” and not “SLWC” but, again, we may be talking about parent companies. It’s also nice to know she can speak German. This is likely a coincidence but you can draw your own conclusions to a point coming up later.
I should start running businesses as it seems that my guesses were correct in that SLWC is a subsidiary of HomeServe USA Corporation.
Do you remember the “utilitysp.net” e-mail domain we saw earlier? I went there and ended up getting bounced around with redirects and eventually landed here:
It would seem that HomeServe USA Corporation offers warranty services for a lot of items. I’m starting to wonder if HomeServe USA is just a middle-man service. Again, I’m not drawing conclusions or stating anything as fact apart from what I’ve personally encountered. Speaking of things I’ve personally encountered in this rabbit hole, here’s another one but this time from the North Dundas Township files:
Here we can see corroboration that the Township of North Dundas, upon agreeing to the terms put forth by SLWC would receive five percent (5%) of the total revenue of the program. I assume that other cities are being offered the same amount however I can’t say with any certainty. SLWC can also send up to six mailings with their city/township/municipality-branded literature and may be able to run other communications campaigns if agreed upon by the city/township/municipality.
Go grab a coffee.
We have an address for Northcoast Solutions of Canada (of whom SLWC is stated to be acting on behalf thereof) so let’s see what’s there:
The first link is that of the law firm Cassels which is why, you can imagine, I’ve been tiptoeing to make sure I choose my words carefully. You may say that other companies can work in the same building but a law firm, a pipe warranty company and a resources company in the same suite? Maybe it’s a shared suite — I’m not making any statements or drawing conclusions. It’s interesting, though, that the Aldever Resources company has a German language tab:
And who else do we know who speaks German? Again, likely a coincidence but I think Carl Jung would flip just a little at this one.
Anything else interesting from investigating that address? Let’s see…
Wait, what? This is a warranty document from Microsoft with nothing to do with replacing pipe infrastructure in Ottawa. I’m a little afraid to ask but is there anything else?
Hardware warranty information on a site called “myprotectionplan360.com” is what comes up. Well, let’s take a gander at the site itself:
The site looks generic enough and although I haven’t examined the source, I’m getting strong bootstrap vibes. But what’s that at the bottom? “The Amynta Group”? I thought this was “360Central”. You know where we’re off to next…
Browsing this site seems to be that this group offers middle-man services for warranty-able items. I think this is the end of the rabbit hole. Even if it’s not, it’s the end for me… For now.
So what’s the point in having followed this path, documented and written all this up? I don’t have a point. I’m not suggesting any points or conclusions. You can do that all yourself should you choose.
