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McAfee’s Global Business Development Manager, Greg Vinson and CEO of Attivo Networks, Tushar Kothari discuss the solutions to Threat Deception.
The post ST22: Attivo Networks with Greg Vinson & Tushar Kothari appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Für viele ist das Arbeiten im Home Office zur Normalität geworden. Microsoft Teams stellt dabei den Ankerpunkt der effektiven Zusammenarbeit und dem Austausch von Inhalten in Microsoft 365 dar. Welche Auswirkung das jedoch auf die Sicherheit hat, diskutieren wir in diesem Podcast. Hierfür zusammengekommen sind Alexander Haug, unser Security Engineer mit Fokus auf Data Protection, sowie Chris Trynoga, unser Solution Architect und Experte für ganzheitliche Sicherheitsansätze.
The post ST23: Moderner Datenschutz für Microsoft Teams (German) appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Vor dem Hintergrund des IT-Fachkräftemangels gestaltet es sich für Unternehmen immer schwieriger, mit der wachsenden Zahl sowie Raffinesse von Cyber-Angriffen Schritt zu halten und drängt Sicherheitsteams dazu, oft nur noch reaktiv agieren zu können. Wie Sie mithilfe einer umfassenden Bedrohungsdatenbank sowie proaktiver Reaktionsmaßnahmen Ihre Endgerätesicherheit verbessern und Reaktionszeiten von Monaten auf Stunden verkürzen können, diskutieren wir in diesem Podcast. Hierfür zusammengekommen sind Heiko Brückle, McAfee Senior Security Engineer, sowie Chris Trynoga, McAfee Regional Solution Architect.
The post ST24: Proaktive Absicherung zur Minimierung von Endgeräterisiken (German) appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Die Cloud ist und bleibt ein Treiber für die digitale Transformation. Nachdem der Fokus primär auf die Erkennung von Shadow-IT
und die Absicherung von SaaS-Diensten lag, wandert nun der Blick auf längerfristige Projekte: Die Migration von ganzen Diensten
und Anwendungen in Richtung Cloud. In diesem Podcast sprechen wir daher über die Themen Infrastruktur und Container in der
Cloud, wie diese sich in die bestehende Architektur einbinden und welche weiteren wichtigen Sichtweisen für eine umfassendes
Sicherheitskonzept hilfreich sind.
The post ST25: Absicherung von Cloud-nativen Anwendungen appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
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At the outset of their federal criminal trial for hijacking vast swaths of Internet addresses for use in large-scale email spam campaigns, three current or former executives at online advertising firm Adconion Direct (now Amobee) have pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges of fraud and misrepresentation via email.
In October 2018, prosecutors in the Southern District of California named four Adconion employees — Jacob Bychak, Mark Manoogian, Petr Pacas, and Mohammed Abdul Qayyum — in a ten-count indictment (PDF) on felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and electronic mail fraud.
The government alleged that between December 2010 and September 2014, the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to identify or pay to identify blocks of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registered to others but which were otherwise inactive.
Prosecutors said the men also sent forged letters to an Internet hosting firm claiming they had been authorized by the registrants of the inactive IP addresses to use that space for their own purposes.
All four defendants pleaded not guilty when they were charged back in 2018, but this week Bychak, Manoogian and Qayyum each entered a plea deal.
“The defendants’ jobs with Adconion were to acquire fresh IP addresses and employ other measures to circumvent the spam filters,” reads a statement released today by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, which said the defendants would pay $100,000 in fines each and perform 100 hours of community service.
“To conceal Adconion’s ties to the stolen IP addresses and the spam sent from these IP addresses, the defendants used a host of DBAs, virtual addresses, and fake names provided by the company,” the statement continues. “While defendants touted ties to well-known name brands, the email marketing campaigns associated with the hijacked IP addresses included advertisements such as ‘BigBeautifulWomen,’ ‘iPhone4S Promos,’ and ‘LatinLove[Cost-per-Click].'”
None of the three plea agreements are currently available on PACER, the online federal court document clearinghouse. However, PACER does show that on June 7 — the same day the pleas were entered by the defendants — the government submitted to the court a superseding set of just two misdemeanor charges (PDF) of fraud in connection with email.
Another document filed in the case says the fourth defendant — Pacas — accepted a deferred prosecution deal, which includes a probationary period and a required $50,000 “donation” to a federal “crime victims fund.”
There are fewer than four billion so-called “Internet Protocol version 4” or IPv4 addresses available for use, but the vast majority of them have already been allocated. The global dearth of available IP addresses has turned them into a commodity wherein each IP can fetch between $15-$25 on the open market.
This has led to boom times for those engaged in the acquisition and sale of IP address blocks, but it has likewise emboldened those who specialize in absconding with and spamming from dormant IP address blocks without permission from the rightful owners.
In May, prosecutors published information about the source of some IP address ranges from which the Adconion employees allegedly spammed. For example, the government found the men leased some of their IP address ranges from a Dutch company that’s been tied to a scandal involving more than four million addresses siphoned from the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), the nonprofit responsible for overseeing IP address allocation for African organizations.
In 2019, AFRINIC fired a top employee after it emerged that in 2013 he quietly commandeered millions of IPs from defunct African entities or from those that were long ago acquired by other firms, and then conspired to sell an estimated $50 million worth of the IPs to marketers based outside Africa.
“Exhibit A” in a recent government court filing shows that in 2013 Adconion leased more than 65,000 IP addresses from Inspiring Networks, a Dutch network services company. In 2020, Inspiring Networks and its director Maikel Uerlings were named in a dogged, multi-part investigation by South African news outlet MyBroadband.co.za and researcher Ron Guilmette as one of two major beneficiaries of the four million IP addresses looted from AFRINIC by its former employee.
Exhibit A, from a May 2022 filing by U.S. federal prosecutors.
The address block in the above image — 196.246.0.0/16 — was reportedly later reclaimed by AFRINIC following an investigation. Inspiring Networks has not responded to requests for comment.
Prosecutors allege the Adconion employees also obtained hijacked IP address blocks from Daniel Dye, another man tied to this case who was charged separately. For many years, Dye was a system administrator for Optinrealbig, a Colorado company that relentlessly pimped all manner of junk email, from mortgage leads and adult-related services to counterfeit products and Viagra. In 2018, Dye pleaded guilty to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.
Optinrealbig’s CEO was the spam king Scott Richter, who changed the name of the company to Media Breakaway after being successfully sued for spamming by AOL, Microsoft, MySpace, and the New York Attorney General Office, among others. In 2008, this author penned a column for The Washington Post detailing how Media Breakaway had hijacked tens of thousands of IP addresses from a defunct San Francisco company for use in its spamming operations.
The last-minute plea deals by the Adconion employees were reminiscent of another recent federal criminal prosecution for IP address sleight-of-hand. In November 2021, the CEO of South Carolina technology firm Micfo pleaded guilty just two days into his trial, admitting 20 counts of wire fraud in connection with an elaborate network of phony companies set up to obtain more than 700,000 IPs from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) — AFRINIC’s counterpart in North America.
Adconion was acquired in June 2014 by Amobee, a Redwood City, Calif. online ad platform that has catered to some of the world’s biggest brands. Amobee’s parent firm — Singapore-based communications giant Singtel — bought Amobee for $321 million in March 2012.
But as Reuters reported in 2021, Amobee cost Singtel nearly twice as much in the last year alone — $589 million — in a “non-cash impairment charge” Singtel disclosed to investors. Marketing industry blog Digiday.com reported in February that Singtel was seeking to part ways with its ad tech subsidiary.
One final note about Amobee: In response to my 2019 story on the criminal charges against the Adconion executives, Amobee issued a statement saying “Amobee has fully cooperated with the government’s investigation of this 2017 matter which pertains to alleged activities that occurred years prior to Amobee’s acquisition of the company.”
Yet as the government’s indictment points out, the alleged hijacking activities took place up until September 2014, which was after Amobee’s acquisition of Adconion Direct in June 2014. Also, the IP address ranges that the Adconion executives were prosecuted for hijacking were all related to incidents in 2013 and 2014, which is hardly “years prior to Amobee’s acquisition of the company.”
Amobee has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Authorities in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. last week said they dismantled the “RSOCKS” botnet, a collection of millions of hacked devices that were sold as “proxies” to cybercriminals looking for ways to route their malicious traffic through someone else’s computer. While the coordinated action did not name the Russian hackers allegedly behind RSOCKS, KrebsOnSecurity has identified its owner as a 35-year-old Russian man living abroad who also runs the world’s top spam forum.
The RUSdot mailer, the email spamming tool made and sold by the administrator of RSOCKS.
According to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice, RSOCKS offered clients access to IP addresses assigned to devices that had been hacked:
“A cybercriminal who wanted to utilize the RSOCKS platform could use a web browser to navigate to a web-based ‘storefront’ (i.e., a public web site that allows users to purchase access to the botnet), which allowed the customer to pay to rent access to a pool of proxies for a specified daily, weekly, or monthly time period. The cost for access to a pool of RSOCKS proxies ranged from $30 per day for access to 2,000 proxies to $200 per day for access to 90,000 proxies.”
The DOJ’s statement doesn’t mention that RSOCKS has been in operation since 2014, when access to the web store for the botnet was first advertised on multiple Russian-language cybercrime forums.
The user “RSOCKS” on the Russian crime forum Verified changed his name to RSOCKS from a previous handle: “Stanx,” whose very first sales thread on Verified in 2016 quickly ran afoul of the forum’s rules and prompted a public chastisement by the forum’s administrator.
Verified was hacked twice in the past few years, and each time the private messages of all users on the forum were leaked. Those messages show that after being warned of his forum infraction, Stanx sent a private message to the Verified administrator detailing his cybercriminal bona fides.
“I am the owner of the RUSdot forum (former Spamdot),” Stanx wrote in Sept. 2016. “In spam topics, people know me as a reliable person.”
A Google-translated version of the Rusdot spam forum.
RUSdot is the successor forum to Spamdot, a far more secretive and restricted forum where most of the world’s top spammers, virus writers and cybercriminals collaborated for years before the community’s implosion in 2010. Even today, the RUSdot Mailer is advertised for sale at the top of the RUSdot community forum.
Stanx said he was a longtime member of several major forums, including the Russian hacker forum Antichat (since 2005), and the Russian crime forum Exploit (since April 2013). In an early post to Antichat in January 2005, Stanx disclosed that he is from Omsk, a large city in the Siberian region of Russia.
According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the user Stanx indeed registered on Exploit in 2013, using the email address stanx@rusdot.com, and the ICQ number 399611. A search in Google for that ICQ number turns up a cached version of a Vkontakte profile for a Denis “Neo” Kloster, from Omsk, Russia.
Cybersecurity firm Constella Intelligence shows that in 2017, someone using the email address istanx@gmail.com registered at the Russian freelancer job site fl.ru with the profile name of “Denis Kloster” and the Omsk phone number of 79136334444. Another record indexed by Constella suggests Denis’s real surname may in fact be “Emilyantsev” [Емельянцев].
That phone number is tied to the WHOIS registration records for multiple domain names over the years, including proxy[.]info, allproxy[.]info, kloster.pro and deniskloster.com.
A copy of the passport for Denis Kloster, as posted to his Vkontakte page in 2019. It shows that in Oct. 2019, he obtained a visa from the American Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.
The “about me” section of DenisKloster.com says the 35-year-old was born in Omsk, that he got his first computer at age 12, and graduated from high school at 16. Kloster says he’s worked in many large companies in Omsk as a system administrator, web developer and photographer.
According to Kloster’s blog, his first real job was running an “online advertising” firm he founded called Internet Advertising Omsk (“riOmsk“), and that he even lived in New York City for a while.
“Something new was required and I decided to leave Omsk and try to live in the States,” Kloster wrote in 2013. “I opened an American visa for myself, it was not difficult to get. And so I moved to live in New York, the largest city in the world, in a country where all wishes come true. But even this was not enough for me, and since then I began to travel the world.”
The current version of the About Me page on Kloster’s site says he closed his advertising business in 2013 to travel the world and focus on his new company: One that provides security and anonymity services to customers around the world. Kloster’s vanity website and LinkedIn page both list him as CEO of a company called “SL MobPartners.”
In 2016, Deniskloster.com featured a post celebrating three years in operation. The anniversary post said Kloster’s anonymity business had grown to nearly two dozen employees, most of whom were included in a group photo posted to that article (and some of whom Kloster thanked by their first names and last initials).
The employees who kept things running for RSOCKS, circa 2016.
“Thanks to you, we are now developing in the field of information security and anonymity!,” the post enthuses. “We make products that are used by thousands of people around the world, and this is very cool! And this is just the beginning!!! We don’t just work together and we’re not just friends, we’re Family.”
Mr. Kloster did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
It’s not clear if the coordinated takedown targeting the RSOCKS botnet will be permanent, as the botnet’s owners could simply rebuild — and possibly rebrand — their crime machine. Based on the RSOCKS owner’s posts, that is exactly what they intend to do.
“RSocks ceases to exist,” wrote the Rsocks account on the BlackHatWorld forum on June 17. “But don’t worry. All the active plans and fund balances will be transferred to another service. Stay tuned. We will inform you about its name and all the details later.”
Rsocks told the BlackHatWorld community they would be back soon under a new name.
Malware-based proxy services like RSOCKS have struggled to remain competitive in a cybercrime market with increasingly sophisticated proxy services that offer many additional features. The demise of RSOCKS follows closely on the heels of VIP72[.]com, a competing proxy botnet service that operated for a decade before its owners pulled the plug on the service last year.
On December 7, 2021, Google announced it was suing two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy — a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals — suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy’s founder is one of the men being sued by Google.
AWMproxy, the storefront for renting access to infected PCs, circa 2011.
Launched in March 2008, AWM Proxy quickly became the largest service for crooks seeking to route their malicious Web traffic through compromised devices. In 2011, researchers at Kaspersky Lab showed that virtually all of the hacked systems for rent at AWM Proxy had been compromised by TDSS (a.k.a TDL-4 and Alureon), a stealthy “rootkit” that installs deep within infected PCs and loads even before the underlying Windows operating system boots up.
In March 2011, security researchers at ESET found TDSS was being used to deploy Glupteba, another rootkit that steals passwords and other access credentials, disables security software, and tries to compromise other devices on the victim’s network — such as Internet routers and media storage servers — for use in relaying spam or other malicious traffic.
A report from the Polish computer emergency response team (CERT Orange Polksa) found Glupteba was by far the biggest malware threat in 2021.
Like its predecessor TDSS, Glupteba is primarily distributed through “pay-per-install” or PPI networks, and via traffic purchased from traffic distribution systems (TDS). Pay-per-install networks try to match cybercriminals who already have access to large numbers of hacked PCs with other crooks seeking broader distribution of their malware.
In a typical PPI network, clients will submit their malware—a spambot or password-stealing Trojan, for example —to the service, which in turn charges per thousand successful installations, with the price depending on the requested geographic location of the desired victims. One of the most common ways PPI affiliates generate revenue is by secretly bundling the PPI network’s installer with pirated software titles that are widely available for download via the web or from file-sharing networks.
An example of a cracked software download site distributing Glupteba. Image: Google.com.
Over the past decade, both Glupteba and AWM Proxy have grown substantially. When KrebsOnSecurity first covered AWM Proxy in 2011, the service was selling access to roughly 24,000 infected PCs scattered across dozens of countries. Ten years later, AWM Proxy was offering 10 times that number of hacked systems on any given day, and Glupteba had grown to more than one million infected devices worldwide.
There is also ample evidence to suggest that Glupteba may have spawned Meris, a massive botnet of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices that surfaced in September 2021 and was responsible for some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks the Internet has ever seen.
But on Dec. 7, 2021, Google announced it had taken technical measures to dismantle the Glupteba botnet, and filed a civil lawsuit (PDF) against two Russian men thought to be responsible for operating the vast crime machine. AWM Proxy’s online storefront disappeared that same day.
AWM Proxy quickly alerted its customers that the service had moved to a new domain, with all customer balances, passwords and purchase histories seamlessly ported over to the new home. However, subsequent takedowns targeting AWM Proxy’s domains and other infrastructure have conspired to keep the service on the ropes and frequently switching domains ever since.
Earlier this month, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. dismantled the “RSOCKS” botnet, a competing proxy service that had been in operation since 2014. KrebsOnSecurity has identified the owner of RSOCKS as a 35-year-old from Omsk, Russia who runs the world’s largest forum catering to spammers.
The employees who kept things running for RSOCKS, circa 2016.
Shortly after last week’s story on the RSOCKS founder, I heard from Riley Kilmer, co-founder of Spur.us, a startup that tracks criminal proxy services. Kilmer said RSOCKS was similarly disabled after Google’s combined legal sneak attack and technical takedown targeting Glupteba.
“The RSOCKS website gave you the estimated number of proxies in each of their subscription packages, and that number went down to zero on Dec. 7,” Kilmer said. “It’s not clear if that means the services were operated by the same people, or if they were just using the same sources (i.e., PPI programs) to generate new installations of their malware.”
Kilmer said each time his company tried to determine how many systems RSOCKS had for sale, they found each Internet address being sold by RSOCKS was also present in AWM Proxy’s network. In addition, Kilmer said, the application programming interfaces (APIs) used by both services to keep track of infected systems were virtually identical, once again suggesting strong collaboration.
“One hundred percent of the IPs we got back from RSOCKS we’d already identified in AWM,” Kilmer said. “And the IP port combinations they give you when you access an individual IP were the same as from AWM.”
In 2011, KrebsOnSecurity published an investigation that identified one of the founders of AWM Proxy, but Kilmer’s revelation prompted me to take a fresh look at the origins of this sprawling cybercriminal enterprise to determine if there were additional clues showing more concrete links between RSOCKS, AWM Proxy and Glupteba.
Supporting Kilmer’s theory that AWM Proxy and RSOCKS may simply be using the same PPI networks to spread, further research shows the RSOCKS owner also had an ownership stake in AD1[.]ru, an extremely popular Russian-language pay-per-install network that has been in operation for at least a decade.
Google took aim at Glupteba in part because its owners were using the botnet to divert and steal vast sums in online advertising revenue. So it’s more than a little ironic that the critical piece of evidence linking all of these operations begins with a Google Analytics code included in the HTML code for the original AWM Proxy back in 2008 (UA-3816536).
That analytics code also was present on a handful of other sites over the years, including the now-defunct Russian domain name registrar Domenadom[.]ru, and the website web-site[.]ru, which curiously was a Russian company operating a global real estate appraisal business called American Appraisal.
Two other domains connected to that Google Analytics code — Russian plastics manufacturers techplast[.]ru and tekhplast.ru — also shared a different Google Analytics code (UA-1838317) with web-site[.]ru and with the domain “starovikov[.]ru.”
The name on the WHOIS registration records for the plastics domains is an “Alexander I. Ukraincki,” whose personal information also is included in the domains tpos[.]ru and alphadisplay[.]ru, both apparently manufacturers of point-of-sale payment terminals in Russia.
Constella Intelligence, a security firm that indexes passwords and other personal information exposed in past data breaches, revealed dozens of variations on email addresses used by Alexander I. Ukraincki over the years. Most of those email addresses start with some variation of “uai@” followed by a domain from one of the many Russian email providers (e.g., yandex.ru, mail.ru). [Full disclosure: Constella is currently an advertiser on this website].
But Constella also shows those different email addresses all relied on a handful of passwords — most commonly “2222den” and “2222DEN.” Both of those passwords have been used almost exclusively in the past decade by the person who registered more than a dozen email addresses with the username “dennstr.”
The dennstr identity leads to several variations on the same name — Denis Strelinikov, or Denis Stranatka, from Ukraine, but those clues ultimately led nowhere promising. And maybe that was the point.
Things began looking brighter after I ran a search in DomainTools for web-site[.]ru’s original WHOIS records, which shows it was assigned in 2005 to a “private person” who used the email address lycefer@gmail.com. A search in Constella on that email address says it was used to register nearly two dozen domains, including starovikov.ru and starovikov[.]com.
A cached copy of the contact page for Starovikov[.]com shows that in 2008 it displayed the personal information for a Dmitry Starovikov, who listed his Skype username as “lycefer.”
Finally, Russian incorporation documents show the company LLC Website (web-site[.]ru)was registered in 2005 to two men, one of whom was named Dmitry Sergeevich Starovikov.
Bringing this full circle, Google says Starovikov is one of the two operators of the Glupteba botnet:
The cover page for Google’s lawsuit against the alleged Glupteba botnet operators.
Mr. Starovikov did not respond to requests for comment. But attorneys for Starovikov and his co-defendant last month filed a response to Google’s complaint in the Southern District of New York, denying (PDF) their clients had any knowledge of the scheme.
Despite all of the disruption caused by Google’s legal and technical meddling, AWM is still around and nearly as healthy as ever, although the service has been branded with a new name and there are dubious claims of new owners. Advertising customer plans ranging from $50 a day to nearly $700 for “VIP access,” AWM Proxy says its malware has been running on approximately 175,000 systems worldwide over the last 24 hours, and that roughly 65,000 of these systems are currently online.
AWM Proxy, as it exists today.
Meanwhile, the administrators of RSOCKS recently alerted customers that the service and any unspent balances will soon be migrated over to a new location.
Many people seem to equate spending time, money and effort to investigate and prosecute cybercriminals with the largely failed war on drugs, meaning there is an endless supply of up-and-coming crooks who will always fill in any gaps in the workforce whenever cybercriminals face justice.
While that may be true for many low-level cyber thieves today, investigations like these show once again how small the cybercriminal underground really is. It also shows how it makes a great deal of sense to focus efforts on targeting and disrupting the relatively small number of established hackers who remain the real force multipliers of cybercrime.
Microleaves, a ten-year-old proxy service that lets customers route their web traffic through millions of Microsoft Windows computers, recently fixed a vulnerability in their website that exposed their entire user database. Microleaves claims its proxy software is installed with user consent, but data exposed in the breach shows the service has a lengthy history of being supplied with new proxies by affiliates incentivized to distribute the software any which way they can — such as by secretly bundling it with other titles.
The Microleaves proxy service, which is in the process of being rebranded to Shifter[.[io.
Launched in 2013, Microleaves is a service that allows customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe. Microleaves works by changing each customer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address every five to ten minutes.
The service, which accepts PayPal, Bitcoin and all major credit cards, is aimed primarily at enterprises engaged in repetitive, automated activity that often results in an IP address being temporarily blocked — such as data scraping, or mass-creating new accounts at some service online.
In response to a report about the data exposure from KrebsOnSecurity, Microleaves said it was grateful for being notified about a “very serious issue regarding our customer information.”
Abhishek Gupta is the PR and marketing manager for Microleaves, which he said in the process of being rebranded to “Shifter.io.” Gupta said the report qualified as a “medium” severity security issue in Shifter’s brand new bug bounty program (the site makes no mention of a bug bounty), which he said offers up to $2,000 for reporting data exposure issues like the one they just fixed. KrebsOnSecurity declined the offer and requested that Shifter donate the amount to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group.
From its inception nearly a decade ago, Microleaves has claimed to lease between 20-30 million IPs via its service at any time. Riley Kilmer, co-founder of the proxy-tracking service Spur.us, said that 20-30 million number might be accurate for Shifter if measured across a six-month time frame. Currently, Spur is tracking roughly a quarter-million proxies associated with Microleaves/Shifter each day, with a high rate of churn in IPs.
Early on, this rather large volume of IP addresses led many to speculate that Microleaves was just a botnet which was being resold as a commercial proxy service.
Proxy traffic related to top Microleaves users, as exposed by the website’s API.
The very first discussion thread started by the new user Microleaves on the forum BlackHatWorld in 2013 sought forum members who could help test and grow the proxy network. At the time, the Microleaves user said their proxy network had 150,000 IPs globally, and was growing quickly.
One of BlackHatWorld’s moderators asked the administrator of the forum to review the Microleaves post.
“User states has 150k proxies,” the forum skeptic wrote. “No seller on BHW has 150k working daily proxies none of us do. Which hints at a possible BOTNET. That’s the only way you will get 150k.”
Microleaves has long been classified by antivirus companies as adware or as a “potentially unwanted program” (PUP), the euphemism that antivirus companies use to describe executable files that get installed with ambiguous consent at best, and are often part of a bundle of software tied to some “free” download. Security vendor Kaspersky flags the Microleaves family of software as a trojan horse program that commandeers the user’s Internet connection as a proxy without notifying the user.
“While working, these Trojans pose as Microsoft Windows Update,” Kaspersky wrote.
In a February 2014 post to BlackHatWorld, Microleaves announced that its sister service — reverseproxies[.]com — was now offering an “Auto CAPTCHA Solving Service,” which automates the solving of those squiggly and sometimes frustrating puzzles that many websites use to distinguish bots from real visitors. The CAPTCHA service was offered as an add-on to the Microleaves proxy service, and ranged in price from $20 for a 2-day trial to $320 for solving up to 80 captchas simultaneously.
“We break normal Recaptcha with 60-90% success rate, recaptcha with blobs 30% success, and 500+ other captcha,” Microleaves wrote. “As you know all success rate on recaptcha depends very much on good proxies that are fresh and not spammed!”
The exposed Microleaves user database shows that the first user created on the service — username “admin” — used the email address alex.iulian@aol.com. A search on that email address in Constella Intelligence, a service that tracks breached data, reveals it was used to create an account at the link shortening service bit.ly under the name Alexandru Florea, and the username “Acidut.” [Full disclosure: Constella is currently an advertiser on this website].
According to the cyber intelligence company Intel 471, a user named Acidut with the email address iulyan87_4u@gmail.com had an active presence on almost a dozen shadowy money-making and cybercrime forums from 2010 to 2017, including BlackHatWorld, Carder[.]pro, Hackforums, OpenSC, and CPAElites.
The user Microleaves (later “Shifter.io”) advertised on BlackHatWorld the sale of 31 million residential IPs for use as proxies, in late 2013. The same account continues to sell subscriptions to Shifter.io.
In a 2011 post on Hackforums, Acidut said they were building a botnet using an “exploit kit,” a set of browser exploits made to be stitched into hacked websites and foist malware on visitors. Acidut claimed their exploit kit was generating 3,000 to 5,000 new bots each day. OpenSC was hacked at one point, and its private messages show Acidut purchased a license from Exmanoize, the handle used by the creator of the Eleonore Exploit Kit.
By November 2013, Acidut was advertising the sale of “26 million SOCKS residential proxies.” In a March 2016 post to CPAElites, Acidut said they had a worthwhile offer for people involved in pay-per-install or “PPI” schemes, which match criminal gangs who pay for malware installs with enterprising hackers looking to sell access to compromised PCs and websites.
Because pay-per-install affiliate schemes rarely impose restrictions on how the software can be installed, such programs can be appealing for cybercriminals who already control large collections of hacked machines and/or compromised websites. Indeed, Acidut went a step further, adding that their program could be quietly and invisibly nested inside of other programs.
“For those of you who are doing PPI I have a global offer that you can bundle to your installer,” Acidut wrote. “I am looking for many installs for an app that will generate website visits. The installer has a silence version which you can use inside your installer. I am looking to buy as many daily installs as possible worldwide, except China.”
Asked about the source of their proxies in 2014, the Microleaves user responded that it was “something related to a PPI network. I can’t say more and I won’t get into details.”
Acidut authored a similar message on the forum BlackHatWorld in 2013, where they encouraged users to contact them on Skype at the username “nevo.julian.” That same Skype contact address was listed prominently on the Microleaves homepage up until about a week ago when KrebsOnSecurity first reached out to the company.
There is a Facebook profile for an Alexandru Iulian Florea from Constanta, Romania, whose username on the social media network is Acidut. Prior to KrebsOnSecurity alerting Shifter of its data breach, the Acidut profile page associated Florea with the websites microleaves.com, shrooms.io, leftclick[.]io, and online[.]io. Mr. Florea did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and his Facebook page no longer mentions these domains.
Leftclick and online[.]io emerged as subsidiaries of Microleaves between 2017 and 2018. According to a help wanted ad posted in 2018 for a developer position at online[.]io, the company’s services were brazenly pitched to investors as “a cybersecurity and privacy tool kit, offering extensive protection using advanced adblocking, anti-tracking systems, malware protection, and revolutionary VPN access based on residential IPs.”
A teaser from Irish Tech News.
“Online[.]io is developing the first fully decentralized peer-to-peer networking technology and revolutionizing the browsing experience by making it faster, ad free, more reliable, secure and non-trackable, thus freeing the Internet from annoying ads, malware, and trackers,” reads the rest of that help wanted ad.
Microleaves CEO Alexandru Florea gave an “interview” to the website Irishtechnews.ie in 2018, in which he explained how Online[.]io (OIO) was going to upend the online advertising and security industries with its initial coin offering (ICO). The word interview is in air quotes because the following statements by Florea deserved some serious pushback by the interviewer.
“Online[.]io solution, developed using the Ethereum blockchain, aims at disrupting the digital advertising market valued at more than $1 trillion USD,” Alexandru enthused. “By staking OIO tokens and implementing our solution, the website operators will be able to access a new non-invasive revenue stream, which capitalizes on time spent by users online.”
“At the same time, internet users who stake OIO tokens will have the opportunity to monetize on the time spent online by themselves and their peers on the World Wide Web,” he continued. “The time spent by users online will lead to ICE tokens being mined, which in turn can be used in the dedicated merchant system or traded on exchanges and consequently changed to fiat.”
Translation: If you install our proxy bot/CAPTCHA-solver/ad software on your computer — or as an exploit kit on your website — we’ll make millions hijacking ads and you will be rewarded with heaps of soon-to-be-worthless shitcoin. Oh, and all your security woes will disappear, too.
It’s unclear how many Internet users and websites willingly agreed to get bombarded with Online[.]io’s annoying ads and search hijackers — and to have their PC turned into a proxy or CAPTCHA-solving zombie for others. But that is exactly what multiple security companies said happened when users encountered online[.]io, which operated using the Microsoft Windows process name of “online-guardian.exe.”
Incredibly, Crunchbase says Online[.]io raised $6 million in funding for an initial coin offering in 2018, based on the plainly ludicrous claims made above. Since then, however, online[.]io seems to have gone…offline, for good.
Until this week, Shifter.io’s website also exposed information about its customer base and most active users, as well as how much money each client has paid over the lifetime of their subscription. The data indicates Shifter has earned more than $11.7 million in direct payments, although it’s unclear how far back in time those payment records go, or how complete they are.
The bulk of Shifter customers who spent more than $100,000 at the proxy service appear to be digital advertising companies, including some located in the United States. None of the several Shifter customers approached by KrebsOnSecurity agreed to be interviewed.
Shifter’s Gupta said he’d been with the company for three years, since the new owner took over the company and made the rebrand to Shifter.
“The company has been on the market for a long time, but operated under a different brand called Microleaves, until new ownership and management took over the company started a reorganization process that is still on-going,” Gupta said. “We are fully transparent. Mostly [our customers] work in the data scraping niche, this is why we actually developed more products in this zone and made a big shift towards APIs and integrated solutions in the past year.”
Ah yes, the same APIs and integrated solutions that were found exposed to the Internet and leaking all of Shifter’s customer information.
Gupta said the original founder of Microleaves was a man from India, who later sold the business to Florea. According to Gupta, the Romanian entrepreneur had multiple issues in trying to run the company, and then sold it three years ago to the current owner — Super Tech Ventures, a private equity company based in Taiwan.
“Our CEO is Wang Wei, he has been with the company since 3 years ago,” Gupta said. “Mr. Florea left the company two years ago after ending this transition period.”
Google and other search engines seem to know nothing about a Super Tech Ventures based in Taiwan. Incredibly, Shifter’s own PR person claimed that he, too, was in the dark on this subject.
“I would love to help, but I really don’t know much about the mother company,” Gupta said, essentially walking back his “fully transparent” statement. “I know they are a branch of the bigger group of asian investment firms focused on private equity in multiple industries.”
Adware and proxy software are often bundled together with “free” software utilities online, or with popular software titles that have been pirated and quietly fused with installers tied to various PPI affiliate schemes.
But just as often, these intrusive programs will include some type of notice — even if installed as part of a software bundle — that many users simply do not read and click “Next” to get on with installing whatever software they’re seeking to use. In these cases, selecting the “basic” or “default” settings while installing usually hides any per-program installation prompts, and assumes you agree to all of the bundled programs being installed. It’s always best to opt for the “custom” installation mode, which can give you a better idea of what is actually being installed, and can let you control certain aspects of the installation.
Either way, it’s best to start with the assumption that if a software or service online is “free,” that there is likely some component involved that allows the provider of that service to monetize your activity. As KrebsOnSecurity noted at the conclusion of last week’s story on a China-based proxy service called 911, the rule of thumb for transacting online is that if you’re not the paying customer, then you and/or your devices are probably the product that’s being sold to others.
Further reading on proxy services:
July 18, 2022: A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’
June 28, 2022: The Link Between AWM Proxy & the Glupteba Botnet
June 22, 2022: Meet the Administrators of the RSOCKS Proxy Botnet
Sept. 1, 2021: 15-Year-Old Malware Proxy Network VIP72 Goes Dark
Aug. 19, 2019: The Rise of “Bulletproof” Residential Networks
With the recent demise of several popular “proxy” services that let cybercriminals route their malicious traffic through hacked PCs, there is now something of a supply chain crisis gripping the underbelly of the Internet. Compounding the problem, several remaining malware-based proxy services have chosen to block new registrations to avoid swamping their networks with a sudden influx of customers.
Last week, a seven-year-old proxy service called 911[.]re abruptly announced it was permanently closing after a cybersecurity breach allowed unknown intruders to trash its servers and delete customer data and backups. 911 was already akin to critical infrastructure for many in the cybercriminal community after its top two competitors — VIP72 and LuxSocks — closed or were shut down by authorities over the past 10 months.
The underground cybercrime forums are now awash in pleas from people who are desperately seeking a new supplier of abundant, cheap, and reliably clean proxies to restart their businesses. The consensus seems to be that those days are now over, and while there are many smaller proxy services remaining, few of them on their own are capable of absorbing anywhere near the current demand.
“Everybody is looking for an alternative, bro,” wrote a BlackHatForums user on Aug. 1 in response to one of many “911 alternative” discussion threads. “No one knows an equivalent alternative to 911[.]re. Their service in terms of value and accessibility compared to other proxy providers was unmatched. Hopefully someone comes with a great alternative to 911[.]re.”
Among the more frequently recommended alternatives to 911 is SocksEscort[.]com, a malware-based proxy network that has been in existence since at least 2010. Here’s what part of their current homepage looks like:
The SocksEscort home page says its services are perfect for people involved in automated online activity that often results in IP addresses getting blocked or banned, such as Craigslist and dating scams, search engine results manipulation, and online surveys.
But faced with a deluge of new signups in the wake of 911’s implosion, SocksEscort was among the remaining veteran proxy services that opted to close its doors to new registrants, replacing its registration page with the message:
“Due to unusual high demand, and heavy load on our servers, we had to block all new registrations. We won’t be able to support our proxies otherwise, and close SocksEscort as a result. We will resume registrations right after demand drops. Thank you for understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience.”
According to Spur.us, a startup that tracks proxy services, SocksEscort is a malware-based proxy offering, which means the machines doing the proxying of traffic for SocksEscort customers have been infected with malicious software that turns them into a traffic relay.
Spur says SocksEscort’s proxy service relies on software designed to run on Windows computers, and is currently leasing access to more than 14,000 hacked computers worldwide. That is a far cry from the proxy inventory advertised by 911, which stood at more than 200,000 IP addresses for rent just a few days ago.
Image: Spur.us
SocksEscort is what’s known as a “SOCKS Proxy” service. The SOCKS (or SOCKS5) protocol allows Internet users to channel their Web traffic through a proxy server, which then passes the information on to the intended destination. From a website’s perspective, the traffic of the proxy network customer appears to originate from a rented/malware-infected PC tied to a residential ISP customer, not from the proxy service customer.
These services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.
The disruption at 911[.]re came days after KrebsOnSecurity published an in-depth look at the long-running proxy service, which showed that 911 had a history of incentivizing the installation of its proxy software without user notice or consent, and that it actually ran some of these “pay-per-install” schemes on its own to guarantee a steady supply of freshly-hacked PCs.
More on SocksEscort in an upcoming story.
Further reading:
July 29, 2022: 911 Proxy Service Implodes After Disclosing Breach
July 28, 2022: Breach Exposes Users of Microleaves Proxy Service
July 18, 2022: A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’
June 28, 2022: The Link Between AWM Proxy & the Glupteba Botnet
June 22, 2022: Meet the Administrators of the RSOCKS Proxy Botnet
Sept. 1, 2021: 15-Year-Old Malware Proxy Network VIP72 Goes Dark
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