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In 2021, the exclusive Russian cybercrime forum Mazafaka was hacked. The leaked user database shows one of the forum’s founders was an attorney who advised Russia’s top hackers on the legal risks of their work, and what to do if they got caught. A review of this user’s hacker identities shows that during his time on the forums he served as an officer in the special forces of the GRU, the foreign military intelligence agency of the Russian Federation.
Launched in 2001 under the tagline “Network terrorism,” Mazafaka would evolve into one of the most guarded Russian-language cybercrime communities. The forum’s member roster included a Who’s Who of top Russian cybercriminals, and it featured sub-forums for a wide range of cybercrime specialities, including malware, spam, coding and identity theft.
One representation of the leaked Mazafaka database.
In almost any database leak, the first accounts listed are usually the administrators and early core members. But the Mazafaka user information posted online was not a database file per se, and it was clearly edited, redacted and restructured by whoever released it. As a result, it can be difficult to tell which members are the earliest users.
The original Mazafaka is known to have been launched by a hacker using the nickname “Stalker.” However, the lowest numbered (non-admin) user ID in the Mazafaka database belongs to another individual who used the handle “Djamix,” and the email address djamix@mazafaka[.]ru.
From the forum’s inception until around 2008, Djamix was one of its most active and eloquent contributors. Djamix told forum members he was a lawyer, and nearly all of his posts included legal analyses of various public cases involving hackers arrested and charged with cybercrimes in Russia and abroad.
“Hiding with purely technical parameters will not help in a serious matter,” Djamix advised Maza members in September 2007. “In order to ESCAPE the law, you need to KNOW the law. This is the most important thing. Technical capabilities cannot overcome intelligence and cunning.”
Stalker himself credited Djamix with keeping Mazafaka online for so many years. In a retrospective post published to Livejournal in 2014 titled, “Mazafaka, from conception to the present day,” Stalker said Djamix had become a core member of the community.
“This guy is everywhere,” Stalker said of Djamix. “There’s not a thing on [Mazafaka] that he doesn’t take part in. For me, he is a stimulus-irritant and thanks to him, Maza is still alive. Our rallying force!”
Djamix told other forum denizens he was a licensed attorney who could be hired for remote or in-person consultations, and his posts on Mazafaka and other Russian boards show several hackers facing legal jeopardy likely took him up on this offer.
“I have the right to represent your interests in court,” Djamix said on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Verified in Jan. 2011. “Remotely (in the form of constant support and consultations), or in person – this is discussed separately. As well as the cost of my services.”
A search on djamix@mazafaka[.]ru at DomainTools.com reveals this address has been used to register at least 10 domain names since 2008. Those include several websites about life in and around Sochi, Russia, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, as well as a nearby coastal town called Adler. All of those sites say they were registered to an Aleksei Safronov from Sochi who also lists Adler as a hometown.
The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds that the phone number associated with those domains — +7.9676442212 — is tied to a Facebook account for an Aleksei Valerievich Safronov from Sochi. Mr. Safronov’s Facebook profile, which was last updated in October 2022, says his ICQ instant messenger number is 53765. This is the same ICQ number assigned to Djamix in the Mazafaka user database.
The Facebook account for Aleksey Safronov.
A “Djamix” account on the forum privetsochi[.]ru (“Hello Sochi”) says this user was born Oct. 2, 1970, and that his website is uposter[.]ru. This Russian language news site’s tagline is, “We Create Communication,” and it focuses heavily on news about Sochi, Adler, Russia and the war in Ukraine, with a strong pro-Kremlin bent.
Safronov’s Facebook profile also gives his Skype username as “Djamixadler,” and it includes dozens of photos of him dressed in military fatigues along with a regiment of soldiers deploying in fairly remote areas of Russia. Some of those photos date back to 2008.
In several of the images, we can see a patch on the arm of Safronov’s jacket that bears the logo of the Spetsnaz GRU, a special forces unit of the Russian military. According to a 2020 report from the Congressional Research Service, the GRU operates both as an intelligence agency — collecting human, cyber, and signals intelligence — and as a military organization responsible for battlefield reconnaissance and the operation of Russia’s Spetsnaz military commando units.
Mr. Safronov posted this image of himself on Facebook in 2016. The insignia of the GRU can be seen on his sleeve.
“In recent years, reports have linked the GRU to some of Russia’s most aggressive and public intelligence operations,” the CRS report explains. “Reportedly, the GRU played a key role in Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and invasion of eastern Ukraine, the attempted assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom, interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, disinformation and propaganda operations, and some of the world’s most damaging cyberattacks.”
According to the Russia-focused investigative news outlet Meduza, in 2014 the Russian Defense Ministry created its “information-operation troops” for action in “cyber-confrontations with potential adversaries.”
“Later, sources in the Defense Ministry explained that these new troops were meant to ‘disrupt the potential adversary’s information networks,'” Meduza reported in 2018. “Recruiters reportedly went looking for ‘hackers who have had problems with the law.'”
Mr. Safronov did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A 2018 treatise written by Aleksei Valerievich Safronov titled “One Hundred Years of GRU Military Intelligence” explains the significance of the bat in the seal of the GRU.
“One way or another, the bat is an emblem that unites all active and retired intelligence officers; it is a symbol of unity and exclusivity,” Safronov wrote. “And, in general, it doesn’t matter who we’re talking about – a secret GRU agent somewhere in the army or a sniper in any of the special forces brigades. They all did and are doing one very important and responsible thing.”
It’s unclear what role Mr. Safronov plays or played in the GRU, but it seems likely the military intelligence agency would have exploited his considerable technical skills, knowledge and connections on the Russian cybercrime forums.
Searching on Safronov’s domain uposter[.]ru in Constella Intelligence reveals that this domain was used in 2022 to register an account at a popular Spanish-language discussion forum dedicated to helping applicants prepare for a career in the Guardia Civil, one of Spain’s two national police forces. Pivoting on that Russian IP in Constella shows three other accounts were created at the same Spanish user forum around the same date.
Mark Rasch is a former cybercrime prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice who now serves as chief legal officer for the New York cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Rasch said there has always been a close relationship between the GRU and the Russian hacker community, noting that in the early 2000s the GRU was soliciting hackers with the skills necessary to hack US banks in order to procure funds to help finance Russia’s war in Chechnya.
“The guy is heavily hooked into the Russian cyber community, and that’s useful for intelligence services,” Rasch said. “He could have been infiltrating the community to monitor it for the GRU. Or he could just be a guy wearing a military uniform.”
Three Americans were charged this week with stealing more than $400 million in a November 2022 SIM-swapping attack. The U.S. government did not name the victim organization, but there is every indication that the money was stolen from the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which had just filed for bankruptcy on that same day.
A graphic illustrating the flow of more than $400 million in cryptocurrencies stolen from FTX on Nov. 11-12, 2022. Image: Elliptic.co.
An indictment unsealed this week and first reported on by Ars Technica alleges that Chicago man Robert Powell, a.k.a. “R,” “R$” and “ElSwapo1,” was the ringleader of a SIM-swapping group called the “Powell SIM Swapping Crew.” Colorado resident Emily “Em” Hernandez allegedly helped the group gain access to victim devices in service of SIM-swapping attacks between March 2021 and April 2023. Indiana resident Carter Rohn, a.k.a. “Carti,” and “Punslayer,” allegedly assisted in compromising devices.
In a SIM-swapping attack, the crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control, allowing them to intercept any text messages or phone calls sent to the victim, including one-time passcodes for authentication or password reset links sent via SMS.
The indictment states that the perpetrators in this heist stole the $400 million in cryptocurrencies on Nov. 11, 2022 after they SIM-swapped an AT&T customer by impersonating them at a retail store using a fake ID. However, the document refers to the victim in this case only by the name “Victim 1.”
Wired’s Andy Greenberg recently wrote about FTX’s all-night race to stop a $1 billion crypto heist that occurred on the evening of November 11:
“FTX’s staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company’s short life. What had recently been one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after an extended struggle, persuaded the company’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, to hand over the reins to John Ray III, a new chief executive now tasked with shepherding the company through a nightmarish thicket of debts, many of which it seemed to have no means to pay.”
“FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someone—a thief or thieves who have yet to be identified—chose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company’s cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time.”
The indictment says the $400 million was stolen over several hours between November 11 and 12, 2022. Tom Robinson, co-founder of the blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, said the attackers in the FTX heist began to drain FTX wallets on the evening of Nov. 11, 2022 local time, and continuing until the 12th of November.
Robinson said Elliptic is not aware of any other crypto heists of that magnitude occurring on that date.
“We put the value of the cryptoassets stolen at $477 million,” Robinson said. “The FTX administrators have reported overall losses due to “unauthorized third-party transfers” of $413 million – the discrepancy is likely due to subsequent seizure and return of some of the stolen assets. Either way, it’s certainly over $400 million, and we are not aware of any other thefts from crypto exchanges on this scale, on this date.”
The SIM-swappers allegedly responsible for the $400 million crypto theft are all U.S. residents. But there are some indications they had help from organized cybercriminals based in Russia. In October 2023, Elliptic released a report that found the money stolen from FTX had been laundered through exchanges with ties to criminal groups based in Russia.
“A Russia-linked actor seems a stronger possibility,” Elliptic wrote. “Of the stolen assets that can be traced through ChipMixer, significant amounts are combined with funds from Russia-linked criminal groups, including ransomware gangs and darknet markets, before being sent to exchanges. This points to the involvement of a broker or other intermediary with a nexus in Russia.”
Nick Bax, director of analytics at the cryptocurrency wallet recovery firm Unciphered, said the flow of stolen FTX funds looks more like what his team has seen from groups based in Eastern Europe and Russian than anything they’ve witnessed from US-based SIM-swappers.
“I was a bit surprised by this development but it seems to be consistent with reports from CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and others that “Scattered Spider” has worked with [ransomware] groups like ALPHV/BlackCat,” Bax said.
CISA’s alert on Scattered Spider says they are a cybercriminal group that targets large companies and their contracted information technology (IT) help desks.
“Scattered Spider threat actors, per trusted third parties, have typically engaged in data theft for extortion and have also been known to utilize BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware alongside their usual TTPs,” CISA said, referring to the group’s signature “Tactics, Techniques an Procedures.”
Nick Bax, posting on Twitter/X in Nov 2022 about his research on the $400 million FTX heist.
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity published a story noting that a Florida man recently charged with being part of a SIM-swapping conspiracy is thought to be a key member of Scattered Spider, a hacking group also known as 0ktapus. That group has been blamed for a string of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies during the summer of 2022.
Financial claims involving FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings are being handled by the financial and risk consulting giant Kroll. In August 2023, Kroll suffered its own breach after a Kroll employee was SIM-swapped. According to Kroll, the thieves stole user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that rely on Kroll services to handle bankruptcy proceedings.
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment for this story from Kroll, the FBI, the prosecuting attorneys, and Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm handling the FTX bankruptcy. This story will be updated in the event any of them respond.
Attorneys for Mr. Powell said they do not know who Victim 1 is in the indictment, as the government hasn’t shared that information yet. Powell’s next court date is a detention hearing on Feb. 2, 2024.
Update, Feb. 3, 12:19 p.m. ET: The FBI declined a request to comment.
On Jan. 9, 2024, U.S. authorities arrested a 19-year-old Florida man charged with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiring with others to use SIM-swapping to steal cryptocurrency. Sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity the accused was a key member of a criminal hacking group blamed for a string of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies during the summer of 2022.
A graphic depicting how 0ktapus leveraged one victim to attack another. Image credit: Amitai Cohen of Wiz.
Prosecutors say Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla., stole at least $800,000 from at least five victims between August 2022 and March 2023. In each attack, the victims saw their email and financial accounts compromised after suffering an unauthorized SIM-swap, wherein attackers transferred each victim’s mobile phone number to a new device that they controlled.
The government says Urban went by the aliases “Sosa” and “King Bob,” among others. Multiple trusted sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Sosa/King Bob was a core member of a hacking group behind the 2022 breach at Twilio, a company that provides services for making and receiving text messages and phone calls. Twilio disclosed in Aug. 2022 that an intrusion had exposed a “limited number” of Twilio customer accounts through a sophisticated social engineering attack designed to steal employee credentials.
Shortly after that disclosure, the security firm Group-IB published a report linking the attackers behind the Twilio intrusion to separate breaches at more than 130 organizations, including LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and Plex. Multiple security firms soon assigned the hacking group the nickname “Scattered Spider.”
Group-IB dubbed the gang by a different name — 0ktapus — which was a nod to how the criminal group phished employees for credentials. The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.
A booking photo of Noah Michael Urban released by the Volusia County Sheriff.
0ktapus used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the targeted company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule. The phishing sites used a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website.
0ktapus often leveraged information or access gained in one breach to perpetrate another. As documented by Group-IB, the group pivoted from its access to Twilio to attack at least 163 of its customers. Among those was the encrypted messaging app Signal, which said the breach could have let attackers re-register the phone number on another device for about 1,900 users.
Also in August 2022, several employees at email delivery firm Mailchimp provided their remote access credentials to this phishing group. According to an Aug. 12 blog post, the attackers used their access to Mailchimp employee accounts to steal data from 214 customers involved in cryptocurrency and finance.
On August 25, 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which attackers stole some source code and proprietary LastPass technical information, and weeks later LastPass said an investigation revealed no customer data or password vaults were accessed.
However, on November 30, 2022 LastPass disclosed a far more serious breach that the company said leveraged data stolen in the August breach. LastPass said criminal hackers had stolen encrypted copies of some password vaults, as well as other personal information.
In February 2023, LastPass disclosed that the intrusion involved a highly complex, targeted attack against a DevOps engineer who was one of only four LastPass employees with access to the corporate vault. In that incident, the attackers exploited a security vulnerability in a Plex media server that the employee was running on his home network, and succeeded in installing malicious software that stole passwords and other authentication credentials. The vulnerability exploited by the intruders was patched back in 2020, but the employee never updated his Plex software.
As it happens, Plex announced its own data breach one day before LastPass disclosed its initial August intrusion. On August 24, 2022, Plex’s security team urged users to reset their passwords, saying an intruder had accessed customer emails, usernames and encrypted passwords.
A review of thousands of messages that Sosa and King Bob posted to several public forums and Discord servers over the past two years shows that the person behind these identities was mainly focused on two things: Sim-swapping, and trading in stolen, unreleased rap music recordings from popular artists.
Indeed, those messages show Sosa/King Bob was obsessed with finding new “grails,” the slang term used in some cybercrime discussion channels to describe recordings from popular artists that have never been officially released. It stands to reason that King Bob was SIM-swapping important people in the music industry to obtain these files, although there is little to support this conclusion from the public chat records available.
“I got the most music in the com,” King Bob bragged in a Discord server in November 2022. “I got thousands of grails.”
King Bob’s chats show he was particularly enamored of stealing the unreleased works of his favorite artists — Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, and Juice Wrld. When another Discord user asked if he has Eminem grails, King Bob said he was unsure.
“I have two folders,” King Bob explained. “One with Uzi, Carti, Juicewrld. And then I have ‘every other artist.’ Every other artist is unorganized as fuck and has thousands of random shit.”
King Bob’s posts on Discord show he quickly became a celebrity on Leaked[.]cx, one of most active forums for trading, buying and selling unreleased music from popular artists. The more grails that users share with the Leaked[.]cx community, the more their status and access on the forum grows.
The last cache of Leaked dot cx indexed by the archive.org on Jan. 11, 2024.
And King Bob shared a large number of his purloined tunes with this community. Still others he tried to sell. It’s unclear how many of those sales were ever consummated, but it is not unusual for a prized grail to sell for anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000.
In mid-January 2024, several Leaked[.]cx regulars began complaining that they hadn’t seen King Bob in a while and were really missing his grails. On or around Jan. 11, the same day the Justice Department unsealed the indictment against Urban, Leaked[.]cx started blocking people who were trying to visit the site from the United States.
Days later, frustrated Leaked[.]cx users speculated about what could be the cause of the blockage.
“Probs blocked as part of king bob investigation i think?,” wrote the user “Plsdontarrest.” “Doubt he only hacked US artists/ppl which is why it’s happening in multiple countries.”
On Sept. 21, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a “Foreshadow,” the nickname chosen by a Florida teenager who was working for a SIM-swapping crew when he was abducted, beaten and held for a $200,000 ransom. A rival SIM-swapping group claimed that Foreshadow and his associates had robbed them of their fair share of the profits from a recent SIM-swap.
In a video released by his abductors on Telegram, a bloodied, battered Foreshadow was made to say they would kill him unless the ransom was paid.
As I wrote in that story, Foreshadow appears to have served as a “holder” — a term used to describe a low-level member of any SIM-swapping group who agrees to carry out the riskiest and least rewarding role of the crime: Physically keeping and managing the various mobile devices and SIM cards that are used in SIM-swapping scams.
KrebsOnSecurity has since learned that Foreshadow was a holder for a particularly active SIM-swapper who went by “Elijah,” which was another nickname that prosecutors say Urban used.
Shortly after Foreshadow’s hostage video began circulating on Telegram and Discord, multiple known actors in the SIM-swapping space told everyone in the channels to delete any previous messages with Foreshadow, claiming he was fully cooperating with the FBI.
This was not the first time Sosa and his crew were hit with violent attacks from rival SIM-swapping groups. In early 2022, a video surfaced on a popular cybercrime channel purporting to show attackers hurling a brick through a window at an address that matches the spacious and upscale home of Urban’s parents in Sanford, Fl.
“Brickings” are among the “violence-as-a-service” offerings broadly available on many cybercrime channels. SIM-swapping and adjacent cybercrime channels are replete with job offers for in-person assignments and tasks that can be found if one searches for posts titled, “If you live near,” or “IRL job” — short for “in real life” job.
A number of these classified ads are in service of performing brickings, where someone is hired to visit a specific address and toss a brick through the target’s window. Other typical IRL job offers involve tire slashings and even drive-by shootings.
Sosa was known to be a top member of the broader cybercriminal community online known as “The Com,” wherein hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that almost invariably begin with social engineering — tricking people over the phone, email or SMS into giving away credentials that allow remote access to corporate internal networks.
Sosa also was active in a particularly destructive group of accomplished criminal SIM-swappers known as “Star Fraud.” Cyberscoop’s AJ Vicens reported last year that individuals within Star Fraud were likely involved in the high-profile Caesars Entertainment an MGM Resorts extortion attacks.
“ALPHV, an established ransomware-as-a-service operation thought to be based in Russia and linked to attacks on dozens of entities, claimed responsibility for Caesars and MGM attacks in a note posted to its website earlier this month,” Vicens wrote. “Experts had said the attacks were the work of a group tracked variously as UNC 3944 or Scattered Spider, which has been described as an affiliate working with ALPHV made up of people in the United States and Britain who excel at social engineering.”
In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published data taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two other SIM-swapping groups showing these crooks focused on SIM-swapping T-Mobile customers, and that they collectively claimed access to T-Mobile on 100 separate occasions over a 7-month period in 2022.
The SIM-swapping groups were able to switch targeted phone numbers to another device on demand because they constantly phished T-Mobile employees into giving up credentials to employee-only tools. In each of those cases the goal was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device.
Allison Nixon, chief research officer at the New York cybersecurity consultancy Unit 221B, said the increasing brazenness of many Com members is a function of how long it has taken federal authorities to go after guys like Sosa.
“These incidents show what happens when it takes too long for cybercriminals to get arrested,” Nixon said. “If governments fail to prioritize this source of threat, violence originating from the Internet will affect regular people.”
The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports that Urban was arrested Jan. 9 and his trial is scheduled to begin in the trial term starting March 4 in Jacksonville. The publication said the judge overseeing Urban’s case denied bail because the defendant was a strong flight risk.
At Urban’s arraignment, it emerged that he had no fixed address and had been using an alias to stay at an Airbnb. The judge reportedly said that when a search warrant was executed at Urban’s residence, the defendant was downloading programs to delete computer files.
What’s more, the judge explained, despite telling authorities in May that he would not have any more contact with his co-conspirators and would not engage in cryptocurrency transactions, he did so anyway.
Urban entered a plea of not guilty. Urban’s court-appointed attorney said her client would have no comment at this time.
Prosecutors charged Urban with eight counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and five counts of aggravated identity theft. According to the government, if convicted Urban faces up to 20 years in federal prison on each wire fraud charge. He also faces a minimum mandatory penalty of two years in prison for the aggravated identity offenses, which will run consecutive to any other prison sentence imposed.
Authorities in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States this week levied financial sanctions against a Russian man accused of stealing data on nearly 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank. 33-year-old Aleksandr Ermakov allegedly stole and leaked the Medibank data while working with one of Russia’s most destructive ransomware groups, but little more is shared about the accused. Here’s a closer look at the activities of Mr. Ermakov’s alleged hacker handles.
Aleksandr Ermakov, 33, of Russia. Image: Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The allegations against Ermakov mark the first time Australia has sanctioned a cybercriminal. The documents released by the Australian government included multiple photos of Mr. Ermakov, and it was clear they wanted to send a message that this was personal.
It’s not hard to see why. The attackers who broke into Medibank in October 2022 stole 9.7 million records on current and former Medibank customers. When the company refused to pay a $10 million ransom demand, the hackers selectively leaked highly sensitive health records, including those tied to abortions, HIV and alcohol abuse.
The U.S. government says Ermakov and the other actors behind the Medibank hack are believed to be linked to the Russia-backed cybercrime gang REvil.
“REvil was among the most notorious cybercrime gangs in the world until July 2021 when they disappeared. REvil is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation and generally motivated by financial gain,” a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury reads. “REvil ransomware has been deployed on approximately 175,000 computers worldwide, with at least $200 million paid in ransom.”
The sanctions say Ermakov went by multiple aliases on Russian cybercrime forums, including GustaveDore, JimJones, and Blade Runner. A search on the handle GustaveDore at the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 shows this user created a ransomware affiliate program in November 2021 called Sugar (a.k.a. Encoded01), which focused on targeting single computers and end-users instead of corporations.
An ad for the ransomware-as-a-service program Sugar posted by GustaveDore warns readers against sharing information with security researchers, law enforcement, or “friends of Krebs.”
In November 2020, Intel 471 analysts concluded that GustaveDore’s alias JimJones “was using and operating several different ransomware strains, including a private undisclosed strain and one developed by the REvil gang.”
In 2020, GustaveDore advertised on several Russian discussion forums that he was part of a Russian technology firm called Shtazi, which could be hired for computer programming, web development, and “reputation management.” Shtazi’s website remains in operation today.
A Google-translated version of Shtazi dot ru. Image: Archive.org.
The third result when one searches for shtazi[.]ru in Google is an Instagram post from a user named Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, who promotes Shtazi’s services as if it were also his business. If this name sounds familiar, it’s because in December 2023 KrebsOnSecurity identified Mr. Shefel as “Rescator,” the cybercriminal identity tied to tens of millions of payment cards that were stolen in 2013 and 2014 from big box retailers Target and Home Depot, among others.
How close was the connection between GustaveDore and Mr. Shefel? The Treasury Department’s sanctions page says Ermakov used the email address ae.ermak@yandex.ru. A search for this email at DomainTools.com shows it was used to register just one domain name: millioner1[.]com. DomainTools further finds that a phone number tied to Mr. Shefel (79856696666) was used to register two domains: millioner[.]pw, and shtazi[.]net.
The December 2023 story here that outed Mr. Shefel as Rescator noted that Shefel recently changed his last name to “Lenin” and had launched a service called Lenin[.]biz that sells physical USSR-era Ruble notes bearing the image of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. The Instagram account for Mr. Shefel includes images of stacked USSR-era Ruble notes, as well as multiple links to Shtazi.
The Instagram account of Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, aka MikeMike aka Rescator.
Intel 471’s research revealed Ermakov was affiliated in some way with REvil because the stolen Medibank data was published on a blog that had one time been controlled by REvil affiliates who carried out attacks and paid an affiliate fee to the gang.
But by the time of the Medibank hack, the REvil group had mostly scattered after a series of high-profile attacks led to the group being disrupted by law enforcement. In November 2021, Europol announced it arrested seven REvil affiliates who collectively made more than $230 million worth of ransom demands since 2019. At the same time, U.S. authorities unsealed two indictments against a pair of accused REvil cybercriminals.
“The posting of Medibank’s data on that blog, however, indicated a connection with that group, although the connection wasn’t clear at the time,” Intel 471 wrote. “This makes sense in retrospect, as Ermakov’s group had also been a REvil affiliate.”
It is easy to dismiss sanctions like these as ineffective, because as long as Mr. Ermakov remains in Russia he has little to fear of arrest. However, his alleged role as an apparent top member of REvil paints a target on him as someone who likely possesses large sums of cryptocurrency, said Patrick Gray, the Australian co-host and founder of the security news podcast Risky Business.
“I’ve seen a few people poo-poohing the sanctions…but the sanctions component is actually less important than the doxing component,” Gray said. “Because this guy’s life just got a lot more complicated. He’s probably going to have to pay some bribes to stay out of trouble. Every single criminal in Russia now knows he is a vulnerable 33 year old with an absolute ton of bitcoin. So this is not a happy time for him.”
Update, Feb. 21, 1:10 p.m. ET: The Russian security firm F.A.C.C.T reports that Ermakov has been arrested in Russia, and charged with violating domestic laws that prohibit the creation, use and distribution of malicious computer programs.
“During the investigation, several defendants were identified who were not only promoting their ransomware, but also developing custom-made malicious software, creating phishing sites for online stores, and driving user traffic to fraudulent schemes popular in Russia and the CIS,” F.A.C.C.T. wrote. “Among those detained was the owner of the nicknames blade_runner, GistaveDore, GustaveDore, JimJones.”
Google continues to struggle with cybercriminals running malicious ads on its search platform to trick people into downloading booby-trapped copies of popular free software applications. The malicious ads, which appear above organic search results and often precede links to legitimate sources of the same software, can make searching for software on Google a dicey affair.
Google says keeping users safe is a top priority, and that the company has a team of thousands working around the clock to create and enforce their abuse policies. And by most accounts, the threat from bad ads leading to backdoored software has subsided significantly compared to a year ago.
But cybercrooks are constantly figuring out ingenious ways to fly beneath Google’s anti-abuse radar, and new examples of bad ads leading to malware are still too common.
For example, a Google search earlier this week for the free graphic design program FreeCAD produced the following result, which shows that a “Sponsored” ad at the top of the search results is advertising the software available from freecad-us[.]org. Although this website claims to be the official FreeCAD website, that honor belongs to the result directly below — the legitimate freecad.org.
How do we know freecad-us[.]org is malicious? A review at DomainTools.com show this domain is the newest (registered Jan. 19, 2024) of more than 200 domains at the Internet address 93.190.143[.]252 that are confusingly similar to popular software titles, including dashlane-project[.]com, filezillasoft[.]com, keepermanager[.]com, and libreofficeproject[.]com.
Some of the domains at this Netherlands host appear to be little more than software review websites that steal content from established information sources in the IT world, including Gartner, PCWorld, Slashdot and TechRadar.
Other domains at 93.190.143[.]252 do serve actual software downloads, but none of them are likely to be malicious if one visits the sites through direct navigation. If one visits openai-project[.]org and downloads a copy of the popular Windows desktop management application Rainmeter, for example, the file that is downloaded has the same exact file signature as the real Rainmeter installer available from rainmeter.net.
But this is only a ruse, says Tom Hegel, principal threat researcher at the security firm Sentinel One. Hegel has been tracking these malicious domains for more than a year, and he said the seemingly benign software download sites will periodically turn evil, swapping out legitimate copies of popular software titles with backdoored versions that will allow cybercriminals to remotely commander the systems.
“They’re using automation to pull in fake content, and they’re rotating in and out of hosting malware,” Hegel said, noting that the malicious downloads may only be offered to visitors who come from specific geographic locations, like the United States. “In the malicious ad campaigns we’ve seen tied to this group, they would wait until the domains gain legitimacy on the search engines, and then flip the page for a day or so and then flip back.”
In February 2023, Hegel co-authored a report on this same network, which Sentinel One has dubbed MalVirt (a play on “malvertising”). They concluded that the surge in malicious ads spoofing various software products was directly responsible for a surge in malware infections from infostealer trojans like IcedID, Redline Stealer, Formbook and AuroraStealer.
Hegel noted that the spike in malicious software-themed ads came not long after Microsoft started blocking by default Office macros in documents downloaded from the Internet. He said the volume of the current malicious ad campaigns from this group appears to be relatively low compared to a year ago.
“It appears to be same campaign continuing,” Hegel said. “Last January, every Google search for ‘Autocad’ led to something bad. Now, it’s like they’re paying Google to get one out of every dozen of searches. My guess it’s still continuing because of the up-and-down [of the] domains hosting malware and then looking legitimate.”
Several of the websites at this Netherlands host (93.190.143[.]252) are currently blocked by Google’s Safebrowsing technology, and labeled with a conspicuous red warning saying the website will try to foist malware on visitors who ignore the warning and continue.
But it remains a mystery why Google has not similarly blocked more than 240+ other domains at this same host, or else removed them from its search index entirely. Especially considering there is nothing else but these domains hosted at that Netherlands IP address, and because they have all remained at that address for the past year.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Google said maintaining a safe ads ecosystem and keeping malware off of its platforms is a priority across Google.
“Bad actors often employ sophisticated measures to conceal their identities and evade our policies and enforcement, sometimes showing Google one thing and users something else,” Google said in a written statement. “We’ve reviewed the ads in question, removed those that violated our policies, and suspended the associated accounts. We’ll continue to monitor and apply our protections.”
Google says it removed 5.2 billion ads in 2022, and restricted more than 4.3 billion ads and suspended over 6.7 million advertiser accounts. The company’s latest ad safety report says Google in 2022 blocked or removed 1.36 billion advertisements for violating its abuse policies.
Some of the domains referenced in this story were included in Sentinel One’s February 2023 report, but dozens more have been added since, such as those spoofing the official download sites for Corel Draw, Github Desktop, Roboform and Teamviewer.
This October 2023 report on the FreeCAD user forum came from a user who reported downloading a copy of the software from freecadsoft[.]com after seeing the site promoted at the top of a Google search result for “freecad.” Almost a month later, another FreeCAD user reported getting stung by the same scam.
“This got me,” FreeCAD forum user “Matterform” wrote on Nov. 19, 2023. “Please leave a report with Google so it can flag it. They paid Google for sponsored posts.”
Sentinel One’s report didn’t delve into the “who” behind this ongoing MalVirt campaign, and there are precious few clues that point to attribution. All of the domains in question were registered through webnic.cc, and several of them display a placeholder page saying the site is ready for content. Viewing the HTML source of these placeholder pages shows many of the hidden comments in the code are in Cyrillic.
Trying to track the crooks using Google’s Ad Transparency tools didn’t lead far. The ad transparency record for the malicious ad featuring freecad-us[.]org (in the screenshot above) shows that the advertising account used to pay for the ad has only run one previous ad through Google search: It advertised a wedding photography website in New Zealand.
The apparent owner of that photography website did not respond to requests for comment, but it’s also likely his Google advertising account was hacked and used to run these malicious ads.
The rapper and social media personality Punchmade Dev is perhaps best known for his flashy videos singing the praises of a cybercrime lifestyle. With memorable hits such as “Internet Swiping” and “Million Dollar Criminal” earning millions of views, Punchmade has leveraged his considerable following to peddle tutorials on how to commit financial crimes online. But until recently, there wasn’t much to support a conclusion that Punchmade was actually doing the cybercrime things he promotes in his songs.
Images from Punchmade Dev’s Twitter/X account show him displaying bags of cash and wearing a functional diamond-crusted payment card skimmer.
Punchmade Dev’s most controversial mix — a rap called “Wire Fraud Tutorial” — was taken down by Youtube last summer for violating the site’s rules. Punchmade shared on social media that the video’s removal was prompted by YouTube receiving a legal process request from law enforcement officials.
The 24-year-old rapper told reporters he wasn’t instructing people how to conduct wire fraud, but instead informing his fans on how to avoid being victims of wire fraud. However, this is difficult to discern from listening to the song, which sounds very much like a step-by-step tutorial on how to commit wire fraud.
“Listen up, I’m finna show y’all how to hit a bank,” Wire Fraud Tutorial begins. “Just pay attention, this is a quick way to jug in any state. First you wanna get a bank log from a trusted site. Do your research because the information must be right.”
And even though we’re talking about an individual who regularly appears in videos wearing a half-million dollars worth of custom jewelry draped around his arm and neck (including the functional diamond-encrusted payment card skimming device pictured above), there’s never been much evidence that Punchmade was actually involved in committing cybercrimes himself. Even his most vocal critics acknowledged that the whole persona could just be savvy marketing.
That changed recently when Punchmade’s various video and social media accounts began promoting a new web shop that is selling stolen payment cards and identity data, as well as hacked financial accounts and software for producing counterfeit checks.
Punchmade Dev’s shop.
The official Punchmadedev account on Instagram links to many of the aforementioned rap videos and tutorials on cybercriming, as well as to Punchmadedev’s other profiles and websites. Among them is mainpage[.]me/punchmade, which includes the following information for “Punchmade Empire ®”
-212,961 subscribers
#1 source on Telegram
Contact: @whopunchmade
24/7 shop: https://punchmade[.]atshop[.]io
Visiting that @whopunchmade Telegram channel shows this user is promoting punchmade[.]atshop[.]io, which is currently selling hacked bank accounts and payment cards with high balances.
Clicking “purchase” on the C@sh App offering, for example, shows that for $80 the buyer will receive logins to Cash App accounts with balances between $3,000 and $5,000. “If you buy this item you’ll get my full support on discord/telegram if there is a problem!,” the site promises. Purchases can be made in cryptocurrencies, and checking out prompts one to continue payment at Coinbase.com.
Another item for sale, “Fullz + Linkable CC,” promises “ID Front + Back, SSN with 700+ Credit Score, and Linkable CC” or credit card. That also can be had for $80 in crypto.
Punchmade has fashioned his public persona around a collection of custom-made, diamond-covered necklaces that are as outlandish and gaudy as they are revelatory. My favorite shot from one of Punchmade’s videos features at least three of these monstrosities: One appears to be a boring old diamond and gold covered bitcoin, but the other two necklaces tell us something about where Punchmade is from:
Notice the University of Kentucky logo, and the Lexington, Ky skyline.
One of them includes the logo and mascot of the University of Kentucky. The other, an enormous diamond studded skyline, appears to have been designed based on the skyline in Lexington, Ky:
The “About” page on Punchmade Dev’s Spotify profile describes him as “an American artist, rapper, musician, producer, director, entrepreneur, actor and investor.” “Punchmade Dev is best known for his creative ways to use technology, video gaming, and social media to build a fan base,” the profile continues.
The profile explains that he launched his own record label in 2021 called Punchmade Records, where he produces his own instrumentals and edits his own music videos.
A search on companies that include the name “punchmade” at the website of the Kentucky Secretary of State brings up just one record: OBN Group LLC, in Lexington, Ky. This November 2021 record includes a Certificate of Assumed Name, which shows that Punchmade LLC is the assumed name of OBN Group LLC.
The president of OBN Group LLC is listed as Devon Turner. A search on the Secretary of State website for other businesses tied to Devon Turner reveals just one other record: A now-defunct entity called DevTakeFlightBeats Inc.
The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds that Devon Turner from Lexington, Ky. used the email address obndevpayments@gmail.com. A lookup on this email at DomainTools.com shows it was used to register the domain foreverpunchmade[.]com, which is registered to a Devon Turner in Lexington, Ky. A copy of this site at archive.org indicates it once sold Punchmade Dev-branded t-shirts and other merchandise.
Mr. Turner did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Searching online for Devon Turner and “Punchmade” brings up a video from @brainjuiceofficial, a YouTube channel that focuses on social media celebrities. @Brainjuiceofficial says Turner was born in October 2000, the oldest child of a single mother of five whose husband was not in the picture.
Devon Turner, a.k.a. “Punchmade Dev,” in an undated photo.
The video says the six-foot five Turner played basketball, track and football in high school, but that he gradually became obsessed with playing the video game NBA 2K17 and building a following of people watching him play the game competitively online.
According to this brief documentary, Turner previously streamed his NBA 2K17 videos on a YouTube channel called DevTakeFlight, although he originally went by the nickname OBN Dev.
“Things may eventually catch up to Devon if he isn’t careful,” @Brainjuiceofficial observed, noting that Turner has been shot at before, and also robbed at an ATM while flexing a bunch of cash for a picture and wearing $500k in jewelry. “Although you have a lot of people that are into what you do, there are a lot of people waiting for you to slip up.”
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