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Last week, the United States joined the U.K. and Australia in sanctioning and charging a Russian man named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the leader of the infamous LockBit ransomware group. LockBit’s leader “LockBitSupp” claims the feds named the wrong guy, saying the charges don’t explain how they connected him to Khoroshev. This post examines the activities of Khoroshev’s many alter egos on the cybercrime forums, and tracks the career of a gifted malware author who has written and sold malicious code for the past 14 years.
Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev. Image: treasury.gov.
On May 7, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Khoroshev on 26 criminal counts, including extortion, wire fraud, and conspiracy. The government alleges Khoroshev created, sold and used the LockBit ransomware strain to personally extort more than $100 million from hundreds of victim organizations, and that LockBit as a group extorted roughly half a billion dollars over four years.
Federal investigators say Khoroshev ran LockBit as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation, wherein he kept 20 percent of any ransom amount paid by a victim organization infected with his code, with the remaining 80 percent of the payment going to LockBit affiliates responsible for spreading the malware.
Financial sanctions levied against Khoroshev by the U.S. Department of the Treasury listed his known email and street address (in Voronezh, in southwest Russia), passport number, and even his tax ID number (hello, Russian tax authorities). The Treasury filing says Khoroshev used the emails sitedev5@yandex.ru, and khoroshev1@icloud.com.
According to DomainTools.com, the address sitedev5@yandex.ru was used to register at least six domains, including a Russian business registered in Khoroshev’s name called tkaner.com, which is a blog about clothing and fabrics.
A search at the breach-tracking service Constella Intelligence on the phone number in Tkaner’s registration records — 7.9521020220 — brings up multiple official Russian government documents listing the number’s owner as Dmitri Yurievich Khoroshev.
Another domain registered to that phone number was stairwell[.]ru, which at one point advertised the sale of wooden staircases. Constella finds that the email addresses webmaster@stairwell.ru and admin@stairwell.ru used the password 225948.
DomainTools reports that stairwell.ru for several years included the registrant’s name as “Dmitrij Ju Horoshev,” and the email address pin@darktower.su. According to Constella, this email address was used in 2010 to register an account for a Dmitry Yurievich Khoroshev from Voronezh, Russia at the hosting provider firstvds.ru.
Image: Shutterstock.
Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 finds that pin@darktower.ru was used by a Russian-speaking member called Pin on the English-language cybercrime forum Opensc. Pin was active on Opensc around March 2012, and authored 13 posts that mostly concerned data encryption issues, or how to fix bugs in code.
Other posts concerned custom code Pin claimed to have written that would bypass memory protections on Windows XP and Windows 7 systems, and inject malware into memory space normally allocated to trusted applications on a Windows machine.
Pin also was active at that same time on the Russian-language security forum Antichat, where they told fellow forum members to contact them at the ICQ instant messenger number 669316.
A search on the ICQ number 669316 at Intel 471 shows that in April 2011, a user by the name NeroWolfe joined the Russian cybercrime forum Zloy using the email address d.horoshev@gmail.com, and from an Internet address in Voronezh, RU.
Constella finds the same password tied to webmaster@stairwell.ru (225948) was used by the email address 3k@xakep.ru, which Intel 471 says was registered to more than a dozen NeroWolfe accounts across just as many Russian cybercrime forums between 2011 and 2015.
NeroWolfe’s introductory post to the forum Verified in Oct. 2011 said he was a system administrator and C++ coder.
“Installing SpyEYE, ZeuS, any DDoS and spam admin panels,” NeroWolfe wrote. This user said they specialize in developing malware, creating computer worms, and crafting new ways to hijack Web browsers.
“I can provide my portfolio on request,” NeroWolfe wrote. “P.S. I don’t modify someone else’s code or work with someone else’s frameworks.”
In April 2013, NeroWolfe wrote in a private message to another Verified forum user that he was selling a malware “loader” program that could bypass all of the security protections on Windows XP and Windows 7.
“The access to the network is slightly restricted,” NeroWolfe said of the loader, which he was selling for $5,000. “You won’t manage to bind a port. However, it’s quite possible to send data. The code is written in C.”
In an October 2013 discussion on the cybercrime forum Exploit, NeroWolfe weighed in on the karmic ramifications of ransomware. At the time, ransomware-as-a-service didn’t exist yet, and many members of Exploit were still making good money from “lockers,” relatively crude programs that locked the user out of their system until they agreed to make a small payment (usually a few hundred dollars via prepaid Green Dot cards).
Lockers, which presaged the coming ransomware scourge, were generally viewed by the Russian-speaking cybercrime forums as harmless moneymaking opportunities, because they usually didn’t seek to harm the host computer or endanger files on the system. Also, there were still plenty of locker programs that aspiring cybercriminals could either buy or rent to make a steady income.
NeroWolfe reminded forum denizens that they were just as vulnerable to ransomware attacks as their would-be victims, and that what goes around comes around.
“Guys, do you have a conscience?,” NeroWolfe wrote. “Okay, lockers, network gopstop aka business in Russian. The last thing was always squeezed out of the suckers. But encoders, no one is protected from them, including the local audience.”
If Khoroshev was ever worried that someone outside of Russia might be able to connect his early hacker handles to his real life persona, that’s not clear from reviewing his history online. In fact, the same email address tied to so many of NeroWolfe’s accounts on the forums — 3k@xakep.ru — was used in 2011 to create an account for a Dmitry Yurevich Khoroshev on the Russian social media network Vkontakte.
NeroWolfe seems to have abandoned all of his forum accounts sometime in 2016. In November 2016, an exploit[.]ru member filed an official complaint against NeroWolfe, saying NeroWolfe had been paid $2,000 to produce custom code but never finished the project and vanished.
It’s unclear what happened to NeroWolfe or to Khoroshev during this time. Maybe he got arrested, or some close associates did. Perhaps he just decided it was time to lay low and hit the reset on his operational security efforts, given his past failures in this regard. It’s also possible NeroWolfe landed a real job somewhere for a few years, fathered a child, and/or had to put his cybercrime career on hold.
Or perhaps Khoroshev saw the coming ransomware industry for the endless pot of gold that it was about to become, and then dedicated himself to working on custom ransomware code. That’s what the government believes.
The indictment against Khoroshev says he used the hacker nickname Putinkrab, and Intel 471 says this corresponds to a username that was first registered across three major Russian cybercrime forums in early 2019.
KrebsOnSecurity could find no obvious connections between Putinkrab and any of Khoroshev’s older identities. However, if Putinkrab was Khoroshev, he would have learned from his past mistakes and started fresh with a new identity (which he did). But also, it is likely the government hasn’t shared all of the intelligence it has collected against him (more on that in a bit).
Putinkrab’s first posts on the Russian cybercrime forums XSS, Exploit and UFOLabs saw this user selling ransomware source code written in C.
A machine-translated ad for ransomware source code from Putinkrab on the Russian language cybercrime forum UFOlabs in 2019. Image: Ke-la.com.
In April 2019, Putkinkrab offered an affiliate program that would run on top of his custom-made ransomware code.
“I want to work for a share of the ransoms: 20/80,” Putinkrab wrote on Exploit. “20 percent is my percentage for the work, you get 80% of the ransoms. The percentage can be reduced up to 10/90 if the volumes are good. But now, temporarily, until the service is fully automated, we are working using a different algorithm.”
Throughout the summer of 2019, Putinkrab posted multiple updates to Exploit about new features being added to his ransomware strain, as well as novel evasion techniques to avoid detection by security tools. He also told forum members he was looking for investors for a new ransomware project based on his code.
In response to an Exploit member who complained that the security industry was making it harder to profit from ransomware, Putinkrab said that was because so many cybercriminals were relying on crappy ransomware code.
“The vast majority of top antiviruses have acquired behavioral analysis, which blocks 95% of crypto-lockers at their root,” Putinkrab wrote. “Cryptolockers made a lot of noise in the press, but lazy system administrators don’t make backups after that. The vast majority of cryptolockers are written by people who have little understanding of cryptography. Therefore, decryptors appear on the Internet, and with them the hope that files can be decrypted without paying a ransom. They just sit and wait. Contact with the owner of the key is lost over time.”
Putinkrab said he had every confidence his ransomware code was a game-changer, and a huge money machine.
“The game is just gaining momentum,” Putinkrab wrote. “Weak players lose and are eliminated.”
The rest of his response was structured like a poem:
“In this world, the strongest survive.
Our life is just a struggle.
The winner will be the smartest,
Who has his head on his shoulders.”
Putinkrab’s final post came on August 23, 2019. The Justice Department says the LockBit ransomware affiliate program was officially launched five months later. From there on out, the government says, Khoroshev adopted the persona of LockBitSupp. In his introductory post on Exploit, LockBit’s mastermind said the ransomware strain had been in development since September 2019.
The original LockBit malware was written in C (a language that NeroWolfe excelled at). Here’s the original description of LockBit, from its maker:
“The software is written in C and Assembler; encryption is performed through the I/O Completion Port; there is a port scanning local networks and an option to find all DFS, SMB, WebDAV network shares, an admin panel in Tor, automatic test decryption; a decryption tool is provided; there is a chat with Push notifications, a Jabber bot that forwards correspondence and an option to terminate services/processes in line which prevent the ransomware from opening files at a certain moment. The ransomware sets file permissions and removes blocking attributes, deletes shadow copies, clears logs and mounts hidden partitions; there is an option to drag-and-drop files/folders and a console/hidden mode. The ransomware encrypts files in parts in various places: the larger the file size, the more parts there are. The algorithms used are AES + RSA.
You are the one who determines the ransom amount after communicating with the victim. The ransom paid in any currency that suits you will be transferred to your wallets. The Jabber bot serves as an admin panel and is used for banning, providing decryption tools, chatting – Jabber is used for absolutely everything.”
Does the above timeline prove that NeroWolfe/Khoroshev is LockBitSupp? No. However, it does indicate Khoroshev was for many years deeply invested in countless schemes involving botnets, stolen data, and malware he wrote that others used to great effect. NeroWolfe’s many private messages from fellow forum members confirm this.
NeroWolfe’s specialty was creating custom code that employed novel stealth and evasion techniques, and he was always quick to volunteer his services on the forums whenever anyone was looking help on a malware project that called for a strong C or C++ programmer.
Someone with those qualifications — as well as demonstrated mastery of data encryption and decryption techniques — would have been in great demand by the ransomware-as-a-service industry that took off at around the same time NeroWolfe vanished from the forums.
Someone like that who is near or at the top of their game vis-a-vis their peers does not simply walk away from that level of influence, community status, and potential income stream unless forced to do so by circumstances beyond their immediate control.
It’s important to note that Putinkrab didn’t just materialize out of thin air in 2019 — suddenly endowed with knowledge about how to write advanced, stealthy ransomware strains. That knowledge clearly came from someone who’d already had years of experience building and deploying ransomware strains against real-life victim organizations.
Thus, whoever Putinkrab was before they adopted that moniker, it’s a safe bet they were involved in the development and use of earlier, highly successful ransomware strains. One strong possible candidate is Cerber ransomware, the most popular and effective affiliate program operating between early 2016 and mid-2017. Cerber thrived because it emerged as an early mover in the market for ransomware-as-a-service offerings.
In February 2024, the FBI seized LockBit’s cybercrime infrastructure on the dark web, following an apparently lengthy infiltration of the group’s operations. The United States has already indicted and sanctioned at least five other alleged LockBit ringleaders or affiliates, so presumably the feds have been able to draw additional resources from those investigations.
Also, it seems likely that the three national intelligence agencies involved in bringing these charges are not showing all of their cards. For example, the Treasury documents on Khoroshev mention a single cryptocurrency address, and yet experts interviewed for this story say there are no obvious clues connecting this address to Khoroshev or Putinkrab.
But given that LockBitSupp has been actively involved in Lockbit ransomware attacks against organizations for four years now, the government almost certainly has an extensive list of the LockBit leader’s various cryptocurrency addresses — and probably even his bank accounts in Russia. And no doubt the money trail from some of those transactions was traceable to its ultimate beneficiary (or close enough).
Not long after Khoroshev was charged as the leader of LockBit, a number of open-source intelligence accounts on Telegram began extending the information released by the Treasury Department. Within hours, these sleuths had unearthed more than a dozen credit card accounts used by Khoroshev over the past decade, as well as his various bank account numbers in Russia.
The point is, this post is based on data that’s available to and verifiable by KrebsOnSecurity. Woodward & Bernstein’s source in the Watergate investigation — Deep Throat — famously told the two reporters to “follow the money.” This is always excellent advice. But these days, that can be a lot easier said than done — especially with people who a) do not wish to be found, and b) don’t exactly file annual reports.
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A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
A researcher found DC Health had five Salesforce Community sites exposing data.
Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.
Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
This misconfigured Salesforce Community site from the state of Vermont was leaking pandemic assistance loan application data, including names, SSNs, email address and bank account information.
Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.
“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.
Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.
“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.
Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.
“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”
The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).
On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.
Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.
But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.
Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.
That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”
Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.
“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”
In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:
Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See
Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile
“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”
For Cisco engineers working on Duo, having a remote-first workplace has helped them reach life goals, connect with colleagues around the world, and be intentional communicators. We understand that working remotely can be an adjustment — that’s why we’ve compiled the 10 parts of remote work that surprised our team members most and their advice for navigating the nuances. If you’re interested in being part of a remote-first workplace, check out our open positions.
Senior Engineering Leader David Rines has worked remotely for the past seven years. He’s found that Cisco’s approach to distributed teams has “enabled us to pick up the right talent, and not necessarily local talent. We are moving towards a global, follow the sun environment,” he said.
One of the aspects Rines appreciates most of this structure is getting “a widely varied set of perspectives and experiences that help build a more reliable, more robust product, which is why we’re here.”
Another benefit to having colleagues across the globe is the sharing of recipes, a perk Senior Site Reliability Engineer Bernard Ting particularly enjoys. Proactively communicating with colleagues virtually “helps you to form bonds with people from other teams. You can always learn something new about cultures elsewhere. I talk to people about food and so I’m always gathering recipes from people from all over the world,” Ting shared.
While some may fear that working remotely could lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness, a different camaraderie can flourish in the structure of our distributed teams. With colleagues across time zones, “there’s always someone there who you can reach out to help solve your problem,” Rines said.
Collaboration hours are another way Site Reliability Engineering Manager Jaya Sistla has cultivated virtual community and problem-solving. These hours are blocked off for team members to talk about what they’re working on. “The main thing is being able to ask for help so you don’t go into the rabbit hole debugging things,” Sistla said.
Ting points out that working in a distributed model allows you to really engage in virtual events and conversations. Given that the team mainly communicates through online chat, Ting has found that “forces you to see everyone as equally approachable, which has made me more comfortable reaching out to people from anywhere in the world.”
For folks sharing an office, collaboration can happen through casual chats over coffee. When facing a challenge, you can ask your neighbor for support. While ideally virtual communication could have a similar cadence and spontaneity, the logistics of remote and distributed work require intentionality and being proactive in connecting with colleagues as people and as co-workers.
When Ting first started working remotely, he felt that every meeting needed to be formal and have a business objective. By sharing his feelings with his manager, he was reassured that “socializing is a very important part of teamwork, because if you don’t have a good relationship with your colleagues you’re not going to be able to have healthy discussions, healthy conflict or be able to critique each other when the situation arises.”
Since that conversation, Ting has been more proactive about catching up with colleagues, which can include sharing a coffee over video chat. Duo’s “coffee roulette” formalizes the process as every month, employees who opt in can be randomly paired up for a quick half-hour chat focused exclusively on socializing. Ting has found being proactive about socializing virtually helpful. “It’s made me more intentional with my time and really treasure the social experience you can get,” he said.
Some folks may be concerned that without a manager observing their efforts and work ethic day in and day out, it may be harder to recognize accomplishments and challenges. Ting found that within his team “when you work on projects and in your one-on-ones with your managers, they’re always very intentional about learning what you’ve been doing and seeing what your progress is like on certain projects. I’ve been asked, ‘How do you think you can improve? What are some of the things you’ve been doing outside of the team work?’”
To cultivate cross-team collaboration and education, there are thoughtfully planned virtual lunch and learns. “We schedule training sessions and common meetings at times that are flexible for everyone. If it has to be repeated, we do it so people can comfortably attend rather than stretching themselves and attending at odd hours,” Sistla said.
For Software Engineer Nick Aspinall, an important and fun part of working remotely is keeping in touch with virtual messaging. One unique perk has been getting to create and customize emojis with team members including a few of himself in “various ridiculous states,” he said.
Connecting with colleagues on themed channels focused on personal and professional interests from coffee to pets “makes it really cool because you can meet people across different teams and still get some of the feeling of rubbing elbows that you get when you’re in the office,” Aspinall said. Participating in these virtual conversations boosts morale while also providing an endless supply of cute animal pics.
Given the multi-faceted nature of our work and the importance of consistent information sharing, having different communication channels and formats to communicate data with varying degrees of complexity is vital. Having information readily accessible, accurate and updated is particularly necessary in a field like cybersecurity.
Senior Software Engineer Mario Lopez finds that the variety of information sources contributes to an easeful remote working experience. For instance, for complex architecture decisions or detailing, Duo’s Wiki is the best source.
Software Engineer Hanna Fernandez has benefited from chat channels dedicated to design and engineering topics to “see what everyone’s up to and what thoughts people have,” she said. Sista pointed out these are great places to ask questions and open up dialogue to solve problems.
Our culture is “video-on,” meaning that it is preferred that during video meetings, as much as possible, attendees have their cameras on. Lopez loves this because “you get a bit of that personal human element.”
“We’re all people behind these screens. You definitely get some of people’s personality through text, but you get it more when you actually see them. It’s infectious when you see someone smiling. You’ve got to smile back,” he shared (while we both smiled).
When Fernandez started at Cisco, she was advised to schedule individual meetings with everyone she would be working with on every team that she joined. That suggestion is one she’s applied even virtually.
“It’s a great strategy because I already know that my team is super talented and very smart, but this way I also get to know them as humans beyond their roles,” Fernandez said. Fernandez also finds it important to check in with co-workers and ask how they’re feeling and how their time off was. “I know a lot of people hate small talk, but it’s not just small talk. I’m genuinely interested in how my co-workers are doing.”
One of Ting’s biggest goals was buying his first house in the countryside outside of London. By working remotely, Ting has flexibility in his location which allowed him to achieve his goal of buying a house and settling down with his partner, while giving their dogs the space they need to be dogs.
When transitioning from fully remote to hybrid, it’s important to recognize that there will be some shifts to get accustomed to. As the structures of remote, distributed and hybrid work evolve, it’s important to stay flexible and notice what’s possible through multiple modalities of team building. Many teams have enjoyed in-person gatherings and connecting through virtual lunches and team games when remote.
Fernandez has had multiple roles with multiple structures at Cisco. As an intern, she was fully in person and shared desk space with other interns who collaborated on full stack engineering. While working in finance IT, Fernandez was hybrid and many of her colleagues were distributed among multiple offices. The pandemic began while she was in a DevOps role, forcing her to maintain boundaries around her work time while working fully remotely. In her current role working on Duo, Fernandez is completely remote but advocates for in-person events if possible, because “humans are social creatures who want to see each other’s faces in real life once in a while.”
For Aspinall, “when we did come back to the office, there was a bit of an adjustment period where you were overstimulated from the office.” He also wanted to ensure team members who were 100% remote were fully included. Now he sees that while half his team is fully remote and the other half is hybrid, “that doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. All of our meetings feel the same. They’re all seamless.”
If you’re interested in joining our team from wherever you are in the world, check out our open roles.
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Phishers are enjoying remarkable success using text messages to steal remote access credentials and one-time passcodes from employees at some of the world’s largest technology companies and customer support firms. A recent spate of SMS phishing attacks from one cybercriminal group has spawned a flurry of breach disclosures from affected companies, which are all struggling to combat the same lingering security threat: The ability of scammers to interact directly with employees through their mobile devices.
In mid-June 2022, a flood of SMS phishing messages began targeting employees at commercial staffing firms that provide customer support and outsourcing to thousands of companies. The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.
The phishers behind this scheme used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the target company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule.
The phishing sites leveraged a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website. But because of the way the bot was configured, it was possible for security researchers to capture the information being sent by victims to the public Telegram server.
This data trove was first reported by security researchers at Singapore-based Group-IB, which dubbed the campaign “0ktapus” for the attackers targeting organizations using identity management tools from Okta.com.
“This case is of interest because despite using low-skill methods it was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations,” Group-IB wrote. “Furthermore, once the attackers compromised an organization they were quickly able to pivot and launch subsequent supply chain attacks, indicating that the attack was planned carefully in advance.”
It’s not clear how many of these phishing text messages were sent out, but the Telegram bot data reviewed by KrebsOnSecurity shows they generated nearly 10,000 replies over approximately two months of sporadic SMS phishing attacks targeting more than a hundred companies.
A great many responses came from those who were apparently wise to the scheme, as evidenced by the hundreds of hostile replies that included profanity or insults aimed at the phishers: The very first reply recorded in the Telegram bot data came from one such employee, who responded with the username “havefuninjail.”
Still, thousands replied with what appear to be legitimate credentials — many of them including one-time codes needed for multi-factor authentication. On July 20, the attackers turned their sights on internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.com, and the intercepted credentials show at least three employees fell for the scam.
Image: Cloudflare.com
In a blog post earlier this month, Cloudflare said it detected the account takeovers and that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Cloudflare said it does not rely on one-time passcodes as a second factor, so there was nothing to provide to the attackers. But Cloudflare said it wanted to call attention to the phishing attacks because they would probably work against most other companies.
“This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote. “On July 20, 2022, the Cloudflare Security team received reports of employees receiving legitimate-looking text messages pointing to what appeared to be a Cloudflare Okta login page. The messages began at 2022-07-20 22:50 UTC. Over the course of less than 1 minute, at least 76 employees received text messages on their personal and work phones. Some messages were also sent to the employees family members.”
On three separate occasions, the phishers targeted employees at Twilio.com, a San Francisco based company that provides services for making and receiving text messages and phone calls. It’s unclear how many Twilio employees received the SMS phishes, but the data suggest at least four Twilio employees responded to a spate of SMS phishing attempts on July 27, Aug. 2, and Aug. 7.
On that last date, Twilio disclosed that on Aug. 4 it became aware of unauthorized access to information related to a limited number of Twilio customer accounts through a sophisticated social engineering attack designed to steal employee credentials.
“This broad based attack against our employee base succeeded in fooling some employees into providing their credentials,” Twilio said. “The attackers then used the stolen credentials to gain access to some of our internal systems, where they were able to access certain customer data.”
That “certain customer data” included information on roughly 1,900 users of the secure messaging app Signal, which relied on Twilio to provide phone number verification services. In its disclosure on the incident, Signal said that with their access to Twilio’s internal tools the attackers were able to re-register those users’ phone numbers to another device.
On Aug. 25, food delivery service DoorDash disclosed that a “sophisticated phishing attack” on a third-party vendor allowed attackers to gain access to some of DoorDash’s internal company tools. DoorDash said intruders stole information on a “small percentage” of users that have since been notified. TechCrunch reported last week that the incident was linked to the same phishing campaign that targeted Twilio.
This phishing gang apparently had great success targeting employees of all the major mobile wireless providers, but most especially T-Mobile. Between July 10 and July 16, dozens of T-Mobile employees fell for the phishing messages and provided their remote access credentials.
“Credential theft continues to be an ongoing issue in our industry as wireless providers are constantly battling bad actors that are focused on finding new ways to pursue illegal activities like this,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “Our tools and teams worked as designed to quickly identify and respond to this large-scale smishing attack earlier this year that targeted many companies. We continue to work to prevent these types of attacks and will continue to evolve and improve our approach.”
This same group saw hundreds of responses from employees at some of the largest customer support and staffing firms, including Teleperformanceusa.com, Sitel.com and Sykes.com. Teleperformance did not respond to requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity did hear from Christopher Knauer, global chief security officer at Sitel Group, the customer support giant that recently acquired Sykes. Knauer said the attacks leveraged newly-registered domains and asked employees to approve upcoming changes to their work schedules.
Image: Group-IB.
Knauer said the attackers set up the phishing domains just minutes in advance of spamming links to those domains in phony SMS alerts to targeted employees. He said such tactics largely sidestep automated alerts generated by companies that monitor brand names for signs of new phishing domains being registered.
“They were using the domains as soon as they became available,” Knauer said. “The alerting services don’t often let you know until 24 hours after a domain has been registered.”
On July 28 and again on Aug. 7, several employees at email delivery firm Mailchimp provided their remote access credentials to this phishing group. According to an Aug. 12 blog post, the attackers used their access to Mailchimp employee accounts to steal data from 214 customers involved in cryptocurrency and finance.
On Aug. 15, the hosting company DigitalOcean published a blog post saying it had severed ties with MailChimp after its Mailchimp account was compromised. DigitalOcean said the MailChimp incident resulted in a “very small number” of DigitalOcean customers experiencing attempted compromises of their accounts through password resets.
According to interviews with multiple companies hit by the group, the attackers are mostly interested in stealing access to cryptocurrency, and to companies that manage communications with people interested in cryptocurrency investing. In an Aug. 3 blog post from email and SMS marketing firm Klaviyo.com, the company’s CEO recounted how the phishers gained access to the company’s internal tools, and used that to download information on 38 crypto-related accounts.
A flow chart of the attacks by the SMS phishing group known as 0ktapus and ScatterSwine. Image: Amitai Cohen for Wiz.io. twitter.com/amitaico.
The ubiquity of mobile phones became a lifeline for many companies trying to manage their remote employees throughout the Coronavirus pandemic. But these same mobile devices are fast becoming a liability for organizations that use them for phishable forms of multi-factor authentication, such as one-time codes generated by a mobile app or delivered via SMS.
Because as we can see from the success of this phishing group, this type of data extraction is now being massively automated, and employee authentication compromises can quickly lead to security and privacy risks for the employer’s partners or for anyone in their supply chain.
Unfortunately, a great many companies still rely on SMS for employee multi-factor authentication. According to a report this year from Okta, 47 percent of workforce customers deploy SMS and voice factors for multi-factor authentication. That’s down from 53 percent that did so in 2018, Okta found.
Some companies (like Knauer’s Sitel) have taken to requiring that all remote access to internal networks be managed through work-issued laptops and/or mobile devices, which are loaded with custom profiles that can’t be accessed through other devices.
Others are moving away from SMS and one-time code apps and toward requiring employees to use physical FIDO multi-factor authentication devices such as security keys, which can neutralize phishing attacks because any stolen credentials can’t be used unless the phishers also have physical access to the user’s security key or mobile device.
This came in handy for Twitter, which announced last year that it was moving all of its employees to using security keys, and/or biometric authentication via their mobile device. The phishers’ Telegram bot reported that on June 16, 2022, five employees at Twitter gave away their work credentials. In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Twitter confirmed several employees were relieved of their employee usernames and passwords, but that its security key requirement prevented the phishers from abusing that information.
Twitter accelerated its plans to improve employee authentication following the July 2020 security incident, wherein several employees were phished and relieved of credentials for Twitter’s internal tools. In that intrusion, the attackers used Twitter’s tools to hijack accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities — forcing those accounts to tweet out links to bitcoin scams.
“Security keys can differentiate legitimate sites from malicious ones and block phishing attempts that SMS 2FA or one-time password (OTP) verification codes would not,” Twitter said in an Oct. 2021 post about the change. “To deploy security keys internally at Twitter, we migrated from a variety of phishable 2FA methods to using security keys as our only supported 2FA method on internal systems.”
Update, 6:02 p.m. ET: Clarified that Cloudflare does not rely on TOTP (one-time multi-factor authentication codes) as a second factor for employee authentication.
Businesses today have many options for interacting with customers online. The findings of our independent survey of online consumers suggest that websites and branded email continue to be critical components of many businesses’ online presence, essential to supporting consumer confidence and enabling effective interaction with customers.
The quantitative study, commissioned by Verisign and conducted in December 2019 and January 2020 by 451 Research, now a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, surveyed 5,450 online consumers across key markets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia to help understand their sentiments on interacting with businesses online.
The survey was designed to arm service providers and registrars with an understanding of how the resources they provide to businesses can help create trust and deliver value to their customers.
Among those surveyed, approximately two-thirds (66%) agreed that a business with its own website is more credible than one without. Likewise, a majority indicated that they would expect it to be more difficult to verify the identity of (56%), find online (55%) and contact (54%) a business that does not have its own website.
Certainly, this doesn’t suggest that businesses should abandon other online channels, such as social media and search engine efforts, to focus on a website-only approach. Instead, 64% of respondents said that a business with many points of online presence is more credible than a business with few.
Still, the study suggests that other online resources should complement, rather than replace, a small business’s own website. Respondents identified a business’s own website as being one of the most popular online methods for learning about (69%) and conducting transactions with (57%) businesses. Further, 71% of respondents reported being more likely to recommend a business with a professional website.
Taken together, these findings suggest that a website can help add credibility and drive new business.
Trust is central to the relationship between a business and customers. This may be particularly true for online transactions (95% of survey respondents said they actively make purchases online), which require consumers to trust not only that the business will deliver the product or service for which they have paid, but also that it will not misuse payment or personal information.
A branded email address may be able to help, as an overwhelming number of respondents (85%) agreed that a business with a branded email address is more credible than one that uses a free email account. Respondents were more likely to have used a business’s branded email address (67%), than the telephone (56%) or social media (40%), to communicate with a business during the prior 12 months.
For a small business, failing to be perceived as credible online could mean lost business not just today, but also in the future. A website and branded email address can help businesses add credibility and more effectively engage with consumers online.
Service providers offer a variety of website-building tools, email hosting solutions, and domain name registration services that can help businesses – whether just starting or well-established – to have a website and use a branded email.
Detailed survey results are available in 451 Research’s Black & White Paper Websites, Branded Email Remain Key to SMB Internet Services.
Verisign is a global wholesale provider of some of the world’s most recognized top-level domains, including .com and .net. For website building tools and email hosting solutions, contact a registrar. You can find a registrar here.
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