YoroTrooper: Researchers Warn of Kazakhstan's Stealthy Cyber Espionage Group

A relatively new threat actor known as YoroTrooper is likely made up of operators originating from Kazakhstan. The assessment, which comes from Cisco Talos, is based on their fluency in Kazakh and Russian, use of Tenge to pay for operating infrastructure, and very limited targeting of Kazakhstani entities, barring the government's Anti-Corruption Agency. "YoroTrooper attempts to obfuscate the

Critical OAuth Flaws Uncovered in Grammarly, Vidio, and Bukalapak Platforms

Critical security flaws have been disclosed in the Open Authorization (OAuth) implementation of popular online services such as Grammarly, Vidio, and Bukalapak, building upon previous shortcomings uncovered in Booking[.]com and Expo. The weaknesses, now addressed by the respective companies following responsible disclosure between February and April 2023, could have allowed malicious actors to

Act Now: VMware Releases Patch for Critical vCenter Server RCE Vulnerability

VMware has released security updates to address a critical flaw in the vCenter Server that could result in remote code execution on affected systems. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-34048 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol. "A malicious actor with network access to vCenter Server may trigger an out-of-bounds

Malvertising Campaign Targets Brazil's PIX Payment System with GoPIX Malware

The popularity of Brazil's PIX instant payment system has made it a lucrative target for threat actors looking to generate illicit profits using a new malware called GoPIX. Kaspersky, which has been tracking the active campaign since December 2022, said the attacks are pulled off using malicious ads that are served when potential victims search for "WhatsApp web" on search engines. "The

Alert: PoC Exploits Released for Citrix and VMware Vulnerabilities

Virtualization services provider VMware has alerted customers to the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a recently patched security flaw in Aria Operations for Logs. Tracked as CVE-2023-34051 (CVSS score: 8.1), the high-severity vulnerability relates to a case of authentication bypass that could lead to remote code execution. "An unauthenticated, malicious actor can inject files

1Password Detects Suspicious Activity Following Okta Support Breach

Popular password management solution 1Password said it detected suspicious activity on its Okta instance on September 29 following the support system breach, but reiterated that no user data was accessed. "We immediately terminated the activity, investigated, and found no compromise of user data or other sensitive systems, either employee-facing or user-facing," Pedro Canahuati, 1Password CTO, 

Who's Experimenting with AI Tools in Your Organization?

With the record-setting growth of consumer-focused AI productivity tools like ChatGPT, artificial intelligence—formerly the realm of data science and engineering teams—has become a resource available to every employee.  From a productivity perspective, that’s fantastic. Unfortunately for IT and security teams, it also means you may have hundreds of people in your organization using a new tool in

Google Play Protect Introduces Real-Time Code-Level Scanning for Android Malware

Google has announced an update to its Play Protect with support for real-time scanning at the code level to tackle novel malicious apps prior to downloading and installing them on Android devices. "Google Play Protect will now recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats," the tech giant said. Google Play Protect is a 

HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited to Launch Record DDoS Attacks

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Google on Tuesday said they took steps to mitigate record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that relied on a novel technique called HTTP/2 Rapid Reset. The layer 7 attacks were detected in late August 2023, the companies said in a coordinated disclosure. The cumulative susceptibility to this attack is being tracked as CVE-2023-44487,

Cybercriminals Using EvilProxy Phishing Kit to Target Senior Executives in U.S. Firms

Senior executives working in U.S.-based organizations are being targeted by a new phishing campaign that leverages a popular adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing toolkit named EvilProxy to conduct credential harvesting and account takeover attacks. Menlo Security said the activity started in July 2023, primarily singling out banking and financial services, insurance, property management and

23andMe User Data Stolen in Targeted Attack on Ashkenazi Jews

At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it's working to verify the data.

Qualcomm Releases Patch for 3 new Zero-Days Under Active Exploitation

Chipmaker Qualcomm has released security updates to address 17 vulnerabilities in various components, while warning that three other zero-days have come under active exploitation. Of the 17 flaws, three are rated Critical, 13 are rated High, and one is rated Medium in severity. "There are indications from Google Threat Analysis Group and Google Project Zero that CVE-2023-33106, CVE-2023-33107,

Researcher Reveals New Techniques to Bypass Cloudflare's Firewall and DDoS Protection

Firewall and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack prevention mechanisms in Cloudflare can be circumvented by exploiting gaps in cross-tenant security controls, defeating the very purpose of these safeguards, it has emerged. "Attackers can utilize their own Cloudflare accounts to abuse the per-design trust-relationship between Cloudflare and the customers' websites, rendering the

Are You Willing to Pay the High Cost of Compromised Credentials?

Weak password policies leave organizations vulnerable to attacks. But are the standard password complexity requirements enough to secure them? 83% of compromised passwords would satisfy the password complexity and length requirements of compliance standards. That’s because bad actors already have access to billions of stolen credentials that can be used to compromise additional accounts by

Signal Messenger Introduces PQXDH Quantum-Resistant Encryption

Encrypted messaging app Signal has announced an update to the Signal Protocol to add support for quantum resistance by upgrading the Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman (X3DH) specification to Post-Quantum Extended Diffie-Hellman (PQXDH). "With this upgrade, we are adding a layer of protection against the threat of a quantum computer being built in the future that is powerful enough to break current

Operation Rusty Flag: Azerbaijan Targeted in New Rust-Based Malware Campaign

Targets located in Azerbaijan have been singled out as part of a new campaign that's designed to deploy Rust-based malware on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct is tracking the operation under the name Operation Rusty Flag. It has not been associated with any known threat actor or group. "The operation has at least two different initial access vectors," security researchers

TikTok Faces Massive €345 Million Fine Over Child Data Violations in E.U.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) slapped TikTok with a €345 million (about $368 million) fine for violating the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in relation to its handling of children's data. The investigation, initiated in September 2021, examined how the popular short-form video platform processed personal data relating to child users (those between the

NodeStealer Malware Now Targets Facebook Business Accounts on Multiple Browsers

An ongoing campaign is targeting Facebook Business accounts with bogus messages to harvest victims' credentials using a variant of the Python-based NodeStealer and potentially take over their accounts for follow-on malicious activities.  "The attacks are reaching victims mainly in Southern Europe and North America across different segments, led by the manufacturing services and technology

Webinar: Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) – Rips in Your Identity Fabric

In today's digital age, SaaS applications have become the backbone of modern businesses. They streamline operations, enhance productivity, and foster innovation. But with great power comes great responsibility. As organizations integrate more SaaS applications into their workflows, they inadvertently open the door to a new era of security threats. The stakes? Your invaluable data and the trust

Way Too Vulnerable: Join this Webinar to Understand and Strengthen Identity Attack Surface

In today's digital age, it's not just about being online but how securely your organization operates online. Regardless of size or industry, every organization heavily depends on digital assets. The digital realm is where business takes place, from financial transactions to confidential data storage. While organizations have quickly adopted tools like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA),

It's a Zero-day? It's Malware? No! It's Username and Password

As cyber threats continue to evolve, adversaries are deploying a range of tools to breach security defenses and compromise sensitive data. Surprisingly, one of the most potent weapons in their arsenal is not malicious code but simply stolen or weak usernames and passwords. This article explores the seriousness of compromised credentials, the challenges they present to security solutions, and the

New Variant of XLoader macOS Malware Disguised as 'OfficeNote' Productivity App

A new variant of an Apple macOS malware called XLoader has surfaced in the wild, masquerading its malicious features under the guise of an office productivity app called "OfficeNote." "The new version of XLoader is bundled inside a standard Apple disk image with the name OfficeNote.dmg," SentinelOne security researchers Dinesh Devadoss and Phil Stokes said in a Monday analysis. "The application

This Malware Turned Thousands of Hacked Windows and macOS PCs into Proxy Servers

Threat actors are leveraging access to malware-infected Windows and macOS machines to deliver a proxy server application and use them as exit nodes to reroute proxy requests. According to AT&T Alien Labs, the unnamed company that offers the proxy service operates more than 400,000 proxy exit nodes, although it's not immediately clear how many of them were co-opted by malware installed on

India Passes New Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB), Putting Users' Privacy First

The Indian President Droupadi Murmu on Friday granted assent to the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB) after it was unanimously passed by both houses of the parliament last week, marking a significant step towards securing people's information. "The Bill provides for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognizes both the rights of the individuals to protect their

Multiple Flaws in CyberPower and Dataprobe Products Put Data Centers at Risk

Multiple security vulnerabilities impacting CyberPower's PowerPanel Enterprise Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) platform and Dataprobe's iBoot Power Distribution Unit (PDU) could be potentially exploited to gain unauthenticated access to these systems and inflict catastrophic damage in target environments. The nine vulnerabilities, from CVE-2023-3259 through CVE-2023-3267, carry

Lolek Bulletproof Hosting Servers Seized, 5 Key Operators Arrested

European and U.S. law enforcement agencies have announced the dismantling of a bulletproof hosting service provider called Lolek Hosted, which cybercriminals have used to launch cyber-attacks across the globe. "Five of its administrators were arrested, and all of its servers seized, rendering LolekHosted.net no longer available," Europol said in a statement. "The service facilitated the

New Python URL Parsing Flaw Could Enable Command Execution Attacks

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the Python URL parsing function that could be exploited to bypass domain or protocol filtering methods implemented with a blocklist, ultimately resulting in arbitrary file reads and command execution. "urlparse has a parsing problem when the entire URL starts with blank characters," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a Friday

Cybercriminals Increasingly Using EvilProxy Phishing Kit to Target Executives

Threat actors are increasingly using a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit dubbed EvilProxy to pull off account takeover attacks aimed at high-ranking executives at prominent companies. According to Proofpoint, an ongoing hybrid campaign has leveraged the service to target thousands of Microsoft 365 user accounts, sending approximately 120,000 phishing emails to hundreds of organizations

Criminals Have Created Their Own ChatGPT Clones

Cybercriminals are touting large language models that could help them with phishing or creating malware. But the AI chatbots could just be their own kind of scam.

Iranian Company Cloudzy Accused of Aiding Cybercriminals and Nation-State Hackers

Services offered by an obscure Iranian company known as Cloudzy are being leveraged by multiple threat actors, including cybercrime groups and nation-state crews. "Although Cloudzy is incorporated in the United States, it almost certainly operates out of Tehran, Iran – in possible violation of U.S. sanctions – under the direction of someone going by the name Hassan Nozari," Halcyon said in a new

Cybercriminals Renting WikiLoader to Target Italian Organizations with Banking Trojan

Organizations in Italy are the target of a new phishing campaign that leverages a new strain of malware called WikiLoader with an ultimate aim to install a banking trojan, stealer, and spyware referred to as Ursnif (aka Gozi). "It is a sophisticated downloader with the objective of installing a second malware payload," Proofpoint said in a technical report. "The malware uses multiple mechanisms

AVRecon Botnet Leveraging Compromised Routers to Fuel Illegal Proxy Service

More details have emerged about a botnet called AVRecon, which has been observed making use of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a multi-year campaign active since at least May 2021. AVRecon was first disclosed by Lumen Black Lotus Labs earlier this month as malware capable of executing additional commands and stealing victim's bandwidth for what appears to be an

Rust-based Realst Infostealer Targeting Apple macOS Users' Cryptocurrency Wallets

A new malware family called Realst has become the latest to target Apple macOS systems, with a third of the samples already designed to infect macOS 14 Sonoma, the upcoming major release of the operating system. Written in the Rust programming language, the malware is distributed in the form of bogus blockchain games and is capable of "emptying crypto wallets and stealing stored password and

The Best Personal Safety Devices, Apps, and Wearables (2024)

Your smartphone or wearable could help you out in a truly dangerous situation. Here are some options to consider.

A Few More Reasons Why RDP is Insecure (Surprise!)

If it seems like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has been around forever, it's because it has (at least compared to the many technologies that rise and fall within just a few years.) The initial version, known as "Remote Desktop Protocol 4.0," was released in 1996 as part of the Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server edition and allowed users to remotely access and control Windows-based computers over a

WormGPT: New AI Tool Allows Cybercriminals to Launch Sophisticated Cyber Attacks

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming all the rage these days, it's perhaps not surprising that the technology has been repurposed by malicious actors to their own advantage, enabling avenues for accelerated cybercrime. According to findings from SlashNext, a new generative AI cybercrime tool called WormGPT has been advertised on underground forums as a way for adversaries to

Surviving the 800 Gbps Storm: Gain Insights from Gcore's 2023 DDoS Attack Statistics

Gcore Radar is a quarterly report prepared by Gcore that provides insights into the current state of the DDoS protection market and cybersecurity trends. This report offers you an understanding of the evolving threat landscape and highlights the measures required to protect against attacks effectively. It serves as an insight for businesses and individuals seeking to stay informed about the

Improve Your Security WordPress Spam Protection With CleanTalk Anti-Spam

Every website owner or webmaster grapples with the issue of spam on their website forms. The volume of spam can be so overwhelming that finding useful information within it becomes quite challenging. What exacerbates this issue is that spam can populate your public pages, appearing in comments and reviews. You likely understand how this can damage your website's reputation, affect search results

WhatsApp Upgrades Proxy Feature Against Internet Shutdowns

Meta's WhatsApp has rolled out updates to its proxy feature, allowing more flexibility in the kind of content that can be shared in conversations. This includes the ability to send and receive images, voice notes, files, stickers and GIFs, WhatsApp told The Hacker News. The new features were first reported by BBC Persian. Some of the other improvements include streamlined steps to simplify the

Cybercriminals Hijacking Vulnerable SSH Servers in New Proxyjacking Campaign

An active financially motivated campaign is targeting vulnerable SSH servers to covertly ensnare them into a proxy network. "This is an active campaign in which the attacker leverages SSH for remote access, running malicious scripts that stealthily enlist victim servers into a peer-to-peer (P2P) proxy network, such as Peer2Profit or Honeygain," Akamai researcher Allen West said in a Thursday

New Mockingjay Process Injection Technique Could Let Malware Evade Detection

A new process injection technique dubbed Mockingjay could be exploited by threat actors to bypass security solutions to execute malicious code on compromised systems. "The injection is executed without space allocation, setting permissions or even starting a thread," Security Joes researchers Thiago Peixoto, Felipe Duarte, and Ido Naor said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The

MOVEit mayhem 3: “Disable HTTP and HTTPS traffic immediately”

Twice more unto the breach... third patch tested and released, shut down web access until you've applied it

CISA Order Highlights Persistent Risk at Network Edge

The U.S. government agency in charge of improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture is ordering all federal agencies to take new measures to restrict access to Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive comes amid a surge in attacks targeting previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used security and networking appliances.

Under a new order from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), federal agencies will have 14 days to respond to any reports from CISA about misconfigured or Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive applies to any networking devices — such as firewalls, routers and load balancers — that allow remote authentication or administration.

The order requires federal departments to limit access so that only authorized users on an agency’s local or internal network can reach the management interfaces of these devices. CISA’s mandate follows a slew of recent incidents wherein attackers exploited zero-day flaws in popular networking products to conduct ransomware and cyber espionage attacks on victim organizations.

Earlier today, incident response firm Mandiant revealed that since at least October 2022, Chinese cyber spies have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in many email security gateway (ESG) appliances sold by California-based Barracuda Networks to hoover up email from organizations using these devices.

Barracuda was alerted to the exploitation of a zero-day in its products in mid-May, and two days later the company pushed a security update to address the flaw in all affected devices. But last week, Barracuda took the highly unusual step of offering to replace compromised ESGs, evidently in response to malware that altered the systems in such a fundamental way that they could no longer be secured remotely with software updates.

According to Mandiant, a previously unidentified Chinese hacking group was responsible for exploiting the Barracuda flaw, and appeared to be searching through victim organization email records for accounts “belonging to individuals working for a government with political or strategic interest to [China] while this victim government was participating in high-level, diplomatic meetings with other countries.”

When security experts began raising the alarm about a possible zero-day in Barracuda’s products, the Chinese hacking group altered their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) in response to Barracuda’s efforts to contain and remediate the incident, Mandiant found.

Mandiant said the attackers will continue to change their tactics and malware, “especially as network defenders continue to take action against this adversary and their activity is further exposed by the infosec community.”

Meanwhile, this week we learned more details about the ongoing exploitation of a zero-day flaw in a broad range of virtual private networking (VPN) products made by Fortinet — devices many organizations rely on to facilitate remote network access for employees.

On June 11, Fortinet released a half-dozen security updates for its FortiOS firmware, including a weakness that researchers said allows an attacker to run malware on virtually any Fortinet SSL VPN appliance. The researchers found that just being able to reach the management interface for a vulnerable Fortinet SSL VPN appliance was enough to completely compromise the devices.

“This is reachable pre-authentication, on every SSL VPN appliance,” French vulnerability researcher Charles Fol tweeted. “Patch your #Fortigate.”

In details published on June 12, Fortinet confirmed that one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-27997) is being actively exploited. The company said it discovered the weakness in an internal code audit that began in January 2023 — when it learned that Chinese hackers were exploiting a different zero-day flaw in its products.

Shodan.io, the search engine made for finding Internet of Things devices, reports that there are currently more than a half-million vulnerable Fortinet devices reachable via the public Internet.

The new cybersecurity directive from CISA orders agencies to remove any networking device management interfaces from the internet by making them only accessible from an internal enterprise network (CISA recommends an isolated management network). CISA also says agencies should “deploy capabilities, as part of a Zero Trust Architecture, that enforce access control to the interface through a policy enforcement point separate from the interface itself (preferred action).”

Security experts say CISA’s directive highlights the reality that cyberspies and ransomware gangs are making it increasingly risky for organizations to expose any devices to the public Internet, because these groups have strong incentives to probe such devices for previously unknown security vulnerabilities.

The most glaring example of this dynamic can be seen in the frequency with which ransomware groups have discovered and pounced on zero-day flaws in widely-used file transfer applications. One ransomware gang in particular — Cl0p — has repeatedly exploited zero day bugs in various file transfer appliances to extort tens of millions of dollars from hundreds of ransomware victims.

On February 2, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that attackers were exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the GoAnywhere file transfer appliance by Fortra. By the time security updates were available to fix the vulnerability, Cl0p had already used it to steal data from more than a hundred organizations running Fortra’s appliance.

According to CISA, on May 27, Cl0p began exploiting a previously unknown flaw in MOVEit Transfer, a popular Internet-facing file transfer application. MOVEit parent Progress Software has since released security updates to address the weakness, but Cl0p claims to have already used it to compromise hundreds of victim organizations. TechCrunch has been tracking the fallout from victim organizations, which range from banks and insurance providers to universities and healthcare entities.

The always on-point weekly security news podcast Risky Business has recently been urging organizations to jettison any and all FTP appliances, noting that Cl0p (or another crime gang) is likely to visit the same treatment on other FTP appliance vendors.

But that sound advice doesn’t exactly scale for mid-tier networking devices like Barracuda ESGs or Fortinet SSL VPNs, which are particularly prominent in small to mid-sized organizations.

“It’s not like FTP services, you can’t tell an enterprise [to] turn off the VPN [because] the productivity hit of disconnecting the VPN is terminal, it’s a non-starter,” Risky Business co-host Adam Boileau said on this week’s show. “So how to mitigate the impact of having to use a domain-joined network appliance at the edge of your network that is going to get zero-day in it? There’s no good answer.”

Risky Business founder Patrick Gray said the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into entire classes of networking appliances that rely on code which was never designed with today’s threat models in mind.

“In the years leading up to the pandemic, the push towards identity-aware proxies and zero trust everything and moving away from this type of equipment was gradual, but it was happening,” Gray said. “And then COVID-19 hit and everybody had to go work from home, and there really was one option to get going quickly — which was to deploy VPN concentrators with enterprise features.”

Gray said the security industry had been focused on building the next generation of remote access tools that are more security-hardened, but when the pandemic hit organizations scrambled to cobble together whatever they could.

“The only stuff available in the market was all this old crap that is not QA’d properly, and every time you shake them CVEs fall out,” Gray remarked, calling the pandemic, “a shot in the arm” to companies like Fortinet and Barracuda.

“They sold so many VPNs through the pandemic and this is the hangover,” Gray said. “COVID-19 extended the life of these companies and technologies, and that’s unfortunate.”

Adversary-in-the-Middle Attack Campaign Hits Dozens of Global Organizations

"Dozens" of organizations across the world have been targeted as part of a broad business email compromise (BEC) campaign that involved the use of adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to carry out the attacks. "Following a successful phishing attempt, the threat actor gained initial access to one of the victim employee's account and executed an 'adversary-in-the-middle' attack to bypass

Critical FortiOS and FortiProxy Vulnerability Likely Exploited - Patch Now!

Fortinet on Monday disclosed that a newly patched critical flaw impacting FortiOS and FortiProxy may have been "exploited in a limited number of cases" in attacks targeting government, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure sectors. The vulnerability, dubbed XORtigate and tracked as CVE-2023-27997 (CVSS score: 9.2), concerns a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in FortiOS and

Microsoft Uncovers Banking AitM Phishing and BEC Attacks Targeting Financial Giants

Banking and financial services organizations are the targets of a new multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attack, Microsoft has revealed. "The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations," the tech giant disclosed in a Thursday

More MOVEit mitigations: new patches published for further protection

Good news... more patches, this time available proactively

Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups

One of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to constantly create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting customers temporarily rent access to a vast pool of established accounts at major providers.

The service in question — kopeechka[.]store — is perhaps best described as a kind of unidirectional email confirmation-as-a-service that promises to “save your time and money for successfully registering multiple accounts.”

“Are you working on large volumes and are costs constantly growing?” Kopeechka’s website asks. “Our service will solve all your problems.”

As a customer of this service, you don’t get full access to the email inboxes you are renting. Rather, you configure your botnet or spam machine to make an automated application programming interface (API) call to the Kopeechka service, which responds with a working email address at an email provider of your choosing.

Once you’ve entered the supplied email address into the new account registration page at some website or service, you tell Kopeechka which service or website you’re expecting an account confirmation link from, and they will then forward any new messages matching that description to your Kopeechka account panel.

Ensuring that customers cannot control inboxes rented through the service means that Kopeechka can rent the same email address to multiple customers (at least until that email address has been used to register accounts at most of the major online services).

Kopeechka also has multiple affiliate programs, including one that pays app developers for embedding Kopeechka’s API in their software. However, far more interesting is their program for rewarding people who choose to sell Kopeechka usernames and passwords for working email addresses.

Kopeechka means “penny” in Russian, which is generous verbiage (and coinage) for a service that charges a tiny fraction of a penny for access to account confirmation links. Their pricing fluctuates slightly based on which email provider you choose, but a form on the service’s homepage says a single confirmation message from apple.com to outlook.com costs .07 rubles, which is currently equal to about $0.00087 dollars.

“Emails can be uploaded to us for sale, and you will receive a percentage of purchases %,” the service explains. “You upload 1 mailbox of a certain domain, discuss percentage with our technical support (it depends on the liquidity of the domain and the number of downloaded emails).”

We don’t have to look very far for examples of Kopeechka in action. In May, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed a Russian spammer named “Quotpw“ who was mass-registering accounts on the social media network Mastodon in order to conduct a series of huge spam campaigns advertising scam cryptocurrency investment platforms.

Much of the fodder for that story came from Renaud Chaput, a freelance programmer working on modernizing and scaling the Mastodon project infrastructure — including joinmastodon.org, mastodon.online, and mastodon.social. Chaput told KrebsOnSecurity that his team was forced to temporarily halt all new registrations for these communities last month after the number of new registrations from Quotpw’s spam campaign started to overwhelm their systems.

“We suddenly went from like three registrations per minute to 900 a minute,” Chaput said. “There was nothing in the Mastodon software to detect that activity, and the protocol is not designed to handle this.”

After that story ran, Chaput said he discovered that the computer code powering Quotpw’s spam botnet (which has since been released as open source) contained an API call to Kopeechka’s service.

“It allows them to pool many bot-created or compromised emails at various providers and offer them to cyber criminals,” Chaput said of Kopeechka. “This is what they used to create thousands of valid Hotmail (and other) addresses when spamming on Mastodon. If you look at the code, it’s really well done with a nice API that forwards you the confirmation link that you can then fake click with your botnet.”

It’s doubtful anyone will make serious money selling email accounts to Kopeechka, unless of course that person already happens to run a botnet and has access to ridiculous numbers of email credentials. And in that sense, this service is genius: It essentially offers scammers a new way to wring extra income from resources that are already plentiful for them.

One final note about Quotpw and the spam botnet that ravaged Chaput’s Mastodon servers last month: Trend Micro just published a report saying Quotpw was spamming to earn money for a Russian-language affiliate program called “Impulse Team,” which pays people to promote cryptocurrency scams.

Websites under the banner of the Impulse Scam Crypto Project are all essentially “advanced fee” scams that tell people they have earned a cryptocurrency investment credit. Upon registering at the site, visitors are told they need to make a minimum deposit on the service to collect the award. However, those who make the initial investment never hear from the site again, and their money is gone.

Interestingly, Trend Micro says the scammers behind the Impulse Team also appear to be operating a fake reputation service called Scam-Doc[.]com, a website that mimics the legitimate Scamdoc.com for measuring the trustworthiness and authenticity of various sites. Trend notes that the phony reputation site routinely gave high trust ratings to a variety of cryptocurrency scam and casino websites.

“We can only suppose that either the same cybercriminals run operations involving both or that several different cybercriminals share the scam-doc[.]com site,” the Trend researchers wrote.

According to the FBI, financial losses from cryptocurrency investment scams dwarfed losses for all other types of cybercrime in 2022, rising from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion last year.

MOVEit zero-day exploit used by data breach gangs: The how, the why, and what to do…

Little Bobby Tables is back!

Microsoft Details Critical Apple macOS Vulnerability Allowing SIP Protection Bypass

Microsoft has shared details of a now-patched flaw in Apple macOS that could be abused by threat actors with root access to bypass security enforcements and perform arbitrary actions on affected devices. Specifically, the flaw – dubbed Migraine and tracked as CVE-2023-32369 – could be abused to get around a key security measure called System Integrity Protection (SIP), or “rootless,” which

Discord Admins Hacked by Malicious Bookmarks

A number of Discord communities focused on cryptocurrency have been hacked this past month after their administrators were tricked into running malicious Javascript code disguised as a Web browser bookmark.

According to interviews with victims, several of the attacks began with an interview request from someone posing as a reporter for a crypto-focused news outlet online. Those who take the bait are sent a link to a Discord server that appears to be the official Discord of the crypto news site, where they are asked to complete a verification step to validate their identity.

As shown in this Youtube video, the verification process involves dragging a button from the phony crypto news Discord server to the bookmarks bar in one’s Web browser. From there, the visitor is instructed to go back to discord.com and then click the new bookmark to complete the verification process.

However, the bookmark is actually a clever snippet of Javascript that quietly grabs the user’s Discord token and sends it to the scammer’s website. The attacker then loads the stolen token into their own browser session and (usually late at night after the admins are asleep) posts an announcement in the targeted Discord about an exclusive “airdrop,” “NFT mint event” or some other potential money making opportunity for the Discord members.

The unsuspecting Discord members click the link provided by the compromised administrator account, and are asked to connect their crypto wallet to the scammer’s site, where it asks for unlimited spend approvals on their tokens, and subsequently drains the balance of any valuable accounts.

Meanwhile, anyone in the compromised Discord channel who notices the scam and replies is banned, and their messages are deleted by the compromised admin account.

Nicholas Scavuzzo is an associate at Ocean Protocol, which describes itself as an “open-source protocol that aims to allow businesses and individuals to exchange and monetize data and data-based services.” On May 22, an administrator for Ocean Protocol’s Discord server clicked a link in a direct message from a community member that prompted them to prove their identity by dragging a link to their bookmarks.

Scavuzzo, who is based in Maine, said the attackers waited until around midnight in his timezone time before using the administrator’s account to send out an unauthorized message about a new Ocean airdrop.

Scavuzzo said the administrator’s account was hijacked even though she had multi-factor authentication turned on.

“A CAPTCHA bot that allows Discord cookies to be accessed by the person hosting the CAPTCHA,” was how Scavuzzo described the attack. “I’ve seen all kinds of crypto scams, but I’ve never seen one like this.”

Importantly, the stolen token only works for the attackers as long as its rightful owner doesn’t log out and back in, or else change their credentials.

Assuming the administrator can log in, that is. In Ocean’s case, one of the first things the intruders did once they swiped the administrator’s token was change the server’s access controls and remove all core Ocean team members from the server.

Fortunately for Ocean, Scavuzzo was able to reach the operator of the server that hosts the Discord channel, and have the channel’s settings reverted back to normal.

“Thankfully, we are a globally distributed team, so we have people awake at all hours,” Scavuzzo said, noting that Ocean is not aware of any Discord community members who fell for the phony airdrop offer, which was live for about 30 minutes. “This could have been a lot worse.”

On May 26, Aura Network reported on Twitter that its Discord server was compromised in a phishing attack that resulted in the deletion of Discord channels and the dissemination of fake Aura Network Airdrop Campaign links.

On May 27, Nahmii — a cryptocurrency technology based on the Ethereum blockchain — warned on Twitter that one of its community moderators on Discord was compromised and posting fake airdrop details.

On May 9, MetrixCoin reported that its Discord server was hacked, with fake airdrop details pushed to all users.

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a trusted source in the cybersecurity industry who dealt firsthand with one of these attacks and asked to remain anonymous.

“I do pro bono Discord security work for a few Discords, and I was approached by one of these fake journalists,” the source said. “I played along and got the link to their Discord, where they were pretending to be journalists from the Cryptonews website using several accounts.”

The source took note of all the Discord IDs of the admins of the fake Cryptonews Discord, so that he could ensure they were blocked from the Discords he helps to secure.

“Since I’ve been doing this for a while now, I’ve built up a substantial database of Discord users and messages, so often I can see these scammers’ history on Discord,” the source said.

In this case, he noticed a user with the “CEO” role in the fake Cryptonews Discord had been seen previously under another username — “Levatax.” Searching on that Discord ID and username revealed a young Turkish coder named Berk Yilmaz whose Github page linked to the very same Discord ID as the scammer CEO.

Reached via instant message on Telegram, Levatax said he’s had no involvement in such schemes, and that he hasn’t been on Discord since his Microsoft Outlook account was hacked months ago.

“The interesting thing [is] that I didn’t use Discord since few months or even social media because of the political status of Turkey,” Levatax explained, referring to the recent election in his country. “The only thing I confirm is losing my Outlook account which connected to my Discord, and I’m already in touch with Microsoft to recover it.”

The verification method used in the above scam involves a type of bookmark called a “bookmarklet” that stores Javascript code as a clickable link in the bookmarks bar at the top of one’s browser.

While bookmarklets can be useful and harmless, malicious Javascript that is executed in the browser by the user is especially dangerous. So please avoid adding (or dragging) any bookmarks or bookmarklets to your browser unless it was your idea in the first place.

Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer

Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. What follows is an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several large Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code.

Renaud Chaput is a freelance programmer working on modernizing and scaling the Mastodon project infrastructure — including joinmastodon.org, mastodon.online, and mastodon.social. Chaput said that on May 4, 2023, someone unleashed a spam torrent targeting users on these Mastodon communities via “private mentions,” a kind of direct messaging on the platform.

The messages said recipients had earned an investment credit at a cryptocurrency trading platform called moonxtrade[.]com. Chaput said the spammers used more than 1,500 Internet addresses across 400 providers to register new accounts, which then followed popular accounts on Mastodon and sent private mentions to the followers of those accounts.

Since then, the same spammers have used this method to advertise more than 100 different crypto investment-themed domains. Chaput said that at one point this month the volume of bot accounts being registered for the crypto spam campaign started overwhelming the servers that handle new signups at Mastodon.social.

“We suddenly went from like three registrations per minute to 900 a minute,” Chaput said. “There was nothing in the Mastodon software to detect that activity, and the protocol is not designed to handle this.”

Seeking to gain a temporary handle on the spam wave, Chaput said he briefly disabled new account registrations on mastodon.social and mastondon.online. Shortly after that, those same servers came under a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Chaput said whoever was behind the DDoS was definitely not using point-and-click DDoS tools, like a booter or stresser service.

“This was three hours non-stop, 200,000 to 400,000 requests per second,” Chaput said of the DDoS. “At first, they were targeting one path, and when we blocked that they started to randomize things. Over three hours the attack evolved several times.”

Chaput says the spam waves have died down since they retrofitted mastodon.social with a CAPTCHA, those squiggly letter and number combinations designed to stymie automated account creation tools. But he’s worried that other Mastodon instances may not be as well-staffed and might be easy prey for these spammers.

“We don’t know if this is the work of one person, or if this is [related to] software or services being sold to others,” Chaput told KrebsOnSecurity. “We’re really impressed by the scale of it — using hundreds of domains and thousands of Microsoft email addresses.”

Chaput said a review of their logs indicates many of the newly registered Mastodon spam accounts were registered using the same 0auth credentials, and that a domain common to those credentials was quot[.]pw.

A DIRECT QUOT

The domain quot[.]pw has been registered and abandoned by several parties since 2014, but the most recent registration data available through DomainTools.com shows it was registered in March 2020 to someone in Krasnodar, Russia with the email address edgard011012@gmail.com.

This email address is also connected to accounts on several Russian cybercrime forums, including “__edman__,” who had a history of selling “logs” — large amounts of data stolen from many bot-infected computers — as well as giving away access to hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

In September 2018, a user by the name “ципа” (phonetically “Zipper” in Russian) registered on the Russian hacking forum Lolzteam using the edgard0111012@gmail.com address. In May 2020, Zipper told another Lolzteam member that quot[.]pw was their domain. That user advertised a service called “Quot Project” which said they could be hired to write programming scripts in Python and C++.

“I make Telegram bots and other rubbish cheaply,” reads one February 2020 sales thread from Zipper.

Clicking the “open chat in Telegram” button on Zipper’s Lolzteam profile page launched a Telegram instant message chat window where the user Quotpw responded almost immediately. Asked if they were aware their domain was being used to manage a spam botnet that was pelting Mastodon instances with crypto scam spam, Quotpw confirmed the spam was powered by their software.

“It was made for a limited circle of people,” Quotpw said, noting that they recently released the bot software as open source on GitHub.

Quotpw went on to say the spam botnet was powered by well more than the hundreds of IP addresses tracked by Chaput, and that these systems were mostly residential proxies. A residential proxy generally refers to a computer or mobile device running some type of software that enables the system to be used as a pass-through for Internet traffic from others.

Very often, this proxy software is installed surreptitiously, such as through a “Free VPN” service or mobile app. Residential proxies also can refer to households protected by compromised home routers running factory-default credentials or outdated firmware.

Quotpw maintains they have earned more than $2,000 sending roughly 100,000 private mentions to users of different Mastodon communities over the past few weeks. Quotpw said their conversion rate for the same bot-powered direct message spam on Twitter is usually much higher and more profitable, although they conceded that recent adjustments to Twitter’s anti-bot CAPTCHA have put a crimp in their Twitter earnings.

“My partners (I’m programmer) lost time and money while ArkoseLabs (funcaptcha) introduced new precautions on Twitter,” Quotpw wrote in a Telegram reply. “On Twitter, more spam and crypto scam.”

Asked whether they felt at all conflicted about spamming people with invitations to cryptocurrency scams, Quotpw said in their hometown “they pay more for such work than in ‘white’ jobs” — referring to legitimate programming jobs that don’t involve malware, botnets, spams and scams.

“Consider salaries in Russia,” Quotpw said. “Any spam is made for profit and brings illegal money to spammers.”

THE VIENNA CONNECTION

Shortly after edgard011012@gmail.com registered quot[.]pw, the WHOIS registration records for the domain were changed again, to msr-sergey2015@yandex.ru, and to a phone number in Austria: +43.6607003748.

Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks breached data, finds that the address msr-sergey2015@yandex.ru has been associated with accounts at the mobile app site aptoide.com (user: CoolappsforAndroid) and vimeworld.ru that were created from different Internet addresses in Vienna, Austria.

A search in Skype on that Austrian phone number shows it belongs to a Sergey Proshutinskiy who lists his location as Vienna, Austria. The very first result that comes up when one searches that unusual name in Google is a LinkedIn profile for a Sergey Proshutinskiy from Vienna, Austria.

Proshutinskiy’s LinkedIn profile says he is a Class of 2024 student at TGM, which is a state-owned, technical and engineering school in Austria. His resume also says he is a data science intern at Mondi Group, an Austrian manufacturer of sustainable packaging and paper.

Mr. Proshutinskiy did not respond to requests for comment.

Quotpw denied being Sergey, and said Sergey was a friend who registered the domain as a birthday present and favor last year.

“Initially, I bought it for 300 rubles,” Quotpw explained. “The extension cost 1300 rubles (expensive). I waited until it expired and forgot to buy it. After that, a friend (Sergey) bought [the] domain and transferred access rights to me.”

“He’s not even an information security specialist,” Quotpw said of Sergey. “My friends do not belong to this field. None of my friends are engaged in scams or other black [hat] activities.”

It may seem unlikely that someone would go to all this trouble to spam Mastodon users over several weeks using an impressive number of resources — all for just $2,000 in profit. But it is likely that whoever is actually running the various crypto scam platforms advertised by Quotpw’s spam messages pays handsomely for any investments generated by their spam.

According to the FBI, financial losses from cryptocurrency investment scams dwarfed losses for all other types of cybercrime in 2022, rising from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion last year.

Update, May 25, 10:30 a.m.:  Corrected attribution of the Austrian school TGM.

PyPI Repository Under Attack: User Sign-Ups and Package Uploads Temporarily Halted

The maintainers of Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language, have temporarily disabled the ability for users to sign up and upload new packages until further notice. "The volume of malicious users and malicious projects being created on the index in the past week has outpaced our ability to respond to it in a timely fashion,

Warning: Samsung Devices Under Attack! New Security Flaw Exposed

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned of active exploitation of a medium-severity flaw affecting Samsung devices. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-21492 (CVSS score: 4.4), impacts select Samsung devices running Android versions 11, 12, and 13. The South Korean electronics giant described the issue as an information disclosure flaw that could be exploited by a

Dr. Active Directory vs. Mr. Exposed Attack Surface: Who'll Win This Fight?

Active Directory (AD) is among the oldest pieces of software still used in the production environment and can be found in most organizations today. This is despite the fact that its historical security gaps have never been amended. For example, because of its inability to apply any security measures beyond checking for a password and username match, AD (as well the resources it manages) is

The US Post Office Is Spying on the Mail. Senators Want to Stop It

The USPS carries out warrantless surveillance on thousands of parcels every year. Lawmakers want it to end—right now.

Re-Victimization from Police-Auctioned Cell Phones

Countless smartphones seized in arrests and searches by police forces across the United States are being auctioned online without first having the data on them erased, a practice that can lead to crime victims being re-victimized, a new study found. In response, the largest online marketplace for items seized in U.S. law enforcement investigations says it now ensures that all phones sold through its platform will be data-wiped prior to auction.

Researchers at the University of Maryland last year purchased 228 smartphones sold “as-is” from PropertyRoom.com, which bills itself as the largest auction house for police departments in the United States. Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns.

Phones may end up in police custody for any number of reasons — such as its owner was involved in identity theft — and in these cases the phone itself was used as a tool to commit the crime.

“We initially expected that police would never auction these phones, as they would enable the buyer to recommit the same crimes as the previous owner,” the researchers explained in a paper released this month. “Unfortunately, that expectation has proven false in practice.”

The researchers said while they could have employed more aggressive technological measures to work out more of the PINs for the remaining phones they bought, they concluded based on the sample that a great many of the devices they won at auction had probably not been data-wiped and were protected only by a PIN.

Beyond what you would expect from unwiped second hand phones — every text message, picture, email, browser history, location history, etc. — the 61 phones they were able to access also contained significant amounts of data pertaining to crime — including victims’ data — the researchers found.

Some readers may be wondering at this point, “Why should we care about what happens to a criminal’s phone?” First off, it’s not entirely clear how these phones ended up for sale on PropertyRoom.

“Some folks are like, ‘Yeah, whatever, these are criminal phones,’ but are they?” said Dave Levin, an assistant professor of computer science at University of Maryland.

“We started looking at state laws around what they’re supposed to do with lost or stolen property, and we found that most of it ends up going the same route as civil asset forfeiture,” Levin continued. “Meaning, if they can’t find out who owns something, it eventually becomes the property of the state and gets shipped out to these resellers.”

Also, the researchers found that many of the phones clearly had personal information on them regarding previous or intended targets of crime: A dozen of the phones had photographs of government-issued IDs. Three of those were on phones that apparently belonged to sex workers; their phones contained communications with clients.

One phone had full credit files for eight different people on it. On another device they found a screenshot including 11 stolen credit cards that were apparently purchased from an online carding shop. On yet another, the former owner had apparently been active in a Telegram group chat that sold tutorials on how to run identity theft scams.

The most interesting phone from the batches they bought at auction was one with a sticky note attached that included the device’s PIN and the notation “Gry Keyed,” no doubt a reference to the Graykey software that is often used by law enforcement agencies to brute-force a mobile device PIN.

“That one had the PIN on the back,” Levin said. “The message chain on that phone had 24 Experian and TransUnion credit histories”.

The University of Maryland team said they took care in their research not to further the victimization of people whose information was on the devices they purchased from PropertyRoom.com. That involved ensuring that none of the devices could connect to the Internet when powered on, and scanning all images on the devices against known hashes for child sexual abuse material.

It is common to find phones and other electronics for sale on auction platforms like eBay that have not been wiped of sensitive data, but in those cases eBay doesn’t possess the items being sold. In contrast, platforms like PropertyRoom obtain devices and resell them at auction directly.

PropertyRoom did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But the researchers said sometime in the past few months PropertyRoom began posting a notice stating that all mobile devices would be wiped of their data before being sold at auction.

“We informed them of our research in October 2022, and they responded that they would review our findings internally,” Levin said. “They stopped selling them for a while, but then it slowly came back, and then we made sure we won every auction. And all of the ones we got from that were indeed wiped, except there were four devices that had external SD [storage] cards in them that weren’t wiped.”

A copy of the University of Maryland study is here (PDF).

Researchers Uncover New BGP Flaws in Popular Internet Routing Protocol Software

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered weaknesses in a software implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that could be weaponized to achieve a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on vulnerable BGP peers. The three vulnerabilities reside in version 8.4 of FRRouting, a popular open source internet routing protocol suite for Linux and Unix platforms. It's currently used by several

ChatGPT's Data Protection Blind Spots and How Security Teams Can Solve Them

In the short time since their inception, ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms have rightfully gained the reputation of ultimate productivity boosters. However, the very same technology that enables rapid production of high-quality text on demand, can at the same time expose sensitive corporate data. A recent incident, in which Samsung software engineers pasted proprietary code into ChatGPT,

Giving a Face to the Malware Proxy Service ‘Faceless’

For the past seven years, a malware-based proxy service known as “Faceless” has sold anonymity to countless cybercriminals. For less than a dollar per day, Faceless customers can route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service. In this post we’ll examine clues left behind over the past decade by the proprietor of Faceless, including some that may help put a face to the name.

Riley Kilmer is co-founder of Spur.us, a company that tracks thousands of VPN and proxy networks, and helps customers identify traffic coming through these anonymity services. Kilmer said Faceless has emerged as one of the underground’s most reliable malware-based proxy services, mainly because its proxy network has traditionally included a great many compromised “Internet of Things” devices — such as media sharing servers — that are seldom included on malware or spam block lists.

Kilmer said when Spur first started looking into Faceless, they noticed almost every Internet address that Faceless advertised for rent also showed up in the IoT search engine Shodan.io as a media sharing device on a local network that was somehow exposed to the Internet.

“We could reliably look up the [fingerprint] for these media sharing devices in Shodan and find those same systems for sale on Faceless,” Kilmer said.

In January 2023, the Faceless service website said it was willing to pay for information about previously undocumented security vulnerabilities in IoT devices. Those with IoT zero-days could expect payment if their exploit involved at least 5,000 systems that could be identified through Shodan.

Recently, Faceless has shown ambitions beyond just selling access to poorly-secured IoT devices. In February, Faceless re-launched a service that lets users drop an email bomb on someone — causing the target’s inbox to be filled with tens of thousands of junk messages.

And in March 2023, Faceless started marketing a service for looking up Social Security Numbers (SSNs) that claims to provide access to “the largest SSN database on the market with a very high hit rate.”

Kilmer said Faceless wants to become a one-stop-fraud-shop for cybercriminals who are seeking stolen or synthetic identities from which to transact online, and a temporary proxy that is geographically close to the identity being sold. Faceless currently sells this bundled product for $9 — $8 for the identity and $1 for the proxy.

“They’re trying to be this one-stop shop for anonymity and personas,” Kilmer said. “The service basically says ‘here’s an SSN and proxy connection that should correspond to that user’s location and make sense to different websites.'”

MRMURZA

Faceless is a project from MrMurza, a particularly talkative member of more than a dozen Russian-language cybercrime forums over the past decade. According to cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, MrMurza has been active in the Russian underground since at least September 2012. Flashpoint said MrMurza appears to be extensively involved in botnet activity and “drops” — fraudulent bank accounts created using stolen identity data that are often used in money laundering and cash-out schemes.

Faceless grew out of a popular anonymity service called iSocks, which was launched in 2014 and advertised on multiple Russian crime forums as a proxy service that customers could use to route their malicious Web traffic through compromised computers.

Flashpoint says that in the months before iSocks went online, MrMurza posted on the Russian language crime forum Verified asking for a serious partner to assist in opening a proxy service, noting they had a botnet that was powered by malware that collected proxies with a 70 percent infection rate.

In September 2016, MrMurza sent a message to all iSocks users saying the service would soon be phased out in favor of Faceless, and that existing iSocks users could register at Faceless for free if they did so quickly — before Faceless began charging new users registration fees between $50 and $100.

Verified and other Russian language crime forums where MrMurza had a presence have been hacked over the years, with contact details and private messages leaked online. In a 2014 private message to the administrator of Verified explaining his bona fides, MrMurza said he received years of positive feedback as a seller of stolen Italian credit cards and a vendor of drops services.

MrMurza told the Verified admin that he used the nickname AccessApproved on multiple other forums over the years. MrMurza also told the admin that his account number at the now-defunct virtual currency Liberty Reserve was U1018928.

According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the user AccessApproved joined the Russian crime forum Zloy in Jan. 2012, from an Internet address in Magnitogorsk, RU. In a 2012 private message where AccessApproved was arguing with another cybercriminal over a deal gone bad, AccessApproved asked to be paid at the Liberty Reserve address U1018928.

In 2013, U.S. federal investigators seized Liberty Reserve and charged its founders with facilitating billions of dollars in money laundering tied to cybercrime. The Liberty Reserve case was prosecuted out of the Southern District of New York, which in 2016 published a list of account information (PDF) tied to thousands of Liberty Reserve addresses the government asserts were involved in money laundering.

That document indicates the Liberty Reserve account claimed by MrMurza/AccessApproved — U1018928 — was assigned in 2011 to a “Vadim Panov” who used the email address lesstroy@mgn.ru.

PANOV

Constella Intelligence, a threat intelligence firm that tracks breached databases, says lesstroy@mgn.ru was used for an account “Hackerok” at the accounting service klerk.ru that was created from an Internet address in Magnitogorsk. The password chosen by this user was “1232.”

In addition to selling access to hacked computers and bank accounts, both MrMurza and AccessApproved ran side hustles on the crime forums selling clothing from popular retailers that refused to ship directly to Russia.

On one cybercrime forum where AccessApproved had clothing customers, denizens of the forum created a lengthy discussion thread to help users identify incoming emails associated with various reshipping services advertised within their community. Reshippers tend to rely on a large number of people in the United States and Europe helping to forward packages overseas, but in many cases the notifications about purchases and shipping details would be forwarded to reshipping service customers from a consistent email account.

That thread said AccessApproved’s clothing reshipping service forwarded confirmation emails from the address panov-v@mail.ru. This address is associated with accounts on two Russian cybercrime forums registered from Magnitogorsk in 2010 using the handle “Omega^gg4u.”

This Omega^gg4u identity sold software that can rapidly check the validity of large batches of stolen credit cards. Interestingly, both Omega^gg4u and AccessApproved also had another niche: Reselling heavily controlled substances — such as human growth hormone and anabolic steroids — from chemical suppliers in China.

A search in Constella on the address panov-v@mail.ru and many variations on that address shows these accounts cycled through the same passwords, including 055752403k, asus666, 01091987h, and the relatively weak password 1232 (recall that 1232 was picked by whoever registered the lesstroy@mgn.ru account at Klerk.ru).

Constella says the email address asus666@yandex.ru relied on the passwords asus666 and 01091987h. The 01091987h password also was used by asus666@mail.ru, which also favored the password 24587256.

Constella further reports that whoever owned the much shorter address asus@mail.ru also used the password 24587256. In addition, it found the password 2318922479 was tied to both asus666@mail.ru and asus@mail.ru.

The email addresses asus@mail.ru, asus2504@mail.ru, and zaxar2504@rambler.ru were all used to register Vkontakte social media accounts for a Denis ***@VIP*** Pankov. There are a number of other Vkontakte accounts registered to asus@mail.ru and many variations of this address under a different name. But none of those other profiles appear tied to real-life identities.

PANKOV

Constella’s data shows the email addresses asus2504@mail.ru and zaxar2504@rambler.ru used the rather unique password denis250485, which was also used by the email address denispankov@yandex.ru and almost a dozen variations at other Russian-language email providers.

Russian vehicle registration records from 2016 show the email address denispankov@yandex.ru belongs to Denis Viktorovich Pankov, born on April 25, 1985. That explains the “250485” portion of Pankov’s favored password. The registration records further indicate that in 2016 Pankov’s vehicle was registered in a suburb of Moscow.

Russian incorporation records show that denispankov@yandex.com is tied to IP Pankov Denis Viktorovich, a now-defunct transportation company in the Volograd Oblast, a region in southern Russia that shares a long border with western Kazazkhstan.

More recent records for IP Pankov Denis Viktorovich show a microenterprise with this name in Omsk that described its main activity as “retail sale by mail or via the Internet.” Russian corporate records indicate this entity was liquidated in 2021.

A reverse password search on “denis250485” via Constella shows this password was used by more than 75 email addresses, most of which are some variation of gaihnik@mail.ru — such as gaihnik25@mail.ru, or gaihnik2504@rambler.ru.

In 2012, someone posted answers to a questionnaire on behalf of Denis Viktorovich Pankov to a Russian-language discussion forum on Chinese crested dog breeds. The message said Pankov was seeking a puppy of a specific breed and was a resident of Krasnogorsk, a city that is adjacent to the northwestern boundary of Moscow.

The message said Pankov was a then 27-year-old manager in an advertising company, and could be reached at the email address gaihnik@mail.ru.

GAIHNIK

Constella Intelligence shows gaihnik@mail.ru registered at the now-defunct email marketing service Smart Responder from an address in Gagarin, which is about 115 miles west of Moscow.

Back in 2015, the user Gaihnik25 was banned from the online game World of Tanks for violating the game’s terms that prohibit “bot farming,” or the automated use of large numbers of player accounts to win some advantage that is usually related to cashing out game accounts or inventory.

For the past few years, someone using the nickname Gaihnik25 has been posting messages to the Russian-language hacking forum Gerki[.]pw, on discussion threads regarding software designed to “brute force” or mass-check online accounts for weak or compromised passwords.

A new member of the Russian hacking forum Nohide[.]Space using the handle Gaihnik has been commenting recently about proxy services, credential checking software, and the sale of hacked mailing lists. Gaihnik’s first post on the forum concerned private software for checking World of Tanks accounts.

The address gaihnik@mail.ru shows how so many email addresses tied to Pankov were also connected to apparently misleading identities on Vkontakte and elsewhere. Constella found this address was tied to a Vkontakte account for a Dmitriy Zakarov.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine says gaihnik@mail.ru belongs to 37-year-old Denis Pankov, yet clicking the Mail.ru profile for that user brings up a profile for a much older man by the name Gavril Zakarov. However, when you log in to a Mail.ru account and view that profile, it shows that most of the account’s profile photos are of a much younger man.

Many of those same photos show up in an online dating profile at dating.ru for the user Gaihnik, a.k.a “Denchik,” who says he is a 37-year-old Taurus from Gagarin who enjoys going for walks in nature, staying up late, and being on the Internet.

Mr. Pankov did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to all of the email addresses mentioned in this story. However, some of those addresses produced detailed error responses; Mail.ru reported that the users panov-v@mail.ru, asus666@mail.ru, and asus2504@mail.ru were terminated, and that gaihnik25@mail.ru is now disabled.

Messages sent to many other email addresses connected via passwords to Pankov and using some variation of asus####@mail.ru also returned similar account termination messages.