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Yes, the Lenovo is Chinese. No, I'm not worried about Superfish. Yes, I'm running windows. No, I don't want a Framework laptop. Seemed to be a lot of time this week gone on talking all things laptops, and there are clearly some very differing views on the topic. Some good suggestions, some neat alternatives and some ideas that, well, just seem a little crazy. But hey, I'm super happy with the machine, it's an absolute beast and I expect I'll get many years of hard work out of it. That and more in this week's video, enjoy 😊
So I wrapped up this week's live stream then promptly blew hours mucking around with Zigbee on Home Assistant. Is it worth it, as someone asked in the chat? Uh, yeah, kinda, mostly. But seriously, having a highly automated house is awesome and I suggest that most people watching these vids harbour the same basic instinct as I do to try and improve our lives through technology. The coordination of lights with times of day, the security checks around open doors, the controlling of fans and air conditioning to keep everyone comfy, it just rocks... when it works 😎
I did it again - I tweeted about Twitter doing something I thought was useful and the hordes did descend on Twitter to tweet about how terrible Twitter is. Right, gotcha, so 1.3M views of that tweet later... As I say in this week's video, there's a whole bunch of crazy arguments in there but the thing that continues to get me the most in every one of these discussions is the argument that Elon is a poo poo head. No, seriously, I explain it at the end of the video how so constantly the counterarguments have no rational base and they constantly boil down to a dislike of the guy. Ironically, continuing to use Twitter to have a rant about stuff just shows that Twitter is just the same as it always was 🤣
There seemed to be an awful lot of time gone on the 23andMe credential stuffing situation this week, but I think it strikes a lot of important chords. We're (us as end users) still reusing credentials, still not turning on MFA and still trying to sue when we don't do these things. And we as builders are still creating systems that allow this to happen en mass. All that said, I don't know how we build systems that are resilient to a single person coming along and entering someone else's (probably) reused credentials into a normal browser session, at least not without introducing additional barriers to entry that will upset the marketing manager. And so, I'm back at the only logical conclusion I think we can all agree on right now: it's a great time to be working in this industry 😊
This must be my first "business as usual" weekly update since August and damn it's nice to be back to normal! New sponsor, new breaches, new blog post and if you're in this part of the world, a brand new summer creeping over the horizon. I've now got a couple of months with very little in the way of travel plans and a goal to really knock a bunch of new HIBP features out of the park, some of which I talk about in this week's video. Enjoy! 🍻
Ah, home 😊 It's been more than a month since I've been able to sit at this desk and stream a weekly video. And now I'm doing it with the glorious spring weather just outside my window, which I really must make more time to start enjoying. Anyway, this week is super casual due to having had zero prep time, but I hope the discussion about the ABC's piece on HIBP and I in particular is interesting. I feel like this whole story has a long way to go yet, hopefully now having a few months at home will give us an opportunity to lay the foundation for the next phase. Stay tuned!
Well that's it, Europe is done! I've spent the week in Prague with highlights including catching up with Josef Prusa, keynoting at Experts Live EU and taking a "beer spa" complete with our own endless supply of tap beer. Life is good 🍻
That’s it - we’ve peaked - life is all downhill from here 🤣 🍻 #BeerSpa pic.twitter.com/ezCpUC6XEK
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 21, 2023
All that and more in this week's video, next week I'll come to you from back home in the sunshine 😎
The victim shaming website operated by the cybercriminals behind 8Base — currently one of the more active ransomware groups — was until earlier today leaking quite a bit of information that the crime group probably did not intend to be made public. The leaked data suggests that at least some of website’s code was written by a 36-year-old programmer residing in the capital city of Moldova.
The 8Base ransomware group’s victim shaming website on the darknet.
8Base maintains a darknet website that is only reachable via Tor, a freely available global anonymity network. The site lists hundreds of victim organizations and companies — all allegedly hacking victims that refused to pay a ransom to keep their stolen data from being published.
The 8Base darknet site also has a built-in chat feature, presumably so that 8Base victims can communicate and negotiate with their extortionists. This chat feature, which runs on the Laravel web application framework, works fine as long as you are *sending* information to the site (i.e., by making a “POST” request).
However, if one were to try to fetch data from the same chat service (i.e., by making a “GET” request), the website until quite recently generated an extremely verbose error message:
The verbose error message when one tries to pull data from 8Base’s darknet site. Notice the link at the bottom of this image, which is generated when one hovers over the “View commit” message under the “Git” heading.
That error page revealed the true Internet address of the Tor hidden service that houses the 8Base website: 95.216.51[.]74, which according to DomainTools.com is a server in Finland that is tied to the Germany-based hosting giant Hetzner.
But that’s not the interesting part: Scrolling down the lengthy error message, we can see a link to a private Gitlab server called Jcube-group: gitlab[.]com/jcube-group/clients/apex/8base-v2. Digging further into this Gitlab account, we can find some curious data points available in the JCube Group’s public code repository.
For example, this “status.php” page, which was committed to JCube Group’s Gitlab repository roughly one month ago, includes code that makes several mentions of the term “KYC” (e.g. KYC_UNVERIFIED, KYC_VERIFIED, and KYC_PENDING).
This is curious because a FAQ on the 8Base darknet site includes a section on “special offers for journalists and reporters,” which says the crime group is open to interviews but that journalists will need to prove their identity before any interview can take place. The 8base FAQ refers to this vetting process as “KYC,” which typically stands for “Know Your Customer.”
“We highly respect the work of journalists and consider information to be our priority,” the 8Base FAQ reads. “We have a special program for journalists which includes sharing information a few hours or even days before it is officially published on our news website and Telegram channel: you would need to go through a KYC procedure to apply. Journalists and reporters can contact us via our PR Telegram channel with any questions.”
The 8Base FAQ (left) and the KYC code in Kolev’s Gitlab account (right)
The 8Base darknet site also has a publicly accessible “admin” login page, which features an image of a commercial passenger plane parked at what appears to be an airport. Next to the airplane photo is a message that reads, “Welcome to 8Base. Admin Login to 8Base dashboard.”
The login page on the 8Base ransomware group’s darknet website.
Right-clicking on the 8Base admin page and selecting “View Source” produces the page’s HTML code. That code is virtually identical to a “login.blade.php” page that was authored and committed to JCube Group’s Gitlab repository roughly three weeks ago.
It appears the person responsible for the JCube Group’s code is a 36-year-old developer from Chisinau, Moldova named Andrei Kolev. Mr. Kolev’s LinkedIn page says he’s a full-stack developer at JCube Group, and that he’s currently looking for work. The homepage for Jcubegroup[.]com lists an address and phone number that Moldovan business records confirm is tied to Mr. Kolev.
The posts on the Twitter account for Mr. Kolev (@andrewkolev) are all written in Russian, and reference several now-defunct online businesses, including pluginspro[.]ru.
Reached for comment via LinkedIn, Mr. Kolev said he had no idea why the 8Base darknet site was pulling code from the “clients” directory of his private JCube Group Gitlab repository, or how the 8Base name was even included.
“I [don’t have] a clue, I don’t have that project in my repo,” Kolev explained. “They [aren’t] my clients. Actually we currently have just our own projects.”
Mr. Kolev shared a screenshot of his current projects, but very quickly after that deleted it. However, KrebsOnSecurity captured a copy of the image before it was removed:
A screenshot of Mr. Kolev’s current projects that he quickly deleted.
Within minutes of explaining why I was reaching out to Mr. Kolev and walking him through the process of finding this connection, the 8Base website was changed, and the error message that linked to the JCube Group private Gitlab repository no longer appeared. Instead, trying the same “GET” method described above caused the 8Base website to return a “405 Method Not Allowed” error page:
Mr. Kolev claimed he didn’t know anything about the now-removed error page on 8Base’s site that referenced his private Gitlab repo, and said he deleted the screenshot from our LinkedIn chat because it contained private information.
Ransomware groups are known to remotely hire developers for specific projects without disclosing exactly who they are or how the new hire’s code is intended to be used, and it is possible that one of Mr. Kolev’s clients is merely a front for 8Base. But despite 8Base’s statement that they are happy to correspond with journalists, KrebsOnSecurity is still waiting for a reply from the group via their Telegram channel.
The tip about the leaky 8Base website was provided by a reader who asked to remain anonymous. That reader, a legitimate security professional and researcher who goes by the handle @htmalgae on Twitter, said it is likely that whoever developed the 8Base website inadvertently left it in “development mode,” which is what caused the site to be so verbose with its error messages.
“If 8Base was running the app in production mode instead of development mode, this Tor de-anonymization would have never been possible,” @htmalgae said.
A recent blog post from VMware/Carbon Black called the 8Base ransomware group “a heavy hitter” that has remained relatively unknown despite the massive spike in activity in Summer of 2023.
“8Base is a Ransomware group that has been active since March 2022 with a significant spike in activity in June of 2023,” Carbon Black researchers wrote. “Describing themselves as ‘simple pen testers,’ their leak site provided victim details through Frequently Asked Questions and Rules sections as well as multiple ways to contact them. ”
According to VMware, what’s particularly interesting about 8Base’s communication style is the use of verbiage that is strikingly familiar to another known cybercriminal group: RansomHouse.
“The group utilizes encryption paired with ‘name-and-shame’ techniques to compel their victims to pay their ransoms,” VMware researchers wrote. “8Base has an opportunistic pattern of compromise with recent victims spanning across varied industries. Despite the high amount of compromises, the information regarding identities, methodology, and underlying motivation behind these incidents still remains a mystery.”
Update, Sept. 21, 10:43 a.m. ET: The author of Databreaches.net was lurking in the 8Base Telegram channel when I popped in to ask the crime group a question, and reports that 8Base did eventually reply: ““hi at the moment we r not doing interviews. we have nothing to say. we r a little busy.”
It's another week of travels, this time from our "second home", Oslo. That's off the back of 4 days in the Netherlands and starting tomorrow, another 4 in Prague. But today, the 17th of September, is extra special 😊
1 year today ❤️ pic.twitter.com/vsRChdDshn
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 17, 2023
We'll be going out and celebrating accordingly as soon as I get this post published so I'll be brief: enjoy this week's video!
I'm super late pushing out this week's video, I mean to the point where I now have a couple of days before doing the next one. Travel from the opposite side of the world is the obvious excuse, then frankly, just wanting to hang out with friends and relax. And now, I somehow find myself publishing this from the most mind-bending set of circumstances:
Heading to 31C. Cold beer. Warm pool. How is this in England?! 🤯 pic.twitter.com/tQSbHaoLhG
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 6, 2023
On that note, straight into the video, links below and I'll do it all again in a couple of days from Spain:
Domain names ending in “.US” — the top-level domain for the United States — are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States.
.US is the “country code top-level domain” or ccTLD of the United States. Most countries have their own ccTLDs: .MX for Mexico, for example, or .CA for Canada. But few other major countries in the world have anywhere near as many phishing domains each year as .US.
That’s according to The Interisle Consulting Group, which gathers phishing data from multiple industry sources and publishes an annual report on the latest trends. Interisle’s newest study examined six million phishing reports between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, and found 30,000 .US phishing domains.
.US is overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, NTIA currently contracts out the management of the .US domain to GoDaddy, by far the world’s largest domain registrar.
Under NTIA regulations, the administrator of the .US registry must take certain steps to verify that their customers actually reside in the United States, or own organizations based in the U.S. But Interisle found that whatever GoDaddy was doing to manage that vetting process wasn’t working.
“The .US ‘nexus’ requirement theoretically limits registrations to parties with a national connection, but .US had very high numbers of phishing domains,” Interisle wrote. “This indicates a possible problem with the administration or application of the nexus requirements.”
Dean Marks is emeritus executive director for a group called the Coalition for Online Accountability, which has been critical of the NTIA’s stewardship of .US. Marks says virtually all European Union member state ccTLDs that enforce nexus restrictions also have massively lower levels of abuse due to their policies and oversight.
“Even very large ccTLDs, like .de for Germany — which has a far larger market share of domain name registrations than .US — have very low levels of abuse, including phishing and malware,” Marks told KrebsOnSecurity. “In my view, this situation with .US should not be acceptable to the U.S. government overall, nor to the US public.”
Marks said there are very few phishing domains ever registered in other ccTLDs that also restrict registrations to their citizens, such as .HU (Hungary), .NZ (New Zealand), and .FI (Finland), where a connection to the country, a proof of identity, or evidence of incorporation are required.
“Or .LK (Sri Lanka), where the acceptable use policy includes a ‘lock and suspend’ if domains are reported for suspicious activity,” Marks said. “These ccTLDs make a strong case for validating domain registrants in the interest of public safety.”
Sadly, .US has been a cesspool of phishing activity for many years. As far back as 2018, Interisle found .US domains were the worst in the world for spam, botnet (attack infrastructure for DDOS etc.) and illicit or harmful content. Back then, .US was being operated by a different contractor.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, GoDaddy said all .US registrants must certify that they meet the NTIA’s nexus requirements. But this appears to be little more than an affirmative response that is already pre-selected for all new registrants.
Attempting to register a .US domain through GoDaddy, for example, leads to a U.S. Registration Information page that auto-populates the nexus attestation field with the response, “I am a citizen of the US.” Other options include, “I am a permanent resident of the US,” and “My primary domicile is in the US.” It currently costs just $4.99 to obtain a .US domain through GoDaddy.
GoDaddy said it also conducts a scan of selected registration request information, and conducts “spot checks” on registrant information.
“We conduct regular reviews, per policy, of registration data within the Registry database to determine Nexus compliance with ongoing communications to registrars and registrants,” the company said in a written statement.
GoDaddy says it “is committed to supporting a safer online environment and proactively addressing this issue by assessing it against our own anti-abuse mitigation system.”
“We stand against DNS abuse in any form and maintain multiple systems and protocols to protect all the TLDs we operate,” the statement continued. “We will continue to work with registrars, cybersecurity firms and other stakeholders to make progress with this complex challenge.”
Interisle found significant numbers of .US domains were registered to attack some of the United States’ most prominent companies, including Bank of America, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Citi, Comcast, Microsoft, Meta, and Target.
“Ironically, at least 109 of the .US domains in our data were used to attack the United States government, specifically the United States Postal Service and its customers,” Interisle wrote. “.US domains were also used to attack foreign government operations: six .US domains were used to attack Australian government services, six attacked Great’s Britain’s Royal Mail, one attacked Canada Post, and one attacked the Denmark Tax Authority.”
The NTIA recently published a proposal that would allow GoDaddy to redact registrant data from WHOIS registration records. The current charter for .US specifies that all .US registration records be public.
Interisle argues that without more stringent efforts to verify a United States nexus for new .US domain registrants, the NTIA’s proposal will make it even more difficult to identify phishers and verify registrants’ identities and nexus qualifications.
In a written statement, the NTIA said DNS abuse is a priority issue for the agency, and that NTIA supports “evidence-based policymaking.”
“We look forward to reviewing the report and will engage with our contractor for the .US domain on steps that we can take not only to address phishing, but the other forms of DNS abuse as well,” the statement reads.
Interisle sources its phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus. For more phishing facts, see Interisle’s 2023 Phishing Landscape report (PDF).’
Update, Sept. 5, 1:44 p.m. ET: Updated story with statement provided today by the NTIA.
Somehow in this week's video, I forgot to talk about the single blog post I wrote this week! So here's the elevator pitch: Cloudflare's Turnstile is a bot-killing machine I've had enormous success with for the "API" (quoted because it's not meant to be consumed by others), behind the front page of HIBP. It's unintrusive, is super easy to implement and kills bots dead. There you go, how's that for a last minute pitch? 😊
This week hasd been manic! Non-stop tickets related to the new HIBP domain subscription service, scrambling to support invoicing and resellers, struggling our way through some odd Stripe things and so on and so forth. It's all good stuff and there have been very few issues of note (and all of those have merely been people getting to grips with the new model), so all in all, it's happy days 😊
You’ve probably never heard of “16Shop,” but there’s a good chance someone using it has tried to phish you.
A 16Shop phishing page spoofing Apple and targeting Japanese users. Image: Akamai.com.
The international police organization INTERPOL said last week it had shuttered the notorious 16Shop, a popular phishing-as-a-service platform launched in 2017 that made it simple for even complete novices to conduct complex and convincing phishing scams. INTERPOL said authorities in Indonesia arrested the 21-year-old proprietor and one of his alleged facilitators, and that a third suspect was apprehended in Japan.
The INTERPOL statement says the platform sold hacking tools to compromise more than 70,000 users in 43 countries. Given how long 16Shop has been around and how many paying customers it enjoyed over the years, that number is almost certainly highly conservative.
Also, the sale of “hacking tools” doesn’t quite capture what 16Shop was all about: It was a fully automated phishing platform that gave its thousands of customers a series of brand-specific phishing kits to use, and provided the domain names needed to host the phishing pages and receive any stolen credentials.
Security experts investigating 16Shop found the service used an application programming interface (API) to manage its users, an innovation that allowed its proprietors to shut off access to customers who failed to pay a monthly fee, or for those attempting to copy or pirate the phishing kit.
16Shop also localized phishing pages in multiple languages, and the service would display relevant phishing content depending on the victim’s geolocation.
Various 16Shop lures for Apple users in different languages. Image: Akamai.
For example, in 2019 McAfee found that for targets in Japan, the 16Shop kit would also collect Web ID and Card Password, while US victims will be asked for their Social Security Number.
“Depending on location, 16Shop will also collect ID numbers (including Civil ID, National ID, and Citizen ID), passport numbers, social insurance numbers, sort codes, and credit limits,” McAfee wrote.
In addition, 16Shop employed various tricks to help its users’ phishing pages stay off the radar of security firms, including a local “blacklist” of Internet addresses tied to security companies, and a feature that allowed users to block entire Internet address ranges from accessing phishing pages.
The INTERPOL announcement does not name any of the suspects arrested in connection with the 16Shop investigation. However, a number of security firms — including Akamai, McAfee and ZeroFox, previously connected the service to a young Indonesian man named Riswanda Noor Saputra, who sold 16Shop under the hacker handle “Devilscream.”
According to the Indonesian security blog Cyberthreat.id, Saputra admitted being the administrator of 16Shop, but told the publication he handed the project off to others by early 2020.
16Shop documentation instructing operators on how to deploy the kit. Image: ZeroFox.
Nevertheless, Cyberthreat reported that Devilscream was arrested by Indonesian police in late 2021 as part of a collaboration between INTERPOL and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Still, researchers who tracked 16Shop since its inception say Devilscream was not the original proprietor of the phishing platform, and he may not be the last.
It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to accidentally infect their own machines with password-stealing malware, and that is exactly what seems to have happened with one of the more recent administrators of 16Shop.
Constella Intelligence, a data breach and threat actor research platform, now allows users to cross-reference popular cybercrime websites and denizens of these forums with inadvertent malware infections by information-stealing trojans. A search in Constella on 16Shop’s domain name shows that in mid-2022, a key administrator of the phishing service infected their Microsoft Windows desktop computer with the Redline information stealer trojan — apparently by downloading a cracked (and secretly backdoored) copy of Adobe Photoshop.
Redline infections steal gobs of data from the victim machine, including a list of recent downloads, stored passwords and authentication cookies, as well as browser bookmarks and auto-fill data. Those records indicate the 16Shop admin used the nicknames “Rudi” and “Rizki/Rizky,” and maintained several Facebook profiles under these monikers.
It appears this user’s full name (or at least part of it) is Rizky Mauluna Sidik, and they are from Bandung in West Java, Indonesia. One of this user’s Facebook pages says Rizky is the chief executive officer and founder of an entity called BandungXploiter, whose Facebook page indicates it is a group focused mainly on hacking and defacing websites.
A LinkedIn profile for Rizky says he is a backend Web developer in Bandung who earned a bachelor’s degree in information technology in 2020. Mr. Rizky did not respond to requests for comment.
So about those domain searches... 😊 The new subscription model launched this week and as many of you know from your own past experiences, pushing major new code live is always a bit of a nail-biting exercise. It went out silently on Sunday morning, nothing major broke so I published the blog post Monday afternoon then emailed all the existing API key subscribers Tuesday morning and now here we are!
One thing I talk a bit about in the video today are the 2 new APIs someone reached out and requested. This was an awesome idea and I can't wait to show you what they've built with them. I expect I'll blog that this coming week and probably quietly slip out the documentation on the 2 new endpoints in advance. Stay tuned for that one, what he's done with this looks so cool 😎
Somewhere in the next few hours from publishing this post, I'll finally push the HIBP domain search changes live. I've been speaking about it a lot in these videos over recent weeks so many of you have already know what it entails, but it's the tip of the iceberg you've seen publicly. This is the culmination of 7 months of work to get this model right with a ridiculous amount of background effort having gone into it. Case in point: read my pain from last night about converting thousands of words of lawyer speak T&Cs from Microsoft Word to HTML. As if preparing these wasn't painful enough, trying to make them simply play nice on a web page has been a nightmare! (I settled for dumping stuff in a <pre> tag for now and will invest the time in doing it right later on.)
I hope you enjoy this week's video, I'll talk much more about the domain search bits in the next video, hopefully following a successful launch!
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