April’s Patch Tuesday Brings Record Number of Fixes

If only Patch Tuesdays came around infrequently — like total solar eclipse rare — instead of just creeping up on us each month like The Man in the Moon. Although to be fair, it would be tough for Microsoft to eclipse the number of vulnerabilities fixed in this month’s patch batch — a record 147 flaws in Windows and related software.

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft today released updates to address 147 security holes in Windows, Office, Azure, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server, DNS Server, Windows Defender, Bitlocker, and Windows Secure Boot.

“This is the largest release from Microsoft this year and the largest since at least 2017,” said Dustin Childs, from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). “As far as I can tell, it’s the largest Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft of all time.”

Tempering the sheer volume of this month’s patches is the middling severity of many of the bugs. Only three of April’s vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they can be abused by malware or malcontents to take remote control over unpatched systems with no help from users.

Most of the flaws that Microsoft deems “more likely to be exploited” this month are marked as “important,” which usually involve bugs that require a bit more user interaction (social engineering) but which nevertheless can result in system security bypass, compromise, and the theft of critical assets.

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs called attention to CVE-2024-20670, an Outlook for Windows spoofing vulnerability described as being easy to exploit. It involves convincing a user to click on a malicious link in an email, which can then steal the user’s password hash and authenticate as the user in another Microsoft service.

Another interesting bug McCarthy pointed to is CVE-2024-29063, which involves hard-coded credentials in Azure’s search backend infrastructure that could be gleaned by taking advantage of Azure AI search.

“This along with many other AI attacks in recent news shows a potential new attack surface that we are just learning how to mitigate against,” McCarthy said. “Microsoft has updated their backend and notified any customers who have been affected by the credential leakage.”

CVE-2024-29988 is a weakness that allows attackers to bypass Windows SmartScreen, a technology Microsoft designed to provide additional protections for end users against phishing and malware attacks. Childs said one of ZDI’s researchers found this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, although Microsoft doesn’t currently list CVE-2024-29988 as being exploited.

“I would treat this as in the wild until Microsoft clarifies,” Childs said. “The bug itself acts much like CVE-2024-21412 – a [zero-day threat from February] that bypassed the Mark of the Web feature and allows malware to execute on a target system. Threat actors are sending exploits in a zipped file to evade EDR/NDR detection and then using this bug (and others) to bypass Mark of the Web.”

Update, 7:46 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story said there were no zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this month. BleepingComputer reports that Microsoft has since confirmed that there are actually two zero-days. One is the flaw Childs just mentioned (CVE-2024-21412), and the other is CVE-2024-26234, described as a “proxy driver spoofing” weakness.

Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that this month’s release includes fixes for two dozen flaws in Windows Secure Boot, the majority of which are considered “Exploitation Less Likely” according to Microsoft.

“However, the last time Microsoft patched a flaw in Windows Secure Boot in May 2023 had a notable impact as it was exploited in the wild and linked to the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit, which was sold on dark web forums for $5,000,” Narang said. “BlackLotus can bypass functionality called secure boot, which is designed to block malware from being able to load when booting up. While none of these Secure Boot vulnerabilities addressed this month were exploited in the wild, they serve as a reminder that flaws in Secure Boot persist, and we could see more malicious activity related to Secure Boot in the future.”

For links to individual security advisories indexed by severity, check out ZDI’s blog and the Patch Tuesday post from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Please consider backing up your data or your drive before updating, and drop a note in the comments here if you experience any issues applying these fixes.

Adobe today released nine patches tackling at least two dozen vulnerabilities in a range of software products, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Commerce, InDesign, Experience Manager, Media Encoder, Bridge, Illustrator, and Adobe Animate.

KrebsOnSecurity needs to correct the record on a point mentioned at the end of March’s “Fat Patch Tuesday” post, which looked at new AI capabilities built into Adobe Acrobat that are turned on by default. Adobe has since clarified that its apps won’t use AI to auto-scan your documents, as the original language in its FAQ suggested.

“In practice, no document scanning or analysis occurs unless a user actively engages with the AI features by agreeing to the terms, opening a document, and selecting the AI Assistant or generative summary buttons for that specific document,” Adobe said earlier this month.

A Close Up Look at the Consumer Data Broker Radaris

If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the co-founders of Radaris operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of their businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Formed in 2009, Radaris is a vast people-search network for finding data on individuals, properties, phone numbers, businesses and addresses. Search for any American’s name in Google and the chances are excellent that a listing for them at Radaris.com will show up prominently in the results.

Radaris reports typically bundle a substantial amount of data scraped from public and court documents, including any current or previous addresses and phone numbers, known email addresses and registered domain names. The reports also list address and phone records for the target’s known relatives and associates. Such information could be useful if you were trying to determine the maiden name of someone’s mother, or successfully answer a range of other knowledge-based authentication questions.

Currently, consumer reports advertised for sale at Radaris.com are being fulfilled by a different people-search company called TruthFinder. But Radaris also operates a number of other people-search properties — like Centeda.com — that sell consumer reports directly and behave almost identically to TruthFinder: That is, reel the visitor in with promises of detailed background reports on people, and then charge a $34.99 monthly subscription fee just to view the results.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) assigns Radaris a rating of “F” for consistently ignoring consumers seeking to have their information removed from Radaris’ various online properties. Of the 159 complaints detailed there in the last year, several were from people who had used third-party identity protection services to have their information removed from Radaris, only to receive a notice a few months later that their Radaris record had been restored.

What’s more, Radaris’ automated process for requesting the removal of your information requires signing up for an account, potentially providing more information about yourself that the company didn’t already have (see screenshot above).

Radaris has not responded to requests for comment.

Radaris, TruthFinder and others like them all force users to agree that their reports will not be used to evaluate someone’s eligibility for credit, or a new apartment or job. This language is so prominent in people-search reports because selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically do not include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).

But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and another people-search service Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.

The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.

“All the while, the companies touted the accuracy of their reports in online ads and other promotional materials, claiming that their reports contain “the MOST ACCURATE information available to the public,” the FTC noted. The FTC says, however, that all the information used in their background reports is obtained from third parties that expressly disclaim that the information is accurate, and that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate take no steps to verify the accuracy of the information.

The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.

The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.

WHO IS RADARIS?

According to Radaris’ profile at the investor website Pitchbook.com, the company’s founder and “co-chief executive officer” is a Massachusetts resident named Gary Norden, also known as Gary Nard.

An analysis of email addresses known to have been used by Mr. Norden shows he is a native Russian man whose real name is Igor Lybarsky (also spelled Lubarsky). Igor’s brother Dmitry, who goes by “Dan,” appears to be the other co-CEO of Radaris. Dmitry Lybarsky’s Facebook/Meta account says he was born in March 1963.

Indirectly or directly, the Lybarskys own multiple properties in both Sherborn and Wellesley, Mass. However, the Radaris website is operated by an offshore entity called Bitseller Expert Ltd, which is incorporated in Cyprus. Neither Lybarsky brother responded to requests for comment.

A review of the domain names registered by Gary Norden shows that beginning in the early 2000s, he and Dan built an e-commerce empire by marketing prepaid calling cards and VOIP services to Russian expatriates who are living in the United States and seeking an affordable way to stay in touch with loved ones back home.

In 2012, the main company in charge of providing those calling services — Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. — was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said Unipoint never applied for a license to provide international telecommunications services.

DomainTools.com shows the email address gnard@unipointtech.com is tied to 137 domains, including radaris.com. DomainTools also shows that the email addresses used by Gary Norden for more than two decades — epop@comby.com, gary@barksy.com and gary1@eprofit.com, among others — appear in WHOIS registration records for an entire fleet of people-search websites, including: centeda.com, virtory.com, clubset.com, kworld.com, newenglandfacts.com, and pub360.com.

Still more people-search platforms tied to Gary Norden– like publicreports.com and arrestfacts.com — currently funnel interested customers to third-party search companies, such as TruthFinder and PersonTrust.com.

The email addresses used by Gary Nard/Gary Norden are also connected to a slew of data broker websites that sell reports on businesses, real estate holdings, and professionals, including bizstanding.com, homemetry.com, trustoria.com, homeflock.com, rehold.com, difive.com and projectlab.com.

AFFILIATE & ADULT

Domain records indicate that Gary and Dan for many years operated a now-defunct pay-per-click affiliate advertising network called affiliate.ru. That entity used domain name servers tied to the aforementioned domains comby.com and eprofit.com, as did radaris.ru.

Comby.com used to be a Russian language social media network that looked a great deal like Facebook. The domain now forwards visitors to Privet.ru (“hello” in Russian), a dating site that claims to have 5 million users. Privet.ru says it belongs to a company called Dating Factory, which lists offices in Switzerland. Privet.ru uses the Gary Norden domain eprofit.com for its domain name servers.

Dating Factory’s website says it sells “powerful dating technology” to help customers create unique or niche dating websites. A review of the sample images available on the Dating Factory homepage suggests the term “dating” in this context refers to adult websites. Dating Factory also operates a community called FacebookOfSex, as well as the domain analslappers.com.

RUSSIAN AMERICA

Email addresses for the Comby and Eprofit domains indicate Gary Norden operates an entity in Wellesley Hills, Mass. called RussianAmerican Holding Inc. (russianamerica.com). This organization is listed as the owner of the domain newyork.ru, which is a site dedicated to orienting newcomers from Russia to the Big Apple.

Newyork.ru’s terms of service refer to an international calling card company called ComFi Inc. (comfi.com) and list an address as PO Box 81362 Wellesley Hills, Ma. Other sites that include this address are russianamerica.com, russianboston.com, russianchicago.com, russianla.com, russiansanfran.com, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com and russianseattle.com (currently offline).

ComFi is tied to Comfibook.com, which was a search aggregator website that collected and published data from many online and offline sources, including phone directories, social networks, online photo albums, and public records.

AMERICAN RUSSIAN MEDIA

Many of the U.S. city-specific online properties apparently tied to Gary Norden include phone numbers on their contact pages for a pair of Russian media and advertising firms based in southern California. The phone number 323-874-8211 appears on the websites russianla.com, russiasanfran.com, and rosconcert.com, which sells tickets to theater events performed in Russian.

Historic domain registration records from DomainTools show rosconcert.com was registered in 2003 to Unipoint Technologies — the same company fined by the FCC for not having a license. Rosconcert.com also lists the phone number 818-377-2101.

A phone number just a few digits away — 323-874-8205 — appears as a point of contact on newyork.ru, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com, and russianchicago.com. A search in Google shows this 82xx number range — and the 818-377-2101 number — belong to two different entities at the same UPS Store mailbox in Tarzana, Calif: American Russian Media Inc. (armediacorp.com), and Lamedia.biz.

Armediacorp.com is the home of FACT Magazine, a glossy Russian-language publication put out jointly by the American-Russian Business Council, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Lamedia.biz says it is an international media organization with more than 25 years of experience within the Russian-speaking community on the West Coast. The site advertises FACT Magazine and the Russian state-owned media outlet Channel One. Clicking the Channel One link on the homepage shows Lamedia.biz offers to submit advertising spots that can be shown to Channel One viewers. The price for a basic ad is listed at $500.

In May 2022, the U.S. government levied financial sanctions against Channel One that bar US companies or citizens from doing business with the company.

LEGAL ACTIONS AGAINST RADARIS

In 2014, a group of people sued Radaris in a class-action lawsuit claiming the company’s practices violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Court records indicate the defendants never showed up in court to dispute the claims, and as a result the judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs a default judgement and ordered the company to pay $7.5 million.

But the plaintiffs in that civil case had a difficult time collecting on the court’s ruling. In response, the court ordered the radaris.com domain name (~9.4M monthly visitors) to be handed over to the plaintiffs.

However, in 2018 Radaris was able to reclaim their domain on a technicality. Attorneys for the company argued that their clients were never named as defendants in the original lawsuit, and so their domain could not legally be taken away from them in a civil judgment.

“Because our clients were never named as parties to the litigation, and were never served in the litigation, the taking of their property without due process is a violation of their rights,” Radaris’ attorneys argued.

In October 2023, an Illinois resident filed a class-action lawsuit against Radaris for allegedly using people’s names for commercial purposes, in violation of the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.

On Feb. 8, 2024, a company called Atlas Data Privacy Corp. sued Radaris LLC for allegedly violating “Daniel’s Law,” a statute that allows New Jersey law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from people-search services and commercial data brokers. Atlas has filed at least 140 similar Daniel’s Law complaints against data brokers recently.

Daniel’s Law was enacted in response to the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge (his mother). In July 2020, a disgruntled attorney who had appeared before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas disguised himself as a Fedex driver, went to her home and shot and killed her son (the judge was unharmed and the assailant killed himself).

Earlier this month, The Record reported on Atlas Data Privacy’s lawsuit against LexisNexis Risk Data Management, in which the plaintiffs representing thousands of law enforcement personnel in New Jersey alleged that after they asked for their information to remain private, the data broker retaliated against them by freezing their credit and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

Another data broker sued by Atlas Data Privacy — pogodata.com — announced on Mar. 1 that it was likely shutting down because of the lawsuit.

“The matter is far from resolved but your response motivates us to try to bring back most of the names while preserving redaction of the 17,000 or so clients of the redaction company,” the company wrote. “While little consolation, we are not alone in the suit – the privacy company sued 140 property-data sites at the same time as PogoData.”

Atlas says their goal is convince more states to pass similar laws, and to extend those protections to other groups such as teachers, healthcare personnel and social workers. Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states would limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminals charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and governments records that fuel the people-search industry.

PEOPLE-SEARCH CARVE-OUTS

There are some pending changes to the US legal and regulatory landscape that could soon reshape large swaths of the data broker industry. But experts say it is unlikely that any of these changes will affect people-search companies like Radaris.

On Feb. 28, 2024, the White House issued an executive order that directs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to create regulations that would prevent data brokers from selling or transferring abroad certain data types deemed too sensitive, including genomic and biometric data, geolocation and financial data, as well as other as-yet unspecified personal identifiers. The DOJ this week published a list of more than 100 questions it is seeking answers to regarding the data broker industry.

In August 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced it was undertaking new rulemaking related to data brokers.

Justin Sherman, an adjunct professor at Duke University, said neither the CFPB nor White House rulemaking will likely address people-search brokers because these companies typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

“These dossiers contain everything from individuals’ names, addresses, and family information to data about finances, criminal justice system history, and home and vehicle purchases,” Sherman wrote in an October 2023 article for Lawfare. “People search websites’ business pitch boils down to the fact that they have done the work of compiling data, digitizing it, and linking it to specific people so that it can be searched online.”

Sherman said while there are ongoing debates about whether people search data brokers have legal responsibilities to the people about whom they gather and sell data, the sources of this information — public records — are completely carved out from every single state consumer privacy law.

“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman wrote. “Tennessee’s consumer data privacy law, for example, stipulates that “personal information,” a cornerstone of the legislation, does not include ‘publicly available information,’ defined as:

“…information that is lawfully made available through federal, state, or local government records, or information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public through widely distributed media, by the consumer, or by a person to whom the consumer has disclosed the information, unless the consumer has restricted the information to a specific audience.”

Sherman said this is the same language as the carve-out in the California privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations. He said with a limited set of exceptions for survivors of stalking and domestic violence, even under California’s newly passed Delete Act — which creates a centralized mechanism for consumers to ask some third-party data brokers to delete their information — consumers across the board cannot exercise these rights when it comes to data scraped from property filings, marriage certificates, and public court documents, for example.

“With some very narrow exceptions, it’s either extremely difficult or impossible to compel these companies to remove your information from their sites,” Sherman told KrebsOnSecurity. “Even in states like California, every single consumer privacy law in the country completely exempts publicly available information.”

Below is a mind map that helped KrebsOnSecurity track relationships between and among the various organizations named in the story above:

Top Suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison Hack Committed Suicide in 2014

When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [SPOILER ALERT!], there was just one problem with that theory: Their top suspect had killed himself more than a year before the hackers began publishing stolen user data.

The new documentary, The Ashley Madison Affair, begins airing today on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in the United Kingdom. The series features interviews with security experts and journalists, Ashley Madison executives, victims of the breach and jilted spouses.

The series also touches on shocking new details unearthed by KrebsOnSecurity and Jeremy Bullock, a data scientist who worked with the show’s producers at the Warner Bros. production company Wall to Wall Media. Bullock had spent many hours poring over the hundreds of thousands of emails that the Ashley Madison hackers stole from Biderman and published online in 2015.

Wall to Wall reached out in July 2022 about collaborating with Bullock after KrebsOnSecurity published A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach. That piece explored how Biderman — who is Jewish — had become the target of concerted harassment campaigns by anti-Semitic and far-right groups online in the months leading up to the hack.

Whoever hacked Ashley Madison had access to all employee emails, but they only released Biderman’s messages — three years worth. Apropos of my retrospective report, Bullock found that a great many messages in Biderman’s inbox were belligerent and anti-Semitic screeds from a former Ashley Madison employee named William Brewster Harrison.

The messages show that Harrison was hired in March 2010 to help promote Ashley Madison online, but the messages also reveal Harrison was heavily involved in helping to create and cultivate phony female accounts on the service.

There is evidence to suggest that in 2010 Harrison was directed to harass the owner of Ashleymadisonsucks.com into closing the site or selling the domain to Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison’s parent company — Toronto-based Avid Life Media — filed a trademark infringement complaint in 2010 that succeeded in revealing a man named Dennis Bradshaw as the owner. But after being informed that Bradshaw was not subject to Canadian trademark laws, Avid Life offered to buy AshleyMadisonSucks.com for $10,000.

When Bradshaw refused to sell the domain, he and his then-girlfriend were subject to an unrelenting campaign of online harassment and blackmail. It now appears those attacks were perpetrated by Harrison, who sent emails from different accounts at the free email service Vistomail pretending to be Bradshaw, his then-girlfriend and their friends.

[As the documentary points out, the domain AshleyMadisonSucks.com was eventually transferred to Ashley Madison, which then shrewdly used it for advertising and to help debunk theories about why its service was supposedly untrustworthy].

Harrison even went after Bradshaw’s lawyer and wife, listing them both on a website he created called Contact-a-CEO[.]com, which Harrison used to besmirch the name of major companies — including several past employers — all entities he believed had slighted him or his family in some way. The site also claimed to include the names, addresses and phone numbers of top CEOs.

An exhaustive analysis of domains registered to the various Vistomail pseudonyms used by Harrison shows he also ran Bash-a-Business[.]com, which Harrison dedicated to “all those sorry ass corporate executives out there profiting from your hard work, organs, lives, ideas, intelligence, and wallets.” Copies of the site at archive.org show it was the work of someone calling themselves “The Chaos Creator.”

Will Harrison was terminated as an Ashley Madison employee in November 2011, and by early 2012 he’d turned his considerable harassment skills squarely against the company. Ashley Madison’s long-suspected army of fake female accounts came to the fore in August 2012 after the former sex worker turned activist and blogger Maggie McNeill published screenshots apparently taken from Ashley Madison’s internal systems suggesting that a large percentage of the female accounts on the service were computer-operated bots.

Ashley Madison’s executives understood that only a handful of employees at the time would have had access to the systems needed to produce the screenshots McNeill published online. In one exchange on Aug. 16, 2012, Ashley Madison’s director of IT was asked to produce a list of all company employees with all-powerful administrator access.

“Who or what is asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman asked, after being sent a list of nine email addresses.

“It appears to be the email address Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.

“And his access was never shut off until today?,” asked the company’s general counsel Mike Dacks.

What prompted the data scientist Bullock to reach out were gobs of anti-Semitic diatribes from Harrison, who had taken to labeling Biderman and others “greedy Jew bastards.”

“So good luck, I’m sure we’ll talk again soon, but for now, Ive got better things in the oven,” Harrison wrote to Biderman after his employment contract with Ashley Madison was terminated. “Just remember I outsmarted you last time and I will outsmart and out maneuver you this time too, by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”

Harrison signed his threatening missive with the salutation, “We are legion,” suggesting that whatever comeuppance he had in store for Ashley Madison would come from a variety of directions and anonymous hackers.

The leaked Biderman emails show that Harrison made good on his threats, and that in the months that followed Harrison began targeting Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives with menacing anonymous emails and spoofed phone calls laced with profanity and anti-Semitic language.

But on Mar. 5, 2014, Harrison committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. This fact was apparently unknown to Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives more than a year later when their July 2015 hack was first revealed.

Does Harrison’s untimely suicide rule him out as a suspect in the 2015 hack? Who is The Chaos Creator, and what else transpired between Harrison and Ashley Madison prior to his death? We’ll explore these questions in Part II of this story, to be published early next week.

KrebsOnSecurity in Upcoming Hulu Series on Ashley Madison Breach

KrebsOnSecurity will likely have a decent amount of screen time in an upcoming Hulu documentary series about the 2015 megabreach at marital infidelity site Ashley Madison. While I can’t predict what the producers will do with the video interviews we shot, it’s fair to say the series will explore compelling new clues as to who may have been responsible for the attack.

The new docuseries produced by ABC News Studios and Wall to Wall Media is tentatively titled, “The Ashley Madison Affair,” and is slated for release on Hulu in late Spring 2023. Wall to Wall Media is part of the Warner Bros. International Television Production group.

“Featuring exclusive footage and untold firsthand interviews from those involved, the series will explore infidelity, morality, cyber-shaming and blackmail and tell the story of ordinary people with big secrets and a mystery that remains unsolved to this day,” reads a Jan. 12, 2023 scoop from The Wrap.

There are several other studios pursuing documentaries on the Ashley Madison breach, and it’s not hard to see why. On July 19, 2015, a hacker group calling itself The Impact Team leaked Ashley Madison internal company data, and announced it would leak all user data in a month unless Ashley Madison voluntarily shut down before then.

A month later, The Impact Team published more than 60 gigabytes of data, including user names, home addresses, search history, and credit card transaction records. The leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. It’s impossible to say how many users lost their jobs or marriages as a result of the breach.

I’m aware that there are multiple studios working on Ashley Madison documentaries because I broke the story of the breach in 2015, and all of those production houses approached me with essentially the same pitch: It would be a shame if your voice wasn’t included in our project.

What stood out about the inquiry from Wall to Wall was that their researchers had already gathered piles of clues about the breach that I’d never seen before.

I’d assumed that participating in their documentary would involve sitting for a few interviews about known historical facts related to the breach. But when Wall to Wall shared what they’d found, I was hooked, and spent several weeks investigating those leads further.

The result was a collaborative research effort revealing key aspects of the breach that have somehow escaped public notice over the years.

I won’t go into detail on what we discovered until the Hulu series is ready for release. Also, I am not privy to what they will produce with the interviews I gave. I can’t say that what we found untangles everything about the breach that was previously unknown, but it sure explains a lot.

A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach

It’s been seven years since the online cheating site AshleyMadison.com was hacked and highly sensitive data about its users posted online. The leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. To date, little is publicly known about the perpetrators or the true motivation for the attack. But a recent review of Ashley Madison mentions across Russian cybercrime forums and far-right websites in the months leading up to the hack revealed some previously unreported details that may deserve further scrutiny.

As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity on July 19, 2015, a group calling itself the “Impact Team” released data sampled from millions of users, as well as maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank details and salary information.

The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information because ALM “profits on the pain of others,” and in response to a paid “full delete” service Ashley Madison parent firm Avid Life Media offered that allowed members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.

According to the hackers, although the delete feature promised “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — weren’t actually scrubbed.

“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”

The Impact Team said ALM had one month to take Ashley Madison offline, along with a sister property called Established Men. The hackers promised that if a month passed and the company did not capitulate, it would release “all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.”

Exactly 30 days later, on Aug. 18, 2015, the Impact Team posted a “Time’s up!” message online, along with links to 60 gigabytes of Ashley Madison user data.

AN URGE TO DESTROY ALM

One aspect of the Ashley Madison breach that’s always bothered me is how the perpetrators largely cast themselves as fighting a crooked company that broke their privacy promises, and how this narrative was sustained at least until the Impact Team decided to leak all of the stolen user account data in August 2015.

Granted, ALM had a lot to answer for. For starters, after the breach it became clear that a great many of the female Ashley Madison profiles were either bots or created once and never used again. Experts combing through the leaked user data determined that fewer than one percent of the female profiles on Ashley Madison had been used on a regular basis, and the rest were used just once — on the day they were created. On top of that, researchers found 84 percent of the profiles were male.

But the Impact Team had to know that ALM would never comply with their demands to dismantle Ashley Madison and Established Men. In 2014, ALM reported revenues of $115 million. There was little chance the company was going to shut down some of its biggest money machines.

Hence, it appears the Impact Team’s goal all along was to create prodigious amounts of drama and tension by announcing the hack of a major cheating website, and then letting that drama play out over the next few months as millions of exposed Ashley Madison users freaked out and became the targets of extortion attacks and public shaming.

Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security, penned a blog post in 2015 concluding that the moral outrage professed by the Impact Team was pure posturing.

“They appear to be motivated by the immorality of adultery, but in all probability, their motivation is that #1 it’s fun and #2 because they can,” Graham wrote.

Per Thorsheim, a security researcher in Norway, told Wired at the time that he believed the Impact Team was motivated by an urge to destroy ALM with as much aggression as they could muster.

“It’s not just for the fun and ‘because we can,’ nor is it just what I would call ‘moralistic fundamentalism,'” Thorsheim told Wired. “Given that the company had been moving toward an IPO right before the hack went public, the timing of the data leaks was likely no coincidence.”

NEO-NAZIS TARGET ASHLEY MADISON CEO

As the seventh anniversary of the Ashley Madison hack rolled around, KrebsOnSecurity went back and looked for any mentions of Ashley Madison or ALM on cybercrime forums in the months leading up to the Impact Team’s initial announcement of the breach on July 19, 2015. There wasn’t much, except a Russian guy offering to sell payment and contact information on 32 million AshleyMadison users, and a bunch of Nazis upset about a successful Jewish CEO promoting adultery.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 recorded a series of posts by a user with the handle “Brutium” on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Antichat between 2014 and 2016. Brutium routinely advertised the sale of large, hacked databases, and on Jan. 24, 2015, this user posted a thread offering to sell data on 32 million Ashley Madison users:

“Data from July 2015
Total ~32 Million contacts:
full name; email; phone numbers; payment, etc.”

It’s unclear whether the postdated “July 2015” statement was a typo, or if Brutium updated that sales thread at some point. There is also no indication whether anyone purchased the information. Brutium’s profile has since been removed from the Antichat forum.

Flashpoint is a threat intelligence company in New York City that keeps tabs on hundreds of cybercrime forums, as well as extremist and hate websites. A search in Flashpoint for mentions of Ashley Madison or ALM prior to July 19, 2015 shows that in the six months leading up to the hack, Ashley Madison and its then-CEO Noel Biderman became a frequent subject of derision across multiple neo-Nazi websites.

On Jan. 14, 2015, a member of the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront posted a lively thread about Ashley Madison in the general discussion area titled, “Jewish owned dating website promoting adultery.”

On July 3, 2015, Andrew Anglin, the editor of the alt-right publication Daily Stormer, posted excerpts about Biderman from a story titled, “Jewish Hyper-Sexualization of Western Culture,” which referred to Biderman as the “Jewish King of Infidelity.”

On July 10, a mocking montage of Biderman photos with racist captions was posted to the extremist website Vanguard News Network, as part of a thread called “Jews normalize sexual perversion.”

“Biderman himself says he’s a happily married father of two and does not cheat,” reads the story posted by Anglin on the Daily Stormer. “In an interview with the ‘Current Affair’ program in Australia, he admitted that if he found out his own wife was accessing his cheater’s site, ‘I would be devastated.'”

The leaked AshleyMadison data included more than three years’ worth of emails stolen from Biderman. The hackers told Motherboard in 2015 they had 300 GB worth of employee emails, but that they saw no need to dump the inboxes of other company employees.

Several media outlets pounced on salacious exchanges in Biderman’s emails as proof he had carried on multiple affairs. Biderman resigned as CEO on Aug. 28, 2015. The last message in the archive of Biderman’s stolen emails was dated July 7, 2015 — almost two weeks before the Impact Team would announce their hack.

Biderman told KrebsOnSecurity on July 19, 2015 that the company believed the hacker was some type of insider.

“We’re on the doorstep of [confirming] who we believe is the culprit, and unfortunately that may have triggered this mass publication,” Biderman said. “I’ve got their profile right in front of me, all their work credentials. It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”

Certain language in the Impact Team’s manifesto seemed to support this theory, such as the line: “For a company whose main promise is secrecy, it’s like you didn’t even try, like you thought you had never pissed anyone off.”

But despite ALM offering a belated $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible, to this day no one has been charged in connection with the hack.

A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’

For the past seven years, an online service known as 911 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, allowing customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe — but predominantly in the United States. 911 says its network is made up entirely of users who voluntarily install its “free VPN” software. But new research shows the proxy service has a long history of purchasing installations via shady “pay-per-install” affiliate marketing schemes, some of which 911 operated on its own.

911[.]re is one of the original “residential proxy” networks, which allow someone to rent a residential IP address to use as a relay for his/her Internet communications, providing anonymity and the advantage of being perceived as a residential user surfing the web.

From a website’s perspective, the IP traffic of a residential proxy network user appears to originate from the rented residential IP address, 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 can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

Residential proxy services are often marketed to people seeking the ability to evade country-specific blocking by the major movie and media streaming providers. But some of them — like 911 — build their networks in part by offering “free VPN” or “free proxy” services that are powered by software which turns the user’s PC into a traffic relay for other users. In this scenario, users indeed get to use a free VPN service, but they are often unaware that doing so will turn their computer into a proxy that lets others use their Internet address to transact online.

Researchers at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada recently published an analysis of 911, and found there were roughly 120,000 PCs for rent via the service, with the largest number of them located in the United States.

“The 911[.]re network uses at least two free VPN services to lure its users to install a malware-like software that achieves persistence on the user’s computer,” the researchers wrote. “During the research we identified two free VPN services that [use] a subterfuge to lure users to install software that looks legitimate but makes them part of the network. These two software are currently unknown to most if not all antivirus companies.”

The researchers concluded that 911 is supported by a “mid scale botnet-like infrastructure that operates in several networks, such as corporate, government and critical infrastructure.” The Canadian team said they found many of the 911 nodes available for rent were situated within several major US-based universities and colleges, critical infrastructures such as clean water, defense contractors, law enforcement and government networks.

Highlighting the risk that 911 nodes could pose to internal corporate networks, they observed that “the infection of a node enables the 911.re user to access shared resources on the network such as local intranet portals or other services.”

“It also enables the end user to probe the LAN network of the infected node,” the paper continues. “Using the internal router, it would be possible to poison the DNS cache of the LAN router of the infected node, enabling further attacks.”

THE INTERNET NEVER FORGETS

A review of the clues left behind by 911’s early days on the Internet paint a more complete picture of this long-running proxy network. The domain names used by 911 over the years have a few common elements in their original WHOIS registration records, including the address ustraffic@qq.com and a Yunhe Wang from Beijing.

That ustraffic email is tied to a small number of interesting domains, including browsingguard[.]com, cleantraffic[.]net, execlean[.]net, proxygate[.]net, and flashupdate[.]net.

A cached copy of flashupdate[.]net available at the Wayback Machine shows that in 2016 this domain was used for the “ExE Bucks” affiliate program, a pay-per-install business which catered to people already running large collections of hacked computers or compromised websites. Affiliates were paid a set amount for each installation of the software, with higher commissions for installs in more desirable nations, particularly Europe, Canada and the United States.

“We load only one software — it’s a Socks5 proxy program,” read the message to ExE Bucks affiliates. The website said affiliates were free to spread the proxy software by any means available (i.e. “all promotion methods allowed”). The website’s copyright suggests the ExE Bucks affiliate program dates back to 2012.

Another domain tied to the ustraffic@qq.com email in 2016 was ExeClean[.]net, a service that advertised to cybercriminals seeking to obfuscate their malicious software so that it goes undetected by all or at least most of the major antivirus products on the market.

“Our technology ensures the maximum security from reverse engineering and antivirus detections,” ExEClean promised.

Yet another domain connected to the ustraffic email is p2pshare[.]net, which advertised “free unlimited internet file-sharing platform” for those who agreed to install their software.

Still more domains associated with ustraffic@qq.com suggest 911’s proxy has been disguised as security updates for video player plugins, including flashplayerupdate[.]xyz, mediaplayerupdate[.]xyz, and videoplayerupdate[.]xyz.

The earliest version of the 911 website available from the Wayback Machine is from 2016. A sister service called proxygate[.]net launched roughly a year prior to 911 as a “free” public test of the budding new residential proxy service. “Basically using clients to route for everyone,” was how Proxygate described itself in 2016.

For more than a year after its founding, the 911 website was written entirely in Simplified Chinese. The service has only ever accepted payment via virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Monero, as well as Alipay and China UnionPay, both payment platforms based in China.

Initially, the terms and conditions of 911’s “End User License Agreement (EULA) named a company called Wugaa Enterprises LLC, which was registered in California in 2016. Records from the California Secretary of State office show that in November 2016, Wugaa Enterprises said it was in the Internet advertising business, and had named as its CEO as one Nicolae Aurelian Mazgarean of Brasov, Romania.

A search of European VAT numbers shows the same Brasov, RO address tied to an enterprise called PPC Leads SRL (in the context of affiliate-based marketing, “PPC” generally refers to the term “pay-per-click”).

911’s EULA would later change its company name and address in 2017, to International Media Ltd. in the British Virgin Islands. That is the same information currently displayed on the 911 website.

The EULA attached to 911 software downloaded from browsingguard[.]com (tied to the same ustraffic@qq email that registered 911) references a company called Gold Click Limited. According to the UK Companies House, Gold Click Limited was registered in 2016 to a 34-year-old Yunhe Wang from Beijing City. Many of the WHOIS records for the above mentioned domains also include the name Yunhe Wang, or some variation thereof.

In a response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, 911 said the researchers were wrong, and that 911 has nothing to do with any of the other domains mentioned above.

“We have 911 SDK link and how it works described clearly in the “Terms of use” of affiliated partners products, and we have details of how the community powered network works on our webpages,” read an email response.

“Besides that, for protecting the end users, we banned many domains’ access and blocked the vulnerable ports, e.g. spamming emails, and torrent is not possible from the 911 network,” the reply continued. “Same as scanning and many others…Accessing to the Lan network and router is also blocked. We are monitoring 911 user’s account closely, once any abnormal behavior detected, we suspend the user’s account right away.”

FORUM ACTIVITY?

911 has remained one of the most popular services among denizens of the cybercrime underground for years, becoming almost shorthand for connecting to that “last mile” of cybercrime. Namely, the ability to route one’s malicious traffic through a computer that is geographically close to the consumer whose credit card they’re about to charge at some website, or whose bank account they’re about to empty.

Given the frequency with which 911 has been praised by cybercrooks on the top forums, it was odd to find the proprietors of 911 do not appear to have created any official support account for the service on any of several dozen forums reviewed by this author going back a decade. However there are two cybercriminal identities on the forums that have responded to individual 911 help requests, and who promoted the sale of 911 accounts via their handles.

Both of these identities were active on the crime forum fl.l33t[.]su between 2016 and 2019. The user “Transfer” advertised and sold access to 911 from 2016 to 2018, amid many sales threads where they advertised expensive electronics and other consumer goods that were bought online with stolen credit cards.

In a 2017 discussion on fl.l33t[.]su, the user who picked the handle “527865713” could be seen answering private messages in response to help inquiries seeking someone at 911. That identity is tied to an individual who for years advertised the ability to receive and relay large wire transfers from China.

One ad from this user in 2016 offered a “China wire service” focusing on Western Union payments, where “all transfers are accepted in China.” The service charged 20 percent of all “scam wires,” unauthorized wire transfers resulting from bank account takeovers or scams like CEO impersonation schemes.

911 TODAY

In August 2021, 911’s biggest competitor — a 15-year-old proxy network built on malware-compromised PCs called VIP72 — abruptly closed up shop. Almost overnight, an overwhelming number of former VIP72 customers began shifting their proxy activities to 911.

That’s according to Riley Kilmer, co-founder of Spur.us — a security company that monitors anonymity services. Kilmer said 911 also gained an influx of new customers after the Jan. 2022 closure of LuxSocks, another malware-based proxy network.

“911’s user base skyrocketed after VIP72 and then LuxSocks went away,” Kilmer said. “And it’s not hard to see why. 911 and VIP72 are both Windows-based apps that operate in a similar way, where you buy private access to IPs.”

Kilmer said 911 is interesting because it appears to be based in China, while nearly all of the other major proxy networks are Russian-backed or Russian-based.

“They have two basic methods to get new IPs,” Kilmer said. “The free VPN apps, and the other is trojanized torrents. They’ll re-upload Photoshop and stuff like that so that it’s backdoored with the 911 proxy. They claim the proxy is bundled with legitimate software and that users all agree to their Terms of Service, meanwhile they can hide behind the claim that it was some affiliate who installed the software, not them.”

Kilmer said at last count, 911 had nearly 200,000 proxy nodes for sale, spanning more than 200 countries: The largest geographic concentration is the United States, where more than 42,000 proxies are currently for rent by the service.

PARTING THOUGHTS

Beware of “free” or super low-cost VPN services. Proper VPN services are not cheap to operate, so the revenue for the service has to come from somewhere. And there are countless “free” VPN services that are anything but, as we’ve seen with 911.

In general, 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. Many free VPN services will enlist users as VPN nodes for others to use, and some even offset costs by collecting and reselling data from their users.

All VPN providers claim to prioritize the privacy of their users, but many then go on to collect and store all manner of personal and financial data from those customers. Others are fairly opaque about their data collection and retention policies.

I’ve largely avoided wading into the fray about which VPN services are best, but there are so many shady and just plain bad ones out there that I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one VPN provider whose business practices and transparency of operation consistently distinguish them from the rest. If maintaining your privacy and anonymity are primary concerns for you as a VPN user, check out Mullvad.net.

Let me make clear that KrebsOnSecurity does not have any financial or business ties to this company (for the avoidance of doubt, this post doesn’t even link to them). I mention it only because I’ve long been impressed with their candor and openness, and because Mullvad goes out of its way to discourage customers from sharing personal or financial data.

To that end, Mullvad will even accept mailed payments of cash to fund accounts, quite a rarity these days. More importantly, the service doesn’t ask users to share phone numbers, email addresses or any other personal information. Nor does it require customers to create passwords: Each subscription can be activated just by entering a Mullvad account number (woe to those who lose their account number).

I wish more companies would observe this remarkably economical security practice, which boils down to the mantra, “You don’t have to protect what you don’t collect.”

Update, July 24, 11:15 a.m. ET: 911’s homepage now includes a banner saying the service has halted new registrations and payments. “We are reviewing our network and adding a series of security measures to prevent misuse of our services,” the message reads. “Proxy balance top-up and new user registration are closed. We are reviewing every existing user, to ensure their usage is legit and [in] compliance with our Terms of Service.”

Update, July 30, 10:07 a.m. ET: 911 announced on July 28 that it is permanently closing down, following a series of data breaches this month that 911 says resulted in the deletion of customer data.

Adconion Execs Plead Guilty in Federal Anti-Spam Case

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.

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.