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If only Patch Tuesdays came around infrequently — like total solar eclipse rare — instead of just creeping up on us each month like The Man in the Moon. Although to be fair, it would be tough for Microsoft to eclipse the number of vulnerabilities fixed in this month’s patch batch — a record 147 flaws in Windows and related software.
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft today released updates to address 147 security holes in Windows, Office, Azure, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server, DNS Server, Windows Defender, Bitlocker, and Windows Secure Boot.
“This is the largest release from Microsoft this year and the largest since at least 2017,” said Dustin Childs, from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). “As far as I can tell, it’s the largest Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft of all time.”
Tempering the sheer volume of this month’s patches is the middling severity of many of the bugs. Only three of April’s vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they can be abused by malware or malcontents to take remote control over unpatched systems with no help from users.
Most of the flaws that Microsoft deems “more likely to be exploited” this month are marked as “important,” which usually involve bugs that require a bit more user interaction (social engineering) but which nevertheless can result in system security bypass, compromise, and the theft of critical assets.
Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs called attention to CVE-2024-20670, an Outlook for Windows spoofing vulnerability described as being easy to exploit. It involves convincing a user to click on a malicious link in an email, which can then steal the user’s password hash and authenticate as the user in another Microsoft service.
Another interesting bug McCarthy pointed to is CVE-2024-29063, which involves hard-coded credentials in Azure’s search backend infrastructure that could be gleaned by taking advantage of Azure AI search.
“This along with many other AI attacks in recent news shows a potential new attack surface that we are just learning how to mitigate against,” McCarthy said. “Microsoft has updated their backend and notified any customers who have been affected by the credential leakage.”
CVE-2024-29988 is a weakness that allows attackers to bypass Windows SmartScreen, a technology Microsoft designed to provide additional protections for end users against phishing and malware attacks. Childs said one of ZDI’s researchers found this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, although Microsoft doesn’t currently list CVE-2024-29988 as being exploited.
“I would treat this as in the wild until Microsoft clarifies,” Childs said. “The bug itself acts much like CVE-2024-21412 – a [zero-day threat from February] that bypassed the Mark of the Web feature and allows malware to execute on a target system. Threat actors are sending exploits in a zipped file to evade EDR/NDR detection and then using this bug (and others) to bypass Mark of the Web.”
Update, 7:46 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story said there were no zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this month. BleepingComputer reports that Microsoft has since confirmed that there are actually two zero-days. One is the flaw Childs just mentioned (CVE-2024-21412), and the other is CVE-2024-26234, described as a “proxy driver spoofing” weakness.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that this month’s release includes fixes for two dozen flaws in Windows Secure Boot, the majority of which are considered “Exploitation Less Likely” according to Microsoft.
“However, the last time Microsoft patched a flaw in Windows Secure Boot in May 2023 had a notable impact as it was exploited in the wild and linked to the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit, which was sold on dark web forums for $5,000,” Narang said. “BlackLotus can bypass functionality called secure boot, which is designed to block malware from being able to load when booting up. While none of these Secure Boot vulnerabilities addressed this month were exploited in the wild, they serve as a reminder that flaws in Secure Boot persist, and we could see more malicious activity related to Secure Boot in the future.”
For links to individual security advisories indexed by severity, check out ZDI’s blog and the Patch Tuesday post from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Please consider backing up your data or your drive before updating, and drop a note in the comments here if you experience any issues applying these fixes.
Adobe today released nine patches tackling at least two dozen vulnerabilities in a range of software products, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Commerce, InDesign, Experience Manager, Media Encoder, Bridge, Illustrator, and Adobe Animate.
KrebsOnSecurity needs to correct the record on a point mentioned at the end of March’s “Fat Patch Tuesday” post, which looked at new AI capabilities built into Adobe Acrobat that are turned on by default. Adobe has since clarified that its apps won’t use AI to auto-scan your documents, as the original language in its FAQ suggested.
“In practice, no document scanning or analysis occurs unless a user actively engages with the AI features by agreeing to the terms, opening a document, and selecting the AI Assistant or generative summary buttons for that specific document,” Adobe said earlier this month.
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The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.
Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals and $15/mo for families, and promises to remove your personal information from nearly 200 people-search sites. Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites.
A testimonial on onerep.com.
Customer case studies published on onerep.com state that it struck a deal to offer the service to employees of Permanente Medicine, which represents the doctors within the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente. Onerep also says it has made inroads among police departments in the United States.
But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.
A search in the data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence for the name Dimitri Shelest brings up the email address dimitri.shelest@onerep.com. Constella also finds that Dimitri Shelest from Belarus used the email address d.sh@nuwber.com, and the Belarus phone number +375-292-702786.
Nuwber.com is a people search service whose employees all appear to be from Belarus, and it is one of dozens of people-search companies that Onerep claims to target with its data-removal service. Onerep.com’s website disavows any relationship to Nuwber.com, stating quite clearly, “Please note that OneRep is not associated with Nuwber.com.”
However, there is an abundance of evidence suggesting Mr. Shelest is in fact the founder of Nuwber. Constella found that Minsk telephone number (375-292-702786) has been used multiple times in connection with the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com. Recall that Onerep.com’s domain registration records in 2018 list the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.
It appears Mr. Shelest sought to reinvent his online identity in 2015 by adding a “2” to his email address. The Belarus phone number tied to Nuwber.com shows up in the domain records for comversus.com, and DomainTools says this domain is tied to both dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com. Other domains that mention both email addresses in their WHOIS records include careon.me, docvsdoc.com, dotcomsvdot.com, namevname.com, okanyway.com and tapanyapp.com.
Onerep.com CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest, as pictured on the “about” page of onerep.com.
A search in DomainTools for the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com shows it is associated with the registration of at least 179 domain names, including dozens of mostly now-defunct people-search companies targeting citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia and Mexico, among others.
Those include nuwber.fr, a site registered in 2016 which was identical to the homepage of Nuwber.com at the time. DomainTools shows the same email and Belarus phone number are in historic registration records for nuwber.at, nuwber.ch, and nuwber.dk (all domains linked here are to their cached copies at archive.org, where available).
Nuwber.com, circa 2015. Image: Archive.org.
Update, March 21, 11:15 a.m. ET: Mr. Shelest has provided a lengthy response to the findings in this story. In summary, Shelest acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, but said there was “zero cross-over or information-sharing with OneRep.” Mr. Shelest said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.
“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.” The full statement is available here (PDF).
Original story:
Historic WHOIS records for onerep.com show it was registered for many years to a resident of Sioux Falls, SD for a completely unrelated site. But around Sept. 2015 the domain switched from the registrar GoDaddy.com to eNom, and the registration records were hidden behind privacy protection services. DomainTools indicates around this time onerep.com started using domain name servers from DNS provider constellix.com. Likewise, Nuwber.com first appeared in late 2015, was also registered through eNom, and also started using constellix.com for DNS at nearly the same time.
Listed on LinkedIn as a former product manager at OneRep.com between 2015 and 2018 is Dimitri Bukuyazau, who says their hometown is Warsaw, Poland. While this LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/dzmitrybukuyazau) does not mention Nuwber, a search on this name in Google turns up a 2017 blog post from privacyduck.com, which laid out a number of reasons to support a conclusion that OneRep and Nuwber.com were the same company.
“Any people search profiles containing your Personally Identifiable Information that were on Nuwber.com were also mirrored identically on OneRep.com, down to the relatives’ names and address histories,” Privacyduck.com wrote. The post continued:
“Both sites offered the same immediate opt-out process. Both sites had the same generic contact and support structure. They were – and remain – the same company (even PissedConsumer.com advocates this fact: https://nuwber.pissedconsumer.com/nuwber-and-onerep-20160707878520.html).”
“Things changed in early 2016 when OneRep.com began offering privacy removal services right alongside their own open displays of your personal information. At this point when you found yourself on Nuwber.com OR OneRep.com, you would be provided with the option of opting-out your data on their site for free – but also be highly encouraged to pay them to remove it from a slew of other sites (and part of that payment was removing you from their own site, Nuwber.com, as a benefit of their service).”
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Bukuyazau declined to answer questions, such as whether he ever worked at Nuwber.com. However, Constella Intelligence finds two interesting email addresses for employees at nuwber.com: d.bu@nuwber.com, and d.bu+figure-eight.com@nuwber.com, which was registered under the name “Dzmitry.”
PrivacyDuck’s claims about how onerep.com appeared and behaved in the early days are not readily verifiable because the domain onerep.com has been completely excluded from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The Wayback Machine will honor such requests if they come directly from the owner of the domain in question.
Still, Mr. Shelest’s name, phone number and email also appear in the domain registration records for a truly dizzying number of country-specific people-search services, including pplcrwlr.in, pplcrwlr.fr, pplcrwlr.dk, pplcrwlr.jp, peeepl.br.com, peeepl.in, peeepl.it and peeepl.co.uk.
The same details appear in the WHOIS registration records for the now-defunct people-search sites waatpp.de, waatp1.fr, azersab.com, and ahavoila.com, a people-search service for French citizens.
The German people-search site waatp.de.
A search on the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com suggests Mr. Shelest was previously involved in rather aggressive email marketing campaigns. In 2010, an anonymous source leaked to KrebsOnSecurity the financial and organizational records of Spamit, which at the time was easily the largest Russian-language pharmacy spam affiliate program in the world.
Spamit paid spammers a hefty commission every time someone bought male enhancement drugs from any of their spam-advertised websites. Mr. Shelest’s email address stood out because immediately after the Spamit database was leaked, KrebsOnSecurity searched all of the Spamit affiliate email addresses to determine if any of them corresponded to social media accounts at Facebook.com (at the time, Facebook allowed users to search profiles by email address).
That mapping, which was done mainly by generous graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University, revealed that dmitrcox@gmail.com was used by a Spamit affiliate, albeit not a very profitable one. That same Facebook profile for Mr. Shelest is still active, and it says he is married and living in Minsk [Update, Mar. 16: Mr. Shelest’s Facebook account is no longer active].
The Italian people-search website peeepl.it.
Scrolling down Mr. Shelest’s Facebook page to posts made more than ten years ago show him liking the Facebook profile pages for a large number of other people-search sites, including findita.com, findmedo.com, folkscan.com, huntize.com, ifindy.com, jupery.com, look2man.com, lookerun.com, manyp.com, peepull.com, perserch.com, persuer.com, pervent.com, piplenter.com, piplfind.com, piplscan.com, popopke.com, pplsorce.com, qimeo.com, scoutu2.com, search64.com, searchay.com, seekmi.com, selfabc.com, socsee.com, srching.com, toolooks.com, upearch.com, webmeek.com, and many country-code variations of viadin.ca (e.g. viadin.hk, viadin.com and viadin.de).
The people-search website popopke.com.
Domaintools.com finds that all of the domains mentioned in the last paragraph were registered to the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com.
Mr. Shelest has not responded to multiple requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from onerep.com, which likewise has not responded to inquiries about its founder’s many apparent conflicts of interest. In any event, these practices would seem to contradict the goal Onerep has stated on its site: “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”
The people-search website findmedo.com.
Max Anderson is chief growth officer at 360 Privacy, a legitimate privacy company that works to keep its clients’ data off of more than 400 data broker and people-search sites. Anderson said it is concerning to see a direct link between between a data removal service and data broker websites.
“I would consider it unethical to run a company that sells people’s information, and then charge those same people to have their information removed,” Anderson said.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity published an analysis of the people-search data broker giant Radaris, whose consumer profiles are deep enough to rival those of far more guarded data broker resources available to U.S. police departments and other law enforcement personnel.
That story revealed that the co-founders of Radaris are two native Russian brothers who operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of the Radaris founders’ businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
KrebsOnSecurity will continue investigating the history of various consumer data brokers and people-search providers. If any readers have inside knowledge of this industry or key players within it, please consider reaching out to krebsonsecurity at gmail.com.
Update, March 15, 11:35 a.m. ET: Many readers have pointed out something that was somehow overlooked amid all this research: The Mozilla Foundation, the company that runs the Firefox Web browser, has launched a data removal service called Mozilla Monitor that bundles OneRep. That notice says Mozilla Monitor is offered as a free or paid subscription service.
“The free data breach notification service is a partnership with Have I Been Pwned (“HIBP”),” the Mozilla Foundation explains. “The automated data deletion service is a partnership with OneRep to remove personal information published on publicly available online directories and other aggregators of information about individuals (“Data Broker Sites”).”
In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Mozilla said they did assess OneRep’s data removal service to confirm it acts according to privacy principles advocated at Mozilla.
“We were aware of the past affiliations with the entities named in the article and were assured they had ended prior to our work together,” the statement reads. “We’re now looking into this further. We will always put the privacy and security of our customers first and will provide updates as needed.”
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Apple and Microsoft recently released software updates to fix dozens of security holes in their operating systems. Microsoft today patched at least 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows OS. Meanwhile, Apple’s new macOS Sonoma addresses at least 68 security weaknesses, and its latest update for iOS fixes two zero-day flaws.
Last week, Apple pushed out an urgent software update to its flagship iOS platform, warning that there were at least two zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities being used in the wild (CVE-2024-23225 and CVE-2024-23296). The security updates are available in iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, and iOS 16.7.6.
Apple’s macOS Sonoma 14.4 Security Update addresses dozens of security issues. Jason Kitka, chief information security officer at Automox, said the vulnerabilities patched in this update often stem from memory safety issues, a concern that has led to a broader industry conversation about the adoption of memory-safe programming languages [full disclosure: Automox is an advertiser on this site].
On Feb. 26, 2024, the Biden administration issued a report that calls for greater adoption of memory-safe programming languages. On Mar. 4, 2024, Google published Secure by Design, which lays out the company’s perspective on memory safety risks.
Mercifully, there do not appear to be any zero-day threats hounding Windows users this month (at least not yet). Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that of the 60 CVEs in this month’s Patch Tuesday release, only six are considered “more likely to be exploited” according to Microsoft.
Those more likely to be exploited bugs are mostly “elevation of privilege vulnerabilities” including CVE-2024-26182 (Windows Kernel), CVE-2024-26170 (Windows Composite Image File System (CimFS), CVE-2024-21437 (Windows Graphics Component), and CVE-2024-21433 (Windows Print Spooler).
Narang highlighted CVE-2024-21390 as a particularly interesting vulnerability in this month’s Patch Tuesday release, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in Microsoft Authenticator, the software giant’s app for multi-factor authentication. Narang said a prerequisite for an attacker to exploit this flaw is to already have a presence on the device either through malware or a malicious application.
“If a victim has closed and re-opened the Microsoft Authenticator app, an attacker could obtain multi-factor authentication codes and modify or delete accounts from the app,” Narang said. “Having access to a target device is bad enough as they can monitor keystrokes, steal data and redirect users to phishing websites, but if the goal is to remain stealth, they could maintain this access and steal multi-factor authentication codes in order to login to sensitive accounts, steal data or hijack the accounts altogether by changing passwords and replacing the multi-factor authentication device, effectively locking the user out of their accounts.”
CVE-2024-21334 earned a CVSS (danger) score of 9.8 (10 is the worst), and it concerns a weakness in Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), a Linux-based cloud infrastructure in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft says attackers could connect to OMI instances over the Internet without authentication, and then send specially crafted data packets to gain remote code execution on the host device.
CVE-2024-21435 is a CVSS 8.8 vulnerability in Windows OLE, which acts as a kind of backbone for a great deal of communication between applications that people use every day on Windows, said Ben McCarthy, lead cybersecurity engineer at Immersive Labs.
“With this vulnerability, there is an exploit that allows remote code execution, the attacker needs to trick a user into opening a document, this document will exploit the OLE engine to download a malicious DLL to gain code execution on the system,” Breen explained. “The attack complexity has been described as low meaning there is less of a barrier to entry for attackers.”
A full list of the vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft this month is available at the SANS Internet Storm Center, which breaks down the updates by severity and urgency.
Finally, Adobe today issued security updates that fix dozens of security holes in a wide range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Premiere Pro, ColdFusion 2023 and 2021, Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, and Adobe Animate. Adobe said it is not aware of active exploitation against any of the flaws.
By the way, Adobe recently enrolled all of its Acrobat users into a “new generative AI feature” that scans the contents of your PDFs so that its new “AI Assistant” can “understand your questions and provide responses based on the content of your PDF file.” Adobe provides instructions on how to disable the AI features and opt out here.
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If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the co-founders of Radaris operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of their businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Formed in 2009, Radaris is a vast people-search network for finding data on individuals, properties, phone numbers, businesses and addresses. Search for any American’s name in Google and the chances are excellent that a listing for them at Radaris.com will show up prominently in the results.
Radaris reports typically bundle a substantial amount of data scraped from public and court documents, including any current or previous addresses and phone numbers, known email addresses and registered domain names. The reports also list address and phone records for the target’s known relatives and associates. Such information could be useful if you were trying to determine the maiden name of someone’s mother, or successfully answer a range of other knowledge-based authentication questions.
Currently, consumer reports advertised for sale at Radaris.com are being fulfilled by a different people-search company called TruthFinder. But Radaris also operates a number of other people-search properties — like Centeda.com — that sell consumer reports directly and behave almost identically to TruthFinder: That is, reel the visitor in with promises of detailed background reports on people, and then charge a $34.99 monthly subscription fee just to view the results.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) assigns Radaris a rating of “F” for consistently ignoring consumers seeking to have their information removed from Radaris’ various online properties. Of the 159 complaints detailed there in the last year, several were from people who had used third-party identity protection services to have their information removed from Radaris, only to receive a notice a few months later that their Radaris record had been restored.
What’s more, Radaris’ automated process for requesting the removal of your information requires signing up for an account, potentially providing more information about yourself that the company didn’t already have (see screenshot above).
Radaris has not responded to requests for comment.
Radaris, TruthFinder and others like them all force users to agree that their reports will not be used to evaluate someone’s eligibility for credit, or a new apartment or job. This language is so prominent in people-search reports because selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically do not include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).
But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and another people-search service Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.
An excerpt from the FTC’s complaint against TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate.
The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.
“All the while, the companies touted the accuracy of their reports in online ads and other promotional materials, claiming that their reports contain “the MOST ACCURATE information available to the public,” the FTC noted. The FTC says, however, that all the information used in their background reports is obtained from third parties that expressly disclaim that the information is accurate, and that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate take no steps to verify the accuracy of the information.
The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.
The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.
According to Radaris’ profile at the investor website Pitchbook.com, the company’s founder and “co-chief executive officer” is a Massachusetts resident named Gary Norden, also known as Gary Nard.
An analysis of email addresses known to have been used by Mr. Norden shows he is a native Russian man whose real name is Igor Lybarsky (also spelled Lubarsky). Igor’s brother Dmitry, who goes by “Dan,” appears to be the other co-CEO of Radaris. Dmitry Lybarsky’s Facebook/Meta account says he was born in March 1963.
The Lybarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Igor a.k.a. “Gary,” in an undated photo.
Indirectly or directly, the Lybarskys own multiple properties in both Sherborn and Wellesley, Mass. However, the Radaris website is operated by an offshore entity called Bitseller Expert Ltd, which is incorporated in Cyprus. Neither Lybarsky brother responded to requests for comment.
A review of the domain names registered by Gary Norden shows that beginning in the early 2000s, he and Dan built an e-commerce empire by marketing prepaid calling cards and VOIP services to Russian expatriates who are living in the United States and seeking an affordable way to stay in touch with loved ones back home.
A Sherborn, Mass. property owned by Barsky Real Estate Trust and Dmitry Lybarsky.
In 2012, the main company in charge of providing those calling services — Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. — was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said Unipoint never applied for a license to provide international telecommunications services.
DomainTools.com shows the email address gnard@unipointtech.com is tied to 137 domains, including radaris.com. DomainTools also shows that the email addresses used by Gary Norden for more than two decades — epop@comby.com, gary@barksy.com and gary1@eprofit.com, among others — appear in WHOIS registration records for an entire fleet of people-search websites, including: centeda.com, virtory.com, clubset.com, kworld.com, newenglandfacts.com, and pub360.com.
Still more people-search platforms tied to Gary Norden– like publicreports.com and arrestfacts.com — currently funnel interested customers to third-party search companies, such as TruthFinder and PersonTrust.com.
The email addresses used by Gary Nard/Gary Norden are also connected to a slew of data broker websites that sell reports on businesses, real estate holdings, and professionals, including bizstanding.com, homemetry.com, trustoria.com, homeflock.com, rehold.com, difive.com and projectlab.com.
Domain records indicate that Gary and Dan for many years operated a now-defunct pay-per-click affiliate advertising network called affiliate.ru. That entity used domain name servers tied to the aforementioned domains comby.com and eprofit.com, as did radaris.ru.
A machine-translated version of Affiliate.ru, a Russian-language site that advertised hundreds of money making affiliate programs, including the Comfi.com prepaid calling card affiliate.
Comby.com used to be a Russian language social media network that looked a great deal like Facebook. The domain now forwards visitors to Privet.ru (“hello” in Russian), a dating site that claims to have 5 million users. Privet.ru says it belongs to a company called Dating Factory, which lists offices in Switzerland. Privet.ru uses the Gary Norden domain eprofit.com for its domain name servers.
Dating Factory’s website says it sells “powerful dating technology” to help customers create unique or niche dating websites. A review of the sample images available on the Dating Factory homepage suggests the term “dating” in this context refers to adult websites. Dating Factory also operates a community called FacebookOfSex, as well as the domain analslappers.com.
Email addresses for the Comby and Eprofit domains indicate Gary Norden operates an entity in Wellesley Hills, Mass. called RussianAmerican Holding Inc. (russianamerica.com). This organization is listed as the owner of the domain newyork.ru, which is a site dedicated to orienting newcomers from Russia to the Big Apple.
Newyork.ru’s terms of service refer to an international calling card company called ComFi Inc. (comfi.com) and list an address as PO Box 81362 Wellesley Hills, Ma. Other sites that include this address are russianamerica.com, russianboston.com, russianchicago.com, russianla.com, russiansanfran.com, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com and russianseattle.com (currently offline).
ComFi is tied to Comfibook.com, which was a search aggregator website that collected and published data from many online and offline sources, including phone directories, social networks, online photo albums, and public records.
The current website for russianamerica.com. Note the ad in the bottom left corner of this image for Channel One, a Russian state-owned media firm that is currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Many of the U.S. city-specific online properties apparently tied to Gary Norden include phone numbers on their contact pages for a pair of Russian media and advertising firms based in southern California. The phone number 323-874-8211 appears on the websites russianla.com, russiasanfran.com, and rosconcert.com, which sells tickets to theater events performed in Russian.
Historic domain registration records from DomainTools show rosconcert.com was registered in 2003 to Unipoint Technologies — the same company fined by the FCC for not having a license. Rosconcert.com also lists the phone number 818-377-2101.
A phone number just a few digits away — 323-874-8205 — appears as a point of contact on newyork.ru, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com, and russianchicago.com. A search in Google shows this 82xx number range — and the 818-377-2101 number — belong to two different entities at the same UPS Store mailbox in Tarzana, Calif: American Russian Media Inc. (armediacorp.com), and Lamedia.biz.
Armediacorp.com is the home of FACT Magazine, a glossy Russian-language publication put out jointly by the American-Russian Business Council, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
Lamedia.biz says it is an international media organization with more than 25 years of experience within the Russian-speaking community on the West Coast. The site advertises FACT Magazine and the Russian state-owned media outlet Channel One. Clicking the Channel One link on the homepage shows Lamedia.biz offers to submit advertising spots that can be shown to Channel One viewers. The price for a basic ad is listed at $500.
In May 2022, the U.S. government levied financial sanctions against Channel One that bar US companies or citizens from doing business with the company.
The website of lamedia.biz offers to sell advertising on two Russian state-owned media firms currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.
In 2014, a group of people sued Radaris in a class-action lawsuit claiming the company’s practices violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Court records indicate the defendants never showed up in court to dispute the claims, and as a result the judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs a default judgement and ordered the company to pay $7.5 million.
But the plaintiffs in that civil case had a difficult time collecting on the court’s ruling. In response, the court ordered the radaris.com domain name (~9.4M monthly visitors) to be handed over to the plaintiffs.
However, in 2018 Radaris was able to reclaim their domain on a technicality. Attorneys for the company argued that their clients were never named as defendants in the original lawsuit, and so their domain could not legally be taken away from them in a civil judgment.
“Because our clients were never named as parties to the litigation, and were never served in the litigation, the taking of their property without due process is a violation of their rights,” Radaris’ attorneys argued.
In October 2023, an Illinois resident filed a class-action lawsuit against Radaris for allegedly using people’s names for commercial purposes, in violation of the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.
On Feb. 8, 2024, a company called Atlas Data Privacy Corp. sued Radaris LLC for allegedly violating “Daniel’s Law,” a statute that allows New Jersey law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from people-search services and commercial data brokers. Atlas has filed at least 140 similar Daniel’s Law complaints against data brokers recently.
Daniel’s Law was enacted in response to the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge (his mother). In July 2020, a disgruntled attorney who had appeared before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas disguised himself as a Fedex driver, went to her home and shot and killed her son (the judge was unharmed and the assailant killed himself).
Earlier this month, The Record reported on Atlas Data Privacy’s lawsuit against LexisNexis Risk Data Management, in which the plaintiffs representing thousands of law enforcement personnel in New Jersey alleged that after they asked for their information to remain private, the data broker retaliated against them by freezing their credit and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.
Another data broker sued by Atlas Data Privacy — pogodata.com — announced on Mar. 1 that it was likely shutting down because of the lawsuit.
“The matter is far from resolved but your response motivates us to try to bring back most of the names while preserving redaction of the 17,000 or so clients of the redaction company,” the company wrote. “While little consolation, we are not alone in the suit – the privacy company sued 140 property-data sites at the same time as PogoData.”
Atlas says their goal is convince more states to pass similar laws, and to extend those protections to other groups such as teachers, healthcare personnel and social workers. Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states would limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminals charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and governments records that fuel the people-search industry.
There are some pending changes to the US legal and regulatory landscape that could soon reshape large swaths of the data broker industry. But experts say it is unlikely that any of these changes will affect people-search companies like Radaris.
On Feb. 28, 2024, the White House issued an executive order that directs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to create regulations that would prevent data brokers from selling or transferring abroad certain data types deemed too sensitive, including genomic and biometric data, geolocation and financial data, as well as other as-yet unspecified personal identifiers. The DOJ this week published a list of more than 100 questions it is seeking answers to regarding the data broker industry.
In August 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced it was undertaking new rulemaking related to data brokers.
Justin Sherman, an adjunct professor at Duke University, said neither the CFPB nor White House rulemaking will likely address people-search brokers because these companies typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.
“These dossiers contain everything from individuals’ names, addresses, and family information to data about finances, criminal justice system history, and home and vehicle purchases,” Sherman wrote in an October 2023 article for Lawfare. “People search websites’ business pitch boils down to the fact that they have done the work of compiling data, digitizing it, and linking it to specific people so that it can be searched online.”
Sherman said while there are ongoing debates about whether people search data brokers have legal responsibilities to the people about whom they gather and sell data, the sources of this information — public records — are completely carved out from every single state consumer privacy law.
“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman wrote. “Tennessee’s consumer data privacy law, for example, stipulates that “personal information,” a cornerstone of the legislation, does not include ‘publicly available information,’ defined as:
“…information that is lawfully made available through federal, state, or local government records, or information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public through widely distributed media, by the consumer, or by a person to whom the consumer has disclosed the information, unless the consumer has restricted the information to a specific audience.”
Sherman said this is the same language as the carve-out in the California privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations. He said with a limited set of exceptions for survivors of stalking and domestic violence, even under California’s newly passed Delete Act — which creates a centralized mechanism for consumers to ask some third-party data brokers to delete their information — consumers across the board cannot exercise these rights when it comes to data scraped from property filings, marriage certificates, and public court documents, for example.
“With some very narrow exceptions, it’s either extremely difficult or impossible to compel these companies to remove your information from their sites,” Sherman told KrebsOnSecurity. “Even in states like California, every single consumer privacy law in the country completely exempts publicly available information.”
Below is a mind map that helped KrebsOnSecurity track relationships between and among the various organizations named in the story above:
A mind map of various entities apparently tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.
Related tags
Microsoft Corp. today pushed software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.
Top of the heap on this Fat Patch Tuesday is CVE-2024-21412, a “security feature bypass” in the way Windows handles Internet Shortcut Files that Microsoft says is being targeted in active exploits. Redmond’s advisory for this bug says an attacker would need to convince or trick a user into opening a malicious shortcut file.
Researchers at Trend Micro have tied the ongoing exploitation of CVE-2024-21412 to an advanced persistent threat group dubbed “Water Hydra,” which they say has being using the vulnerability to execute a malicious Microsoft Installer File (.msi) that in turn unloads a remote access trojan (RAT) onto infected Windows systems.
The other zero-day flaw is CVE-2024-21351, another security feature bypass — this one in the built-in Windows SmartScreen component that tries to screen out potentially malicious files downloaded from the Web. Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs says it’s important to note that this vulnerability alone is not enough for an attacker to compromise a user’s workstation, and instead would likely be used in conjunction with something like a spear phishing attack that delivers a malicious file.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said this is the fifth vulnerability in Windows SmartScreen patched since 2022 and all five have been exploited in the wild as zero-days. They include CVE-2022-44698 in December 2022, CVE-2023-24880 in March 2023, CVE-2023-32049 in July 2023 and CVE-2023-36025 in November 2023.
Narang called special attention to CVE-2024-21410, an “elevation of privilege” bug in Microsoft Exchange Server that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited by attackers. Attacks on this flaw would lead to the disclosure of NTLM hashes, which could be leveraged as part of an NTLM relay or “pass the hash” attack, which lets an attacker masquerade as a legitimate user without ever having to log in.
“We know that flaws that can disclose sensitive information like NTLM hashes are very valuable to attackers,” Narang said. “A Russian-based threat actor leveraged a similar vulnerability to carry out attacks – CVE-2023-23397 is an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook patched in March 2023.”
Microsoft notes that prior to its Exchange Server 2019 Cumulative Update 14 (CU14), a security feature called Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), which provides NTLM credential relay protections, was not enabled by default.
“Going forward, CU14 enables this by default on Exchange servers, which is why it is important to upgrade,” Narang said.
Rapid7’s lead software engineer Adam Barnett highlighted CVE-2024-21413, a critical remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that could be exploited just by viewing a specially-crafted message in the Outlook Preview pane.
“Microsoft Office typically shields users from a variety of attacks by opening files with Mark of the Web in Protected View, which means Office will render the document without fetching potentially malicious external resources,” Barnett said. “CVE-2024-21413 is a critical RCE vulnerability in Office which allows an attacker to cause a file to open in editing mode as though the user had agreed to trust the file.”
Barnett stressed that administrators responsible for Office 2016 installations who apply patches outside of Microsoft Update should note the advisory lists no fewer than five separate patches which must be installed to achieve remediation of CVE-2024-21413; individual update knowledge base (KB) articles further note that partially-patched Office installations will be blocked from starting until the correct combination of patches has been installed.
It’s a good idea for Windows end-users to stay current with security updates from Microsoft, which can quickly pile up otherwise. That doesn’t mean you have to install them on Patch Tuesday. Indeed, waiting a day or three before updating is a sane response, given that sometimes updates go awry and usually within a few days Microsoft has fixed any issues with its patches. It’s also smart to back up your data and/or image your Windows drive before applying new updates.
For a more detailed breakdown of the individual flaws addressed by Microsoft today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s list. For those admins responsible for maintaining larger Windows environments, it often pays to keep an eye on Askwoody.com, which frequently points out when specific Microsoft updates are creating problems for a number of users.
The rapper and social media personality Punchmade Dev is perhaps best known for his flashy videos singing the praises of a cybercrime lifestyle. With memorable hits such as “Internet Swiping” and “Million Dollar Criminal” earning millions of views, Punchmade has leveraged his considerable following to peddle tutorials on how to commit financial crimes online. But until recently, there wasn’t much to support a conclusion that Punchmade was actually doing the cybercrime things he promotes in his songs.
Images from Punchmade Dev’s Twitter/X account show him displaying bags of cash and wearing a functional diamond-crusted payment card skimmer.
Punchmade Dev’s most controversial mix — a rap called “Wire Fraud Tutorial” — was taken down by Youtube last summer for violating the site’s rules. Punchmade shared on social media that the video’s removal was prompted by YouTube receiving a legal process request from law enforcement officials.
The 24-year-old rapper told reporters he wasn’t instructing people how to conduct wire fraud, but instead informing his fans on how to avoid being victims of wire fraud. However, this is difficult to discern from listening to the song, which sounds very much like a step-by-step tutorial on how to commit wire fraud.
“Listen up, I’m finna show y’all how to hit a bank,” Wire Fraud Tutorial begins. “Just pay attention, this is a quick way to jug in any state. First you wanna get a bank log from a trusted site. Do your research because the information must be right.”
And even though we’re talking about an individual who regularly appears in videos wearing a half-million dollars worth of custom jewelry draped around his arm and neck (including the functional diamond-encrusted payment card skimming device pictured above), there’s never been much evidence that Punchmade was actually involved in committing cybercrimes himself. Even his most vocal critics acknowledged that the whole persona could just be savvy marketing.
That changed recently when Punchmade’s various video and social media accounts began promoting a new web shop that is selling stolen payment cards and identity data, as well as hacked financial accounts and software for producing counterfeit checks.
Punchmade Dev’s shop.
The official Punchmadedev account on Instagram links to many of the aforementioned rap videos and tutorials on cybercriming, as well as to Punchmadedev’s other profiles and websites. Among them is mainpage[.]me/punchmade, which includes the following information for “Punchmade Empire ®”
-212,961 subscribers
#1 source on Telegram
Contact: @whopunchmade
24/7 shop: https://punchmade[.]atshop[.]io
Visiting that @whopunchmade Telegram channel shows this user is promoting punchmade[.]atshop[.]io, which is currently selling hacked bank accounts and payment cards with high balances.
Clicking “purchase” on the C@sh App offering, for example, shows that for $80 the buyer will receive logins to Cash App accounts with balances between $3,000 and $5,000. “If you buy this item you’ll get my full support on discord/telegram if there is a problem!,” the site promises. Purchases can be made in cryptocurrencies, and checking out prompts one to continue payment at Coinbase.com.
Another item for sale, “Fullz + Linkable CC,” promises “ID Front + Back, SSN with 700+ Credit Score, and Linkable CC” or credit card. That also can be had for $80 in crypto.
Punchmade has fashioned his public persona around a collection of custom-made, diamond-covered necklaces that are as outlandish and gaudy as they are revelatory. My favorite shot from one of Punchmade’s videos features at least three of these monstrosities: One appears to be a boring old diamond and gold covered bitcoin, but the other two necklaces tell us something about where Punchmade is from:
Notice the University of Kentucky logo, and the Lexington, Ky skyline.
One of them includes the logo and mascot of the University of Kentucky. The other, an enormous diamond studded skyline, appears to have been designed based on the skyline in Lexington, Ky:
The “About” page on Punchmade Dev’s Spotify profile describes him as “an American artist, rapper, musician, producer, director, entrepreneur, actor and investor.” “Punchmade Dev is best known for his creative ways to use technology, video gaming, and social media to build a fan base,” the profile continues.
The profile explains that he launched his own record label in 2021 called Punchmade Records, where he produces his own instrumentals and edits his own music videos.
A search on companies that include the name “punchmade” at the website of the Kentucky Secretary of State brings up just one record: OBN Group LLC, in Lexington, Ky. This November 2021 record includes a Certificate of Assumed Name, which shows that Punchmade LLC is the assumed name of OBN Group LLC.
The president of OBN Group LLC is listed as Devon Turner. A search on the Secretary of State website for other businesses tied to Devon Turner reveals just one other record: A now-defunct entity called DevTakeFlightBeats Inc.
The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds that Devon Turner from Lexington, Ky. used the email address obndevpayments@gmail.com. A lookup on this email at DomainTools.com shows it was used to register the domain foreverpunchmade[.]com, which is registered to a Devon Turner in Lexington, Ky. A copy of this site at archive.org indicates it once sold Punchmade Dev-branded t-shirts and other merchandise.
Mr. Turner did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Searching online for Devon Turner and “Punchmade” brings up a video from @brainjuiceofficial, a YouTube channel that focuses on social media celebrities. @Brainjuiceofficial says Turner was born in October 2000, the oldest child of a single mother of five whose husband was not in the picture.
Devon Turner, a.k.a. “Punchmade Dev,” in an undated photo.
The video says the six-foot five Turner played basketball, track and football in high school, but that he gradually became obsessed with playing the video game NBA 2K17 and building a following of people watching him play the game competitively online.
According to this brief documentary, Turner previously streamed his NBA 2K17 videos on a YouTube channel called DevTakeFlight, although he originally went by the nickname OBN Dev.
“Things may eventually catch up to Devon if he isn’t careful,” @Brainjuiceofficial observed, noting that Turner has been shot at before, and also robbed at an ATM while flexing a bunch of cash for a picture and wearing $500k in jewelry. “Although you have a lot of people that are into what you do, there are a lot of people waiting for you to slip up.”
In 2020, the United States brought charges against four men accused of building a bulletproof hosting empire that once dominated the Russian cybercrime industry and supported multiple organized cybercrime groups. All four pleaded guilty to conspiracy and racketeering charges. But there is a fascinating and untold backstory behind the two Russian men involved, who co-ran the world’s top spam forum and worked closely with Russia’s most dangerous cybercriminals.
From January 2005 to April 2013, there were two primary administrators of the cybercrime forum Spamdot (a.k.a Spamit), an invite-only community for Russian-speaking people in the businesses of sending spam and building botnets of infected computers to relay said spam. The Spamdot admins went by the nicknames Icamis (a.k.a. Ika), and Salomon (a.k.a. Sal).
Spamdot forum administrator “Ika” a.k.a. “Icamis” responds to a message from “Tarelka,” the botmaster behind the Rustock botnet. Dmsell said: “I’m actually very glad that I switched to legal spam mailing,” prompting Tarelka and Ika to scoff.
As detailed in my 2014 book, Spam Nation, Spamdot was home to crooks controlling some of the world’s nastiest botnets, global malware contagions that went by exotic names like Rustock, Cutwail, Mega-D, Festi, Waledac, and Grum.
Icamis and Sal were in daily communications with these botmasters, via the Spamdot forum and private messages. Collectively in control over millions of spam-spewing zombies, those botmasters also continuously harvested passwords and other data from infected machines.
As we’ll see in a moment, Salomon is now behind bars, in part because he helped to rob dozens of small businesses in the United States using some of those same harvested passwords. He is currently housed in a federal prison in Michigan, serving the final stretch of a 60-month sentence.
But the identity and whereabouts of Icamis have remained a mystery to this author until recently. For years, security experts — and indeed, many top cybercriminals in the Spamit affiliate program — have expressed the belief that Sal and Icamis were likely the same person using two different identities. And there were many good reasons to support this conclusion.
For example, in 2010 Spamdot and its spam affiliate program Spamit were hacked, and its user database shows Sal and Icamis often accessed the forum from the same Internet address — usually from Cherepovets, an industrial town situated approximately 230 miles north of Moscow. Also, it was common for Icamis to reply when Spamdot members communicated a request or complaint to Sal, and vice versa.
Image: maps.google.com
Still, other clues suggested Icamis and Sal were two separate individuals. For starters, they frequently changed the status on their instant messenger clients at different times. Also, they each privately discussed with others having attended different universities.
KrebsOnSecurity began researching Icamis’s real-life identity in 2012, but failed to revisit any of that research until recently. In December 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published new details about the identity of “Rescator,” a Russian cybercriminal who is thought to be closely connected to the 2013 data breach at Target.
That story mentioned Rescator’s real-life identity was exposed by Icamis in April 2013, as part of a lengthy farewell letter Ika wrote to Spamdot members wherein Ika said he was closing the forum and quitting the cybercrime business entirely.
To no one’s shock, Icamis didn’t quit the business: He simply became more quiet and circumspect about his work, which increasingly was focused on helping crime groups siphon funds from U.S. bank accounts. But the Rescator story was a reminder that 10 years worth of research on who Ika/Icamis is in real life had been completely set aside. This post is an attempt to remedy that omission.
The farewell post from Ika (aka Icamis), the administrator of both the BlackSEO forum and Pustota, the successor forum to Spamit/Spamdot.
Icamis and Sal offered a comprehensive package of goods and services that any aspiring or accomplished spammer would need on a day-to-day basis: Virtually unlimited bulletproof domain registration and hosting services, as well as services that helped botmasters evade spam block lists generated by anti-spam groups like Spamhaus.org. Here’s snippet of Icamis’s ad on Spamdot from Aug. 2008, wherein he addresses forum members with the salutation, “Hello Gentlemen Scammers.”
We are glad to present you our services!
Many are already aware (and are our clients), but publicity is never superfluous.Domains.
– all major gtlds (com, net, org, info, biz)
– many interesting and uninteresting cctlds
– options for any topic
– processing of any quantities
– guarantees
– exceptionally low prices for domains for white and gray schemes (including any SEO and affiliate spam )
– control panel with balances and auto-registration
– all services under the Ikamis brand, proven over the years;)Servers.
– long-term partnerships with several [data centers] in several parts of the world for any topic
– your own data center (no longer in Russia ;)) for gray and white topics
– any configuration and any hardware
– your own IP networks (PI, not PA) and full legal support
– realtime backups to neutral sites
– guarantees and full responsibility for the services provided
– non-standard equipment on request
– our own admins to resolve any technical issues (services are free for clients)
– hosting (shared and vps) is also possibleNon-standard and related services.
– ssl certificates signed by geotrust and thawte
– old domains (any year, any quantity)
– beautiful domains (keyword, short, etc.)
– domains with indicators (any, for SEO, etc.)
– making unstable gtld domains stable
– interception and hijacking of custom domains (expensive)
– full domain posting via web.archive.org with restoration of native content (preliminary applications)
– any updates to our panels to suit your needs upon request (our own coders)All orders for the “Domains” sections and “Servers” are carried out during the day (depending on our workload).
For non-standard and related services, a preliminary application is required 30 days in advance (except for ssl certificates – within 24 hours).
Icamis and Sal frequently claimed that their service kept Spamhaus and other anti-spam groups several steps behind their operations. But it’s clear that those anti-spam operations had a real and painful impact on spam revenues, and Salomon was obsessed with striking back at anti-spam groups, particularly Spamhaus.
In 2007, Salomon collected more than $3,000 from botmasters affiliated with competing spam affiliate programs that wanted to see Spamhaus suffer, and the money was used to fund a week-long distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Spamhaus and its online infrastructure. But rather than divert their spam botnets from their normal activity and thereby decrease sales, the botmasters voted to create a new DDoS botnet by purchasing installations of DDoS malware on thousands of already-hacked PCs (at a rate of $25 per 1,000 installs).
As an affiliate of Spamdot, Salomon used the email address ad1@safe-mail.net, and the password 19871987gr. The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence found the password 19871987gr was used by the email address grichishkin@gmail.com. Multiple accounts are registered to that email address under the name Alexander Valerievich Grichishkin, from Cherepovets.
In 2020, Grichishkin was arrested outside of Russia on a warrant for providing bulletproof hosting services to cybercriminal gangs. The U.S. government said Grichishkin and three others set up the infrastructure used by cybercriminals between 2009 to 2015 to distribute malware and attack financial institutions and victims throughout the United States.
Those clients included crooks using malware like Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel and the Blackhole exploit kit to build botnets and steal banking credentials.
“The Organization and its members helped their clients to access computers without authorization, steal financial information (including banking credentials), and initiate unauthorized wire transfers from victims’ financial accounts,” the government’s complaint stated.
Grichishkin pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. He is 36 years old, has a wife and kids in Thailand, and is slated for release on February 8, 2024.
The identity of Icamis came into view when KrebsOnSecurity began focusing on clues that might connect Icamis to Cherepovets (Ika’s apparent hometown based on the Internet addresses he regularly used to access Spamdot).
Historic domain ownership records from DomainTools.com reveal that many of the email addresses and domains connected to Icamis invoke the name “Andrew Artz,” including icamis[.]ws, icamis[.]ru, and icamis[.]biz. Icamis promoted his services in 2003 — such as bulk-domains[.]info — using the email address icamis@4host.info. From one of his ads in 2005:
Domains For Projects Advertised By Spam
I can register bulletproof domains for sites and projects advertised by spam(of course they must be legal). I can not provide DNS for u, only domains. The price will be:
65$ for domain[if u will buy less than 5 domains]
50$ for domain[more than 5 domains]
45$ for domain[more than 10 domains]
These prices are for domains in the .net & .com zones.
If u want to order domains write me to: icamis@4host.info
In 2009, an “Andrew Artz” registered at the hosting service FirstVDS.com using the email address icamis@4host.info, with a notation saying the company name attached to the account was “WMPay.” Likewise, the bulletproof domain service icamis[.]ws was registered to an Andrew Artz.
The domain wmpay.ru is registered to the phonetically similar name “Andrew Hertz,” at andrew@wmpay.ru. A search on “icamis.ru” in Google brings up a 2003 post by him on a discussion forum designed by and for students of Amtek, a secondary school in Cherepovets (Icamis was commenting from an Internet address in Cherepovets).
The website amtek-foreva-narod.ru is still online, and it links to several yearbooks for Amtek graduates. It states that the yearbook for the Amtek class of 2004 is hosted at 41.wmpay[.]com.
The yearbook photos for the Amtek class of 2004 are not indexed in the Wayback Machine at archive.org, but the names and nicknames of 16 students remain. However, it appears that the entry for one student — the Wmpay[.]com site administrator — was removed at some point.
In 2004, the administrator of the Amtek discussion forum — a 2003 graduate who used the handle “Grand” — observed that there were three people named Andrey who graduated from Amtek in 2004, but one of them was conspicuously absent from the yearbook at wmpay[.]ru: Andrey Skvortsov.
To bring this full circle, Icamis was Andrey Skvortsov, the other Russian man charged alongside Grichiskin (the two others who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges were from Estonia and Lithuania). All of the defendants in that case pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO).
[Author’s note: No doubt government prosecutors had their own reasons for omitting the nicknames of the defendants in their press releases, but that information sure would have saved me a lot of time and effort].
Skvortsov was sentenced to time served, and presumably deported. His current whereabouts are unknown and he was not reachable for comment via his known contact addresses.
The government says Ika and Sal’s bulletproof hosting empire provided extensive support for a highly damaging cybercrime group known as the JabberZeus Crew, which worked closely with the author of the Zeus Trojan — Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev — to develop a then-advanced strain of the Zeus malware that was designed to defeat one-time codes for authentication. Bogachev is a top Russian cybercriminal with a standing $3 million bounty on his head from the FBI.
The JabberZeus Crew stole money by constantly recruiting money mules, people in the United States and in Europe who could be enticed or tricked into forwarding money stolen from cybercrime victims. Interestingly, Icamis’s various email addresses are connected to websites for a vast network of phony technology companies that claimed they needed people with bank accounts to help pay their overseas employees.
Icamis used the email address tech@safe-mail.net on Spamdot, and this email address is tied to the registration records for multiple phony technology companies that were set up to recruit money mules.
One such site — sun-technology[.]net — advertised itself as a Hong Kong-based electronics firm that was looking for “honest, responsible and motivated people in UK, USA, AU and NZ to be Sales Representatives in your particular region and receive payments from our clients. Agent commission is 5 percent of total amount received to the personal bank account. You may use your existing bank account or open a new one for these purposes.”
In January 2010, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the JabberZeus crew had just used money mules to steal $500,000 from tiny Duanesburg Central School District in upstate New York. As part of his sentence, Skvortsov was ordered to pay $497,200 in restitution to the Duanesburg Central School District.
The JabberZeus Crew operated mainly out of the eastern Ukraine city of Donetsk, which was always pro-Russia and is now occupied by Russian forces. But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the alleged leader of the notorious cybercrime gang — Vyacheslav Igoravich Andreev (a.ka. Penchukov) — fled his mandatory military service orders and was arrested in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently in federal custody awaiting trial, and is slated to be arraigned in U.S. federal court tomorrow (Jan. 9, 2024). A copy of the indictment against Andreev is here (PDF).
Andreev, aka “Tank,” seen here performing as a DJ in Ukraine in an undated photo from social media.
On Dec. 18, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that U.S. retail giant Target was battling a wide-ranging computer intrusion that compromised more than 40 million customer payment cards over the previous month. The malware used in the Target breach included the text string “Rescator,” which also was the handle chosen by the cybercriminal who was selling all of the cards stolen from Target customers. Ten years later, KrebsOnSecurity has uncovered new clues about the real-life identity of Rescator.
Rescator, advertising a new batch of cards stolen in a 2014 breach at P.F. Chang’s.
Shortly after breaking the Target story, KrebsOnSecurity reported that Rescator appeared to be a hacker from Ukraine. Efforts to confirm my reporting with that individual ended when they declined to answer questions, and after I declined to accept a bribe of $10,000 not to run my story.
That reporting was based on clues from an early Russian cybercrime forum in which a hacker named Rescator — using the same profile image that Rescator was known to use on other forums — claimed to have originally been known as “Helkern,” the nickname chosen by the administrator of a cybercrime forum called Darklife.
KrebsOnSecurity began revisiting the research into Rescator’s real-life identity in 2018, after the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment that named a different Ukrainian man as Helkern.
It may be helpful to first recap why Rescator is thought to be so closely tied to the Target breach. For starters, the text string “Rescator” was found in some of the malware used in the Target breach. Investigators would later determine that a variant of the malware used in the Target breach was used in 2014 to steal 56 million payment cards from Home Depot customers. And once again, cards stolen in the Home Depot breach were sold exclusively at Rescator’s shops.
On Nov. 25, 2013, two days before Target said the breach officially began, Rescator could be seen in instant messages hiring another forum member to verify 400,000 payment cards that Rescator claimed were freshly stolen.
By the first week of December 2013, Rescator’s online store — rescator[.]la — was selling more than six million payment card records stolen from Target customers. Prior to the Target breach, Rescator had mostly sold much smaller batches of stolen card and identity data, and the website allowed cybercriminals to automate the sending of fraudulent wire transfers to money mules based in Lviv, Ukraine.
Finally, there is some honor among thieves, and in the marketplace for stolen payment card data it is considered poor form to advertise a batch of cards as “yours” if you are merely reselling cards sold to you by a third-party card vendor or thief. When serious stolen payment card shop vendors wish to communicate that a batch of cards is uniquely their handiwork or that of their immediate crew, they refer to it as “our base.” And Rescator was quite clear in his advertisements that these millions of cards were obtained firsthand.
The new clues about Rescator’s identity came into focus when I revisited the reporting around an April 2013 story here that identified the author of the OSX Flashback Trojan, an early Mac malware strain that quickly spread to more than 650,000 Mac computers worldwide in 2012.
That story about the Flashback author was possible because a source had obtained a Web browser authentication cookie for a founding member of a Russian cybercrime forum called BlackSEO. Anyone in possession of that cookie could then browse the invite-only BlackSEO forum and read the user’s private messages without having to log in.
BlackSEO.com VIP member “Mavook” tells forum admin Ika in a private message that he is the Flashback author.
The legitimate owner of that BlackSEO user cookie went by the nickname Ika, and Ika’s private messages on the forum showed he was close friends with the Flashback author. At the time, Ika also was the administrator of Pustota[.]pw — a closely-guarded Russian forum that counted among its members some of the world’s most successful and established spammers and malware writers.
For many years, Ika held a key position at one of Russia’s largest Internet service providers, and his (mostly glowing) reputation as a reliable provider of web hosting to the Russian cybercrime community gave him an encyclopedic knowledge about nearly every major player in that scene at the time.
The story on the Flashback author featured redacted screenshots that were taken from Ika’s BlackSEO account (see image above). The day after that story ran, Ika posted a farewell address to his mates, expressing shock and bewilderment over the apparent compromise of his BlackSEO account.
In a lengthy post on April 4, 2013 titled “I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING,” Ika told Pustota forum members he was so spooked by recent events that he was closing the forum and quitting the cybercrime business entirely. Ika recounted how the Flashback story had come the same week that rival cybercriminals tried to “dox” him (their dox named the wrong individual, but included some of Ika’s more guarded identities).
“It’s no secret that karma farted in my direction,” Ika said at the beginning of his post. Unbeknownst to Ika at the time, his Pustota forum also had been completely hacked that week, and a copy of its database shared with this author.
A Google translated version of the farewell post from Ika, the administrator of Pustota, a Russian language cybercrime forum focused on botnets and spam. Click to enlarge.
Ika said the two individuals who tried to dox him did so on an even more guarded Russian language forum — DirectConnection[.]ws, perhaps the most exclusive Russian cybercrime community ever created. New applicants of this forum had to pay a non-refundable deposit, and receive vouches by three established cybercriminals already on the forum. Even if one managed to steal (or guess) a user’s DirectConnection password, the login page could not be reached unless the visitor also possessed a special browser certificate that the forum administrator gave only to approved members.
In no uncertain terms, Ika declared that Rescator went by the nickname MikeMike on DirectConnection:
“I did not want to bring any of this to real life. Especially since I knew the patron of the clowns – specifically Pavel Vrublevsky. Yes, I do state with confidence that the man with the nickname Rescator a.k.a. MikeMike with his partner Pipol have been Pavel Vrublevsky’s puppets for a long time.”
Pavel Vrublevsky is a convicted cybercriminal who became famous as the CEO of the Russian e-payments company ChronoPay, which specialized in facilitating online payments for a variety of “high-risk” businesses, including gambling, pirated Mp3 files, rogue antivirus software and “male enhancement” pills.
As detailed in my 2014 book Spam Nation, Vrublevsky not-so-secretly ran a pharmacy affiliate spam program called Rx-Promotion, which paid spammers and virus writers to blast out tens of billions of junk emails advertising generic Viagra and controlled pharmaceuticals like pain relief medications. Much of my reporting on Vrublevsky’s cybercrime empire came from several years worth of internal ChronoPay emails and documents that were leaked online in 2010 and 2011.
Pavel Vrublevsky’s former Facebook profile photo.
In 2014, KrebsOnSecurity learned from a trusted source close to the Target breach investigation that the user MikeMike on DirectConnection — the same account that Ika said belonged to Rescator — used the email address “zaxvatmira@gmail.com.”
At the time, KrebsOnSecurity could not connect that email address to anything or anyone. However, a recent search on zaxvatmira@gmail.com at the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence returns just one result: An account created in November 2010 at the site searchengines[.]ru under the handle “r-fac1.”
A search on “r-fac1” at cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 revealed that this user’s introductory post on searchengines[.]ru advertised musictransferonline[.]com, an affiliate program that paid people to drive traffic to sites that sold pirated music files for pennies apiece.
According to leaked ChronoPay emails from 2010, this domain was registered and paid for by ChronoPay. Those missives also show that in August 2010 Vrublevsky authorized a payment of ~$1,200 for a multi-user license of an Intranet service called MegaPlan.
ChronoPay used the MegaPlan service to help manage the sprawling projects that Vrublevsky referred to internally as their “black” payment processing operations, including pirated pills, porn, Mp3s, and fake antivirus products. ChronoPay employees used their MegaPlan accounts to track payment disputes, order volumes, and advertising partnerships for these high-risk programs.
Borrowing a page from the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs, the employees adopted nicknames like “Mr. Kink,” “Mr. Heppner,” and “Ms. Nati.” However, in a classic failure of operational security, many of these employees had their MegaPlan account messages automatically forwarded to their real ChronoPay email accounts.
A screen shot of the org chart from ChronoPay’s MegaPlan Intranet system.
When ChronoPay’s internal emails were leaked in 2010, the username and password for its MegaPlan subscription were still working and valid. An internal user directory for that subscription included the personal (non-ChronoPay) email address tied to each employee Megaplan nickname. That directory listing said the email address zaxvatmira@gmail.com was assigned to the head of the Media/Mp3 division for ChronoPay, pictured at the top left of the organizational chart above as “Babushka Vani and Koli.”
[Author’s note: I initially overlooked the presence of the email address zaxvatmira@gmail.com in my notes because it did not show up in text searches of my saved emails, files or messages. I rediscovered it recently when a text search for zaxvatmira@gmail.com on my Mac found the address in a screenshot of the ChronoPay MegaPlan interface.]
The nickname two rungs down from “Babushka” in the ChronoPay org chart is “Lev Tolstoy,” which the MegaPlan service showed was picked by someone who used the email address v.zhabukin@freefrog-co-ru.
ChronoPay’s emails show that this Freefrog email address belongs to a Vasily Borisovich Zhabykin from Moscow. The Russian business tracking website rusprofile[.]ru reports that Zhabykin is or was the supervisor or owner of three Russian organizations, including one called JSC Hot Spot.
[Author’s note: The word “babushka” means “grandma” in Russian, and it could be that this nickname is a nod to the ChronoPay CEO’s wife, Vera. The leaked ChronoPay emails show that Vera Vrublevsky managed a group of hackers working with their media division, and was at least nominally in charge of MP3 projects for ChronoPay. Indeed, in messages exposed by the leaked ChronoPay email cache, Zhabykin stated that he was “directly subordinate” to Mrs. Vrublevsky].
JSC Hot Spot is interesting because its co-founder is another ChronoPay employee: 37-year-old Mikhail “Mike” Shefel. A Facebook profile for Mr. Shefel says he is or was vice president of payment systems at ChronoPay. However, the last update on that profile is from 2018, when Shefel appears to have legally changed his last name.
Archive.org shows that Hot Spot’s website — myhotspot[.]ru — sold a variety of consulting services, including IT security assessments, code and system audits, and email marketing. The earliest recorded archive of the Hot Spot website listed three clients on its homepage, including ChronoPay and Freefrog.
ChronoPay internal emails show that Freefrog was one of its investment projects that facilitated the sale of pirated Mp3 files. Rusprofile[.]ru reports that Freefrog’s official company name — JSC Freefrog — is incorporated by a thinly-documented entity based in the Seychelles called Impex Consulting Ltd., and it is unclear who its true owners are.
However, a search at DomainTools.com on the phone number listed on the homepage of myhotspot[.]ru (74957809554) reveals that number is associated with eight domain names.
Six of those domains are some variation of FreeFrog. Another domain registered to that phone number is bothunter[.]me, which included a copyright credit to “Hot Spot 2011.” At the annual Russian Internet Week IT convention in Moscow in 2012, Mr. Shefel gave a short presentation about bothunter, which he described as a service he designed to identify inauthentic (bot) accounts on Russian social media networks.
Interestingly, one of r-fac1’s first posts to Searchengines[.]ru a year earlier saw this user requesting help from other members who had access to large numbers of hacked social media accounts. R-fac1 told forum members that he was only looking to use those accounts to post harmless links and comments to the followers of the hacked profiles, and his post suggested he was testing something.
“Good afternoon,” r-fac1 wrote on Dec. 20, 2010. “I’m looking for people with their own not-recently-registered accounts on forums, (except for search) Social networks, Twitter, blogs, their websites. Tasks, depending on your accounts, post text and a link, sometimes just a link. Most often the topic is chatter, relaxation, discussion. Posting my links in your profiles, on your walls. A separate offer for people with a large set of contacts in instant messengers to try to use viral marketing.”
Neither Mr. Shefel nor Mr. Zhabykin responded to requests for comment.
Mr. Zhabykin soon moved on to bigger ventures, co-founding a cryptocurrency exchange based in Moscow’s financial center called Suex. In September 2021, Suex earned the distinction of becoming the first crypto firm to be sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which effectively blocked Suex from the global financial system. The Treasury alleged Suex helped to process millions in criminal transactions, including the proceeds of numerous ransomware attacks.
“I don’t understand how I got mixed up in this,” Zhabykin told The New York Times in 2021. Zhabykin said Suex, which is registered in the Czech Republic, was mostly a failure and had conducted only a half dozen or so transactions since 2019.
The Russian business tracking service Rusprofile says Zhabykin also is the owner of a company based in the United Kingdom called RideWithLocal; the company’s website says it specializes in arranging excursions for extreme sports, including snowboarding, skiing, surfing and parasailing. Images from the RideWithLocal Facebook page show helicopters dropping snowboarders and skiers atop some fairly steep mountains.
A screenshot from the Facebook page of RideWithLocal.
Constella Intelligence found a cached copy of a now-deleted LinkedIn profile for Mr. Zhabykin, who described himself as a “sporttech/fintech specialist and mentor.”
“I create products and services worldwide, focusing on innovation and global challenges,” his LinkedIn profile said. “I’ve started my career in 2002 and since then I worked in Moscow, different regions of Russia, including Siberia and in Finland, Brazil, United Kingdom, Sri Lanka. Over the last 15 years I contributed to many amazing products in the following industries: sports, ecology, sport tech, fin tech, electronic payments, big data, telecommunications, pulp and paper industry, wood processing and travel. My specialities are Product development, Mentorship, Strategy and Business development.”
Rusprofile reports that Mikhail Borisovich Shefel is associated with at least eight current or now-defunct companies in Russia, including Dengi IM (Money IM), Internet Capital, Internet Lawyer, Internet 2, Zao Hot Spot, and (my personal favorite) an entity incorporated in 2021 called “All the Money in the World.”
Constella Intelligence found several official documents for Mr. Shefel that came from hacked Russian phone, automobile and residence records. They indicate Mr. Shefel is the registrant of a black Porsche Cayenne (Plate:X537SR197) and a Mercedes (Plate:P003PX90). Those vehicle records show Mr. Shefel was born on May 28, 1986.
Rusprofile reveals that at some point near the end of 2018, Shefel changed his last name to Lenin. DomainTools reports that in 2018, Mr. Shefel’s company Internet 2 LLC registered the domain name Lenin[.]me. This now-defunct service sold physical USSR-era Ruble notes that bear the image of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Pavel Vrublevsky remains imprisoned in Russia, awaiting trial on fraud charges levied against the payment company CEO in March 2022. Authorities allege Vrublevsky operated several fraudulent SMS-based payment schemes. They also accused Vrublevsky of facilitating money laundering for Hydra, the largest Russian darknet market. Hydra trafficked in illegal drugs and financial services, including cryptocurrency tumbling for money laundering, exchange services between cryptocurrency and Russian rubles, and the sale of falsified documents and hacking services.
In 2013, Vrublevsky was sentenced to 2.5 years in a Russian penal colony for convincing one of his top spammers and botmasters to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a ChronoPay competitor that shut down the ticketing system for the state-owned Aeroflot airline.
Following his release, Vrublevsky began working on a new digital payments platform based in Hong Kong called HPay Ltd (a.k.a. Hong Kong Processing Corporation). HPay appears to have had a great number of clients that were running schemes which bamboozled people with fake lotteries and prize contests.
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment on this research from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Secret Service, both of which have been involved in the Target breach investigation over the years. The FBI declined to comment. The Secret Service declined to confirm or dispute any of the findings, but said it is still interested in hearing from anyone who might have more information.
“The U.S. Secret Service does not comment on any open investigation and won’t confirm or deny the accuracy in any reporting related to a criminal manner,” the agency said in a written statement. “However, If you have any information relating to the subjects referenced in this article, please contact the U.S. Secret Service at mostwanted@usss.dhs.gov. The Secret Service pays a reward for information leading to the arrest of cybercriminals.”
The final Patch Tuesday of 2023 is upon us, with Microsoft Corp. today releasing fixes for a relatively small number of security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. Even more unusual, there are no known “zero-day” threats targeting any of the vulnerabilities in December’s patch batch. Still, four of the updates pushed out today address “critical” vulnerabilities that Microsoft says can be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from users.
Among the critical bugs quashed this month is CVE-2023-35628, a weakness present in Windows 10 and later versions, as well as Microsoft Server 2008 and later. Kevin Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said the flaw affects MSHTML, a core component of Windows that is used to render browser-based content. Breen notes that MSHTML also can be found in a number of Microsoft applications, including Office, Outlook, Skype and Teams.
“In the worst-case scenario, Microsoft suggests that simply receiving an email would be enough to trigger the vulnerability and give an attacker code execution on the target machine without any user interaction like opening or interacting with the contents,” Breen said.
Another critical flaw that probably deserves priority patching is CVE-2023-35641, a remote code execution weakness in a built-in Windows feature called the Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service that lets multiple devices share an Internet connection. While CVE-2023-35641 earned a high vulnerability severity score (a CVSS rating of 8.8), the threat from this flaw may be limited somewhat because an attacker would need to be on the same network as the target. Also, while ICS is present in all versions of Windows since Windows 7, it is not on by default (although some applications may turn it on).
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that a number of the non-critical patches released today were identified by Microsoft as “more likely to be exploited.” For example, CVE-2023-35636, which Microsoft says is an information disclosure vulnerability in Outlook. An attacker could exploit this flaw by convincing a potential victim to open a specially crafted file delivered via email or hosted on a malicious website.
Narang said what makes this one stand out is that exploitation of this flaw would lead to the disclosure of NTLM hashes, which could be leveraged as part of an NTLM relay or “pass the hash” attack, which lets an attacker masquerade as a legitimate user without ever having to log in.
”It is reminiscent of CVE-2023-23397, an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook that was exploited in the wild as a zero day and patched in the March 2023 Patch Tuesday release,” Narang said. “However, unlike CVE-2023-23397, CVE-2023-35636 is not exploitable via Microsoft’s Preview Pane, which lowers the severity of this flaw.”
As usual, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a good roundup on all of the patches released today and indexed by severity. Windows users, please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any difficulties as a result of these patches.
Microsoft today released updates to fix more than five dozen security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including three “zero day” vulnerabilities that Microsoft warns are already being exploited in active attacks.
The zero-day threats targeting Microsoft this month include CVE-2023-36025, a weakness that allows malicious content to bypass the Windows SmartScreen Security feature. SmartScreen is a built-in Windows component that tries to detect and block malicious websites and files. Microsoft’s security advisory for this flaw says attackers could exploit it by getting a Windows user to click on a booby-trapped link to a shortcut file.
Kevin Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said emails with .url attachments or logs with processes spawning from .url files “should be a high priority for threat hunters given the active exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild.”
The second zero day this month is CVE-2023-36033, which is a vulnerability in the “DWM Core Library” in Microsoft Windows that was exploited in the wild as a zero day and publicly disclosed prior to patches being available. It affects Microsoft Windows 10 and later, as well as Microsoft Windows Server 2019 and subsequent versions.
“This vulnerability can be exploited locally, with low complexity and without needing high-level privileges or user interaction,” said Mike Walters, president and co-founder of the security firm Action1. “Attackers exploiting this flaw could gain SYSTEM privileges, making it an efficient method for escalating privileges, especially after initial access through methods like phishing.”
The final zero day in this month’s Patch Tuesday is a problem in the “Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver” tracked as CVE-2023-36036 that affects Windows 10 and later, as well as Windows Server 2008 at later. Microsoft says it is relatively straightforward for attackers to exploit CVE-2023-36036 as a way to elevate their privileges on a compromised PC.
Beyond the zero day flaws, Breen said organizations running Microsoft Exchange Server should prioritize several new Exchange patches, including CVE-2023-36439, which is a bug that would allow attackers to install malicious software on an Exchange server. This weakness technically requires the attacker to be authenticated to the target’s local network, but Breen notes that a pair of phished Exchange credentials will provide that access nicely.
“This is typically achieved through social engineering attacks with spear phishing to gain initial access to a host before searching for other vulnerable internal targets – just because your Exchange Server doesn’t have internet-facing authentication doesn’t mean it’s protected,” Breen said.
Breen said this vulnerability goes hand in hand with three other Exchange bugs that Microsoft designated as “exploitation more likely:” CVE-2023-36050, CVE-2023-36039 and CVE-2023-36035.
Finally, the SANS Internet Storm Center points to two additional bugs patched by Microsoft this month that aren’t yet showing signs of active exploitation but that were made public prior to today and thus deserve prioritization. Those include: CVE-2023-36038, a denial of service vulnerability in ASP.NET Core, with a CVSS score of 8.2; and CVE-2023-36413: A Microsoft Office security feature bypass. Exploiting this vulnerability will bypass the protected mode when opening a file received via the web.
Windows users, please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any difficulties as a result of these patches.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of the largest cybercrime services for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked recently, exposing its internal operations, finances and organizational structure. In today’s Part II, we’ll examine clues about the real-life identity of “Fearlless,” the nickname chosen by the proprietor of the SWAT USA Drops service.
Based in Russia, SWAT USA recruits people in the United States to reship packages containing pricey electronics that are purchased with stolen credit cards. As detailed in this Nov. 2 story, SWAT currently employs more than 1,200 U.S. residents, all of whom will be cut loose without a promised payday at the end of their first month reshipping stolen goods.
The current co-owner of SWAT, a cybercriminal who uses the nickname “Fearlless,” operates primarily on the cybercrime forum Verified. This Russian-language forum has tens of thousands of members, and it has suffered several hacks that exposed more than a decade’s worth of user data and direct messages.
January 2021 posts on Verified show that Fearlless and his partner Universalo purchased the SWAT reshipping business from a Verified member named SWAT, who’d been operating the service for years. SWAT agreed to transfer the business in exchange for 30 percent of the net profit over the ensuing six months.
Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says Fearlless first registered on Verified in February 2013. The email address Fearlless used on Verified leads nowhere, but a review of Fearlless’ direct messages on Verified indicates this user originally registered on Verified a year earlier as a reshipping vendor, under the alias “Apathyp.”
There are two clues supporting the conclusion that Apathyp and Fearlless are the same person. First, the Verified administrators warned Apathyp he had violated the forum’s rules barring the use of multiple accounts by the same person, and that Verified’s automated systems had detected that Apathyp and Fearlless were logging in from the same device. Second, in his earliest private messages on Verified, Fearlless told others to contact him on an instant messenger address that Apathyp had claimed as his.
Intel 471 says Apathyp registered on Verified using the email address triploo@mail.ru. A search on that email address at the breach intelligence service Constella Intelligence found that a password commonly associated with it was “niceone.” But the triploo@mail.ru account isn’t connected to much else that’s interesting except a now-deleted account at Vkontakte, the Russian answer to Facebook.
However, in Sept. 2020, Apathyp sent a private message on Verified to the owner of a stolen credit card shop, saying his credentials no longer worked. Apathyp told the proprietor that his chosen password on the service was “12Apathy.”
A search on that password at Constella reveals it was used by just four different email addresses, two of which are particularly interesting: gezze@yandex.ru and gezze@mail.ru. Constella discovered that both of these addresses were previously associated with the same password as triploo@mail.ru — “niceone,” or some variation thereof.
Constella found that years ago gezze@mail.ru was used to create a Vkontakte account under the name Ivan Sherban (former password: “12niceone“) from Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the southern region of Russia. That same email address is now tied to a Vkontakte account for an Ivan Sherban who lists his home as Saint Petersburg, Russia. Sherban’s profile photo shows a heavily tattooed, muscular and recently married individual with his beautiful new bride getting ready to drive off in a convertible sports car.
A pivotal clue for validating the research into Apathyp/Fearlless came from the identity intelligence firm myNetWatchman, which found that gezze@mail.ru at one time used the passwords “геззи1991” (gezze1991) and “gezze18081991.”
Care to place a wager on when Vkontakte says is Mr. Sherban’s birthday? Ten points if you answered August 18 (18081991).
Mr. Sherban did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Microsoft today issued security updates for more than 100 newly-discovered vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and related software, including four flaws that are already being exploited. In addition, Apple recently released emergency updates to quash a pair of zero-day bugs in iOS.
Apple last week shipped emergency updates in iOS 17.0.3 and iPadOS 17.0.3 in response to active attacks. The patch fixes CVE-2023-42724, which attackers have been using in targeted attacks to elevate their access on a local device.
Apple said it also patched CVE-2023-5217, which is not listed as a zero-day bug. However, as Bleeping Computer pointed out, this flaw is caused by a weakness in the open-source “libvpx” video codec library, which was previously patched as a zero-day flaw by Google in the Chrome browser and by Microsoft in Edge, Teams, and Skype products. For anyone keeping count, this is the 17th zero-day flaw that Apple has patched so far this year.
Fortunately, the zero-days affecting Microsoft customers this month are somewhat less severe than usual, with the exception of CVE-2023-44487. This weakness is not specific to Windows but instead exists within the HTTP/2 protocol used by the World Wide Web: Attackers have figured out how to use a feature of HTTP/2 to massively increase the size of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and these monster attacks reportedly have been going on for several weeks now.
Amazon, Cloudflare and Google all released advisories today about how they’re addressing CVE-2023-44487 in their cloud environments. Google’s Damian Menscher wrote on Twitter/X that the exploit — dubbed a “rapid reset attack” — works by sending a request and then immediately cancelling it (a feature of HTTP/2). “This lets attackers skip waiting for responses, resulting in a more efficient attack,” Menscher explained.
Natalie Silva, lead security engineer at Immersive Labs, said this flaw’s impact to enterprise customers could be significant, and lead to prolonged downtime.
“It is crucial for organizations to apply the latest patches and updates from their web server vendors to mitigate this vulnerability and protect against such attacks,” Silva said. In this month’s Patch Tuesday release by Microsoft, they have released both an update to this vulnerability, as well as a temporary workaround should you not be able to patch immediately.”
Microsoft also patched zero-day bugs in Skype for Business (CVE-2023-41763) and Wordpad (CVE-2023-36563). The latter vulnerability could expose NTLM hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.
“It may or may not be a coincidence that Microsoft announced last month that WordPad is no longer being updated, and will be removed in a future version of Windows, although no specific timeline has yet been given,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7. “Unsurprisingly, Microsoft recommends Word as a replacement for WordPad.”
Other notable bugs addressed by Microsoft include CVE-2023-35349, a remote code execution weakness in the Message Queuing (MSMQ) service, a technology that allows applications across multiple servers or hosts to communicate with each other. This vulnerability has earned a CVSS severity score of 9.8 (10 is the worst possible). Happily, the MSMQ service is not enabled by default in Windows, although Immersive Labs notes that Microsoft Exchange Server can enable this service during installation.
Speaking of Exchange, Microsoft also patched CVE-2023-36778, a vulnerability in all current versions of Exchange Server that could allow attackers to run code of their choosing. Rapid7’s Barnett said successful exploitation requires that the attacker be on the same network as the Exchange Server host, and use valid credentials for an Exchange user in a PowerShell session.
For a more detailed breakdown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any difficulties as a result of these patches.
The fake USPS phishing page.
Recent weeks have seen a sizable uptick in the number of phishing scams targeting U.S. Postal Service (USPS) customers. Here’s a look at an extensive SMS phishing operation that tries to steal personal and financial data by spoofing the USPS, as well as postal services in at least a dozen other countries.
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who received an SMS purporting to have been sent by the USPS, saying there was a problem with a package destined for the reader’s address. Clicking the link in the text message brings one to the domain usps.informedtrck[.]com.
The landing page generated by the phishing link includes the USPS logo, and says “Your package is on hold for an invalid recipient address. Fill in the correct address info by the link.” Below that message is a “Click update” button that takes the visitor to a page that asks for more information.
The remaining buttons on the phishing page all link to the real USPS.com website. After collecting your address information, the fake USPS site goes on to request additional personal and financial data.
This phishing domain was recently registered and its WHOIS ownership records are basically nonexistent. However, we can find some compelling clues about the extent of this operation by loading the phishing page in Developer Tools, a set of debugging features built into Firefox, Chrome and Safari that allow one to closely inspect a webpage’s code and operations.
Check out the bottom portion of the screenshot below, and you’ll notice that this phishing site fails to load some external resources, including an image from a link called fly.linkcdn[.]to.
Click the image to enlarge.
A search on this domain at the always-useful URLscan.io shows that fly.linkcdn[.]to is tied to a slew of USPS-themed phishing domains. Here are just a few of those domains (links defanged to prevent accidental clicking):
usps.receivepost[.]com
usps.informedtrck[.]com
usps.trckspost[.]com
postreceive[.]com
usps.trckpackages[.]com
usps.infortrck[.]com
usps.quicktpos[.]com
usps.postreceive].]com
usps.revepost[.]com
trackingusps.infortrck[.]com
usps.receivepost[.]com
usps.trckmybusi[.]com
postreceive[.]com
tackingpos[.]com
usps.trckstamp[.]com
usa-usps[.]shop
usps.infortrck[.]com
unlistedstampreceive[.]com
usps.stampreceive[.]com
usps.stamppos[.]com
usps.stampspos[.]com
usps.trckmypost[.]com
usps.trckintern[.]com
usps.tackingpos[.]com
usps.posinformed[.]com
As we can see in the screenshot below, the developer tools console for informedtrck[.]com complains that the site is unable to load a Google Analytics code — UA-80133954-3 — which apparently was rejected for pointing to an invalid domain.
Notice the highlighted Google Analytics code exposed by a faulty Javascript element on the phishing website. Click to enlarge. That code actually belongs to the USPS.
The valid domain for that Google Analytics code is the official usps.com website. According to dnslytics.com, that same analytics code has shown up on at least six other nearly identical USPS phishing pages dating back nearly as many years, including onlineuspsexpress[.]com, which DomainTools.com says was registered way back in September 2018 to an individual in Nigeria.
A different domain with that same Google Analytics code that was registered in 2021 is peraltansepeda[.]com, which archive.org shows was running a similar set of phishing pages targeting USPS users. DomainTools.com indicates this website name was registered by phishers based in Indonesia.
DomainTools says the above-mentioned USPS phishing domain stamppos[.]com was registered in 2022 via Singapore-based Alibaba.com, but the registrant city and state listed for that domain says “Georgia, AL,” which is not a real location.
Alas, running a search for domains registered through Alibaba to anyone claiming to reside in Georgia, AL reveals nearly 300 recent postal phishing domains ending in “.top.” These domains are either administrative domains obscured by a password-protected login page, or are .top domains phishing customers of the USPS as well as postal services serving other countries.
Those other nations include the Australia Post, An Post (Ireland), Correos.es (Spain), the Costa Rican post, the Chilean Post, the Mexican Postal Service, Poste Italiane (Italy), PostNL (Netherlands), PostNord (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), and Posti (Finland). A complete list of these domains is available here (PDF).
A phishing page targeting An Post, the state-owned provider of postal services in Ireland.
The Georgia, AL domains at Alibaba also encompass several that spoof sites claiming to collect outstanding road toll fees and fines on behalf of the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
An anonymous reader wrote in to say they submitted fake information to the above-mentioned phishing site usps.receivepost[.]com via the malware sandbox any.run. A video recording of that analysis shows that the site sends any submitted data via an automated bot on the Telegram instant messaging service.
The traffic analysis just below the any.run video shows that any data collected by the phishing site is being sent to the Telegram user @chenlun, who offers to sell customized source code for phishing pages. From a review of @chenlun’s other Telegram channels, it appears this account is being massively spammed at the moment — possibly thanks to public attention brought by this story.
Meanwhile, researchers at DomainTools recently published a report on an apparently unrelated but equally sprawling SMS-based phishing campaign targeting USPS customers that appears to be the work of cybercriminals based in Iran.
Phishers tend to cast a wide net and often spoof entities that are broadly used by the local population, and few brands are going to have more household reach than domestic mail services. In June, the United Parcel Service (UPS) disclosed that fraudsters were abusing an online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing messages that spoofed the UPS and other brands.
With the holiday shopping season nearly upon us, now is a great time to remind family and friends about the best advice to sidestep phishing scams: Avoid clicking on links or attachments that arrive unbidden in emails, text messages and other mediums. Most phishing scams invoke a temporal element that warns of negative consequences should you fail to respond or act quickly.
If you’re unsure whether the message is legitimate, take a deep breath and visit the site or service in question manually — ideally, using a browser bookmark so as to avoid potential typosquatting sites.
Update: Added information about the Telegram bot and any.run analysis.
Microsoft today issued software updates to fix at least five dozen security holes in Windows and supported software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited. Also, Adobe, Google Chrome and Apple iOS users may have their own zero-day patching to do.
On Sept. 7, researchers at Citizen Lab warned they were seeing active exploitation of a “zero-click,” zero-day flaw to install spyware on iOS devices without any interaction from the victim.
“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” the researchers wrote.
According to Citizen Lab, the exploit uses malicious images sent via iMessage, an embedded component of Apple’s iOS that has been the source of previous zero-click flaws in iPhones and iPads.
Apple says the iOS flaw (CVE-2023-41064) does not seem to work against devices that have its ultra-paranoid “Lockdown Mode” enabled. This feature restricts non-essential iOS features to reduce the device’s overall attack surface, and it was designed for users concerned that they may be subject to targeted attacks. Citizen Lab says the bug it discovered was being exploited to install spyware made by the Israeli cyber surveillance company NSO Group.
This vulnerability is fixed in iOS 16.6.1 and iPadOS 16.6.1. To turn on Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Lockdown Mode.
Not to be left out of the zero-day fun, Google acknowledged on Sept. 11 that an exploit for a heap overflow bug in Chrome is being exploited in the wild. Google says it is releasing updates to fix the flaw, and that restarting Chrome is the way to apply any pending updates. Interestingly, Google says this bug was reported by Apple and Citizen Lab.
On the Microsoft front, a zero-day in Microsoft Word is among the more concerning bugs fixed today. Tracked as CVE-2023-36761, it is flagged as an “information disclosure” vulnerability. But that description hardly grasps at the sensitivity of the information potentially exposed here.
Tom Bowyer, manager of product security at Automox, said exploiting this vulnerability could lead to the disclosure of Net-NTLMv2 hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.
“If a malicious actor gains access to these hashes, they can potentially impersonate the user, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems,” Bowyer said, noting that CVE-2023-36761 can be exploited just by viewing a malicious document in the Windows preview pane. “They could also conduct pass-the-hash attacks, where the attacker uses the hashed version of a password to authenticate themselves without needing to decrypt it.”
The other Windows zero-day fixed this month is CVE-2023-36802. This is an “elevation of privilege” flaw in the “Microsoft Streaming Service Proxy,” which is built into Windows 10, 11 and Windows Server versions. Microsoft says an attacker who successfully exploits the bug can gain SYSTEM level privileges on a Windows computer.
Five of the flaws Microsoft fixed this month earned its “critical” rating, which the software giant reserves for vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or malcontents with little or no interaction by Windows users.
According to the SANS Internet Storm Center, the most serious critical bug in September’s Patch Tuesday is CVE-2023-38148, which is a weakness in the Internet Connection Sharing service on Windows. Microsoft says an unauthenticated attacker could leverage the flaw to install malware just sending a specially crafted data packet to a vulnerable Windows system.
Finally, Adobe has released critical security updates for its Adobe Reader and Acrobat software that also fixes a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-26369). More details are at Adobe’s advisory.
For a more granular breakdown of the Windows updates pushed out today, check out Microsoft Patch Tuesday by Morphus Labs. In the meantime, consider backing up your data before updating Windows, and keep an eye on AskWoody.com for reports of any widespread problems with any of the updates released as part of September’s Patch Tuesday.
Update: Mozilla also has fixed zero-day flaw in Firefox and Thunderbird, and the Brave browser was updated as well. It appears the common theme here is any software that uses a code library called “libwebp,” and that this vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2023-4863.
“This includes Electron-based applications, for example – Signal,” writes StackDiary.com. “Electron patched the vulnerability yesterday. Also, software like Honeyview (from Bandisoft) released an update to fix the issue. CVE-2023-4863 was falsely marked as Chrome-only by Mitre and other organizations that track CVE’s and 100% of media reported this issue as “Chrome only”, when it’s not.”
In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.
Taylor Monahan is lead product manager of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people. Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto.
Monahan said virtually all of the victims she has assisted were longtime cryptocurrency investors, and security-minded individuals. Importantly, none appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto heist, such as the compromise of one’s email and/or mobile phone accounts.
“The victim profile remains the most striking thing,” Monahan wrote. “They truly all are reasonably secure. They are also deeply integrated into this ecosystem, [including] employees of reputable crypto orgs, VCs [venture capitalists], people who built DeFi protocols, deploy contracts, run full nodes.”
Monahan has been documenting the crypto thefts via Twitter/X since March 2023, frequently expressing frustration in the search for a common cause among the victims. Then on Aug. 28, Monahan said she’d concluded that the common thread among nearly every victim was that they’d previously used LastPass to store their “seed phrase,” the private key needed to unlock access to their cryptocurrency investments.
MetaMask owner Taylor Monahan on Twitter. Image: twitter.com/tayvano_
Armed with your secret seed phrase, anyone can instantly access all of the cryptocurrency holdings tied to that cryptographic key, and move the funds to anywhere they like.
Which is why the best practice for many cybersecurity enthusiasts has long been to store their seed phrases either in some type of encrypted container — such as a password manager — or else inside an offline, special-purpose hardware encryption device, such as a Trezor or Ledger wallet.
“The seed phrase is literally the money,” said Nick Bax, director of analytics at Unciphered, a cryptocurrency wallet recovery company. “If you have my seed phrase, you can copy and paste that into your wallet, and then you can see all my accounts. And you can transfer my funds.”
Bax said he closely reviewed the massive trove of cryptocurrency theft data that Taylor Monahan and others have collected and linked together.
“It’s one of the broadest and most complex cryptocurrency investigations I’ve ever seen,” Bax said. “I ran my own analysis on top of their data and reached the same conclusion that Taylor reported. The threat actor moved stolen funds from multiple victims to the same blockchain addresses, making it possible to strongly link those victims.”
Bax, Monahan and others interviewed for this story say they’ve identified a unique signature that links the theft of more than $35 million in crypto from more than 150 confirmed victims, with roughly two to five high-dollar heists happening each month since December 2022.
KrebsOnSecurity has reviewed this signature but is not publishing it at the request of Monahan and other researchers, who say doing so could cause the attackers to alter their operations in ways that make their criminal activity more difficult to track.
But the researchers have published findings about the dramatic similarities in the ways that victim funds were stolen and laundered through specific cryptocurrency exchanges. They also learned the attackers frequently grouped together victims by sending their cryptocurrencies to the same destination crypto wallet.
A graphic published by @tayvano_ on Twitter depicting the movement of stolen cryptocurrencies from victims who used LastPass to store their crypto seed phrases.
By identifying points of overlap in these destination addresses, the researchers were then able to track down and interview new victims. For example, the researchers said their methodology identified a recent multi-million dollar crypto heist victim as an employee at Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm that works closely with law enforcement agencies to help track down cybercriminals and money launderers.
Chainalysis confirmed that the employee had suffered a high-dollar cryptocurrency heist late last month, but otherwise declined to comment for this story.
Bax said the only obvious commonality between the victims who agreed to be interviewed was that they had stored the seed phrases for their cryptocurrency wallets in LastPass.
“On top of the overlapping indicators of compromise, there are more circumstantial behavioral patterns and tradecraft which are also consistent between different thefts and support the conclusion,” Bax told KrebsOnSecuirty. “I’m confident enough that this is a real problem that I’ve been urging my friends and family who use LastPass to change all of their passwords and migrate any crypto that may have been exposed, despite knowing full well how tedious that is.”
LastPass declined to answer questions about the research highlighted in this story, citing an ongoing law enforcement investigation and pending litigation against the company in response to its 2022 data breach.
“Last year’s incident remains the subject of an ongoing investigation by law enforcement and is also the subject of pending litigation,” LastPass said in a written statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity. “Since last year’s attack on LastPass, we have remained in contact with law enforcement and continue to do so.”
Their statement continues:
“We have shared various technical information, Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), and threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) with our law enforcement contacts as well as our internal and external threat intelligence and forensic partners in an effort to try and help identify the parties responsible. In the meantime, we encourage any security researchers to share any useful information they believe they may have with our Threat Intelligence team by contacting securitydisclosure@lastpass.com.”
On August 25, 2022, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba wrote to users that the company had detected unusual activity in its software development environment, and that the intruders stole some source code and proprietary LastPass technical information. On Sept. 15, 2022, LastPass said an investigation into the August breach determined the attacker did not access any customer data or password vaults.
But on Nov. 30, 2022, LastPass notified customers about another, far more serious security incident that the company said leveraged data stolen in the August breach. LastPass disclosed that criminal hackers had compromised encrypted copies of some password vaults, as well as other personal information.
In February 2023, LastPass disclosed that the intrusion involved a highly complex, targeted attack against a DevOps engineer who was one of only four LastPass employees with access to the corporate vault.
“This was accomplished by targeting the DevOps engineer’s home computer and exploiting a vulnerable third-party media software package, which enabled remote code execution capability and allowed the threat actor to implant keylogger malware,” LastPass officials wrote. “The threat actor was able to capture the employee’s master password as it was entered, after the employee authenticated with MFA, and gain access to the DevOps engineer’s LastPass corporate vault.”
Dan Goodin at Ars Technica reported and then confirmed that the attackers exploited a known vulnerability in a Plex media server that the employee was running on his home network, and succeeded in installing malicious software that stole passwords and other authentication credentials. The vulnerability exploited by the intruders was patched back in 2020, but the employee never updated his Plex software.
As it happens, Plex announced its own data breach one day before LastPass disclosed its initial August intrusion. On August 24, 2022, Plex’s security team urged users to reset their passwords, saying an intruder had accessed customer emails, usernames and encrypted passwords.
A basic functionality of LastPass is that it will pick and remember lengthy, complex passwords for each of your websites or online services. To automatically populate the appropriate credentials at any website going forward, you simply authenticate to LastPass using your master password.
LastPass has always emphasized that if you lose this master password, that’s too bad because they don’t store it and their encryption is so strong that even they can’t help you recover it.
But experts say all bets are off when cybercrooks can get their hands on the encrypted vault data itself — as opposed to having to interact with LastPass via its website. These so-called “offline” attacks allow the bad guys to conduct unlimited and unfettered “brute force” password cracking attempts against the encrypted data using powerful computers that can each try millions of password guesses per second.
“It does leave things vulnerable to brute force when the vaults are stolen en masse, especially if info about the vault HOLDER is available,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer at UC Davis. “So you just crunch and crunch and crunch with GPUs, with a priority list of vaults you target.”
How hard would it be for well-resourced criminals to crack the master passwords securing LastPass user vaults? Perhaps the best answer to this question comes from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher and the original developer behind the Adblock Plus browser plugin.
In a December 2022 blog post, Palant explained that the crackability of a LastPass master password depends largely on two things: The complexity of the master password, and the default settings for LastPass users, which appear to have varied quite a bit based on when those users began patronizing the service.
LastPass says that since 2018 it has required a twelve-character minimum for master passwords, which the company said “greatly minimizes the ability for successful brute force password guessing.”
But Palant said while LastPass indeed improved its master password defaults in 2018, it did not force all existing customers who had master passwords of lesser lengths to pick new credentials that would satisfy the 12-character minimum.
“If you are a LastPass customer, chances are that you are completely unaware of this requirement,” Palant wrote. “That’s because LastPass didn’t ask existing customers to change their master password. I had my test account since 2018, and even today I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it.”
Palant believes LastPass also failed to upgrade many older, original customers to more secure encryption protections that were offered to newer customers over the years. One important setting in LastPass is the number of “iterations,” or how many times your master password is run through the company’s encryption routines. The more iterations, the longer it takes an offline attacker to crack your master password.
Palant noted last year that for many older LastPass users, the initial default setting for iterations was anywhere from “1” to “500.” By 2013, new LastPass customers were given 5,000 iterations by default. In February 2018, LastPass changed the default to 100,100 iterations. And very recently, it upped that again to 600,000.
Palant said the 2018 change was in response to a security bug report he filed about some users having dangerously low iterations in their LastPass settings.
“Worse yet, for reasons that are beyond me, LastPass didn’t complete this migration,” Palant wrote. “My test account is still at 5,000 iterations, as are the accounts of many other users who checked their LastPass settings. LastPass would know how many users are affected, but they aren’t telling that. In fact, it’s painfully obvious that LastPass never bothered updating users’ security settings. Not when they changed the default from 1 to 500 iterations. Not when they changed it from 500 to 5,000. Only my persistence made them consider it for their latest change. And they still failed implementing it consistently.”
A chart on Palant’s blog post offers an idea of how increasing password iterations dramatically increases the costs and time needed by the attackers to crack someone’s master password. Palant said it would take a single GPU about a year to crack a password of average complexity with 500 iterations, and about 10 years to crack the same password run through 5,000 iterations.
Image: palant.info
However, these numbers radically come down when a determined adversary also has other large-scale computational assets at their disposal, such as a bitcoin mining operation that can coordinate the password-cracking activity across multiple powerful systems simultaneously.
Weaver said a password or passphrase with average complexity — such as “Correct Horse Battery Staple” is only secure against online attacks, and that its roughly 40 bits of randomness or “entropy” means a graphics card can blow through it in no time.
“An Nvidia 3090 can do roughly 4 million [password guesses] per second with 1000 iterations, but that would go down to 8 thousand per second with 500,000 iterations, which is why iteration count matters so much,” Weaver said. “So a combination of ‘not THAT strong of a password’ and ‘old vault’ and ‘low iteration count’ would make it theoretically crackable but real work, but the work is worth it given the targets.”
Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, Palant said he never received a response from LastPass about why the company apparently failed to migrate some number of customers to more secure account settings.
“I know exactly as much as everyone else,” Palant wrote in reply. “LastPass published some additional information in March. This finally answered the questions about the timeline of their breach – meaning which users are affected. It also made obvious that business customers are very much at risk here, Federated Login Services being highly compromised in this breach (LastPass downplaying as usual of course).”
Palant said upon logging into his LastPass account a few days ago, he found his master password was still set at 5,000 iterations.
KrebsOnSecurity interviewed one of the victims tracked down by Monahan, a software engineer and startup founder who recently was robbed of approximately $3.4 million worth of different cryptocurrencies. The victim agreed to tell his story in exchange for anonymity because he is still trying to claw back his losses. We’ll refer to him here as “Connor” (not his real name).
Connor said he began using LastPass roughly a decade ago, and that he also stored the seed phrase for his primary cryptocurrency wallet inside of LastPass. Connor chose to protect his LastPass password vault with an eight character master password that included numbers and symbols (~50 bits of entropy).
“I thought at the time that the bigger risk was losing a piece of paper with my seed phrase on it,” Connor said. “I had it in a bank security deposit box before that, but then I started thinking, ‘Hey, the bank might close or burn down and I could lose my seed phrase.'”
Those seed phrases sat in his LastPass vault for years. Then, early on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023, Connor was awoken by a service he’d set up to monitor his cryptocurrency addresses for any unusual activity: Someone was draining funds from his accounts, and fast.
Like other victims interviewed for this story, Connor didn’t suffer the usual indignities that typically presage a cryptocurrency robbery, such as account takeovers of his email inbox or mobile phone number.
Connor said he doesn’t know the number of iterations his master password was given originally, or what it was set at when the LastPass user vault data was stolen last year. But he said he recently logged into his LastPass account and the system forced him to upgrade to the new 600,000 iterations setting.
“Because I set up my LastPass account so early, I’m pretty sure I had whatever weak settings or iterations it originally had,” he said.
Connor said he’s kicking himself because he recently started the process of migrating his cryptocurrency to a new wallet protected by a new seed phrase. But he never finished that migration process. And then he got hacked.
“I’d set up a brand new wallet with new keys,” he said. “I had that ready to go two months ago, but have been procrastinating moving things to the new wallet.”
Connor has been exceedingly lucky in regaining access to some of his stolen millions in cryptocurrency. The Internet is swimming with con artists masquerading as legitimate cryptocurrency recovery experts. To make matters worse, because time is so critical in these crypto heists, many victims turn to the first quasi-believable expert who offers help.
Instead, several friends steered Connor to Flashbots.net, a cryptocurrency recovery firm that employs several custom techniques to help clients claw back stolen funds — particularly those on the Ethereum blockchain.
According to Connor, Flashbots helped rescue approximately $1.5 million worth of the $3.4 million in cryptocurrency value that was suddenly swept out of his account roughly a week ago. Lucky for him, Connor had some of his assets tied up in a type of digital loan that allowed him to borrow against his various cryptocurrency assets.
Without giving away too many details about how they clawed back the funds, here’s a high level summary: When the crooks who stole Connor’s seed phrase sought to extract value from these loans, they were borrowing the maximum amount of credit that he hadn’t already used. But Connor said that left open an avenue for some of that value to be recaptured, basically by repaying the loan in many small, rapid chunks.
According to MetaMask’s Monahan, users who stored any important passwords with LastPass — particularly those related to cryptocurrency accounts — should change those credentials immediately, and migrate any crypto holdings to new offline hardware wallets.
“Really the ONLY thing you need to read is this,” Monahan pleaded to her 70,000 followers on Twitter/X: “PLEASE DON’T KEEP ALL YOUR ASSETS IN A SINGLE KEY OR SECRET PHRASE FOR YEARS. THE END. Split up your assets. Get a hw [hardware] wallet. Migrate. Now.”
If you also had passwords tied to banking or retirement accounts, or even just important email accounts — now would be a good time to change those credentials as well.
I’ve never been comfortable recommending password managers, because I’ve never seriously used them myself. Something about putting all your eggs in one basket. Heck, I’m so old-fashioned that most of my important passwords are written down and tucked away in safe places.
But I recognize this antiquated approach to password management is not for everyone. Connor says he now uses 1Password, a competing password manager that recently earned the best overall marks from Wired and The New York Times.
1Password says that three things are needed to decrypt your information: The encrypted data itself, your account password, and your Secret Key. Only you know your account password, and your Secret Key is generated locally during setup.
“The two are combined on-device to encrypt your vault data and are never sent to 1Password,” explains a 1Password blog post ‘What If 1Password Gets Hacked?‘ “Only the encrypted vault data lives on our servers, so neither 1Password nor an attacker who somehow manages to guess or steal your account password would be able to access your vaults – or what’s inside them.
Weaver said that Secret Key adds an extra level of randomness to all user master passwords that LastPass didn’t have.
“With LastPass, the idea is the user’s password vault is encrypted with a cryptographic hash (H) of the user’s passphrase,” Weaver said. “The problem is a hash of the user’s passphrase is remarkably weak on older LastPass vaults with master passwords that do not have many iterations. 1Password uses H(random-key||password) to generate the password, and it is why you have the QR code business when adding a new device.”
Weaver said LastPass deserves blame for not having upgraded iteration counts for all users a long time ago, and called the latest forced upgrades “a stunning indictment of the negligence on the part of LastPass.”
“That they never even notified all those with iteration counts of less than 100,000 — who are really vulnerable to brute force even with 8-character random passwords or ‘correct horse battery staple’ type passphrases — is outright negligence,” Weaver said. “I would personally advocate that nobody ever uses LastPass again: Not because they were hacked. Not because they had an architecture (unlike 1Password) that makes such hacking a problem. But because of their consistent refusal to address how they screwed up and take proactive efforts to protect their customers.”
Bax and Monahan both acknowledged that their research alone can probably never conclusively tie dozens of high-dollar crypto heists over the past year to the LastPass breach. But Bax says at this point he doesn’t see any other possible explanation.
“Some might say it’s dangerous to assert a strong connection here, but I’d say it’s dangerous to assert there isn’t one,” he said. “I was arguing with my fiance about this last night. She’s waiting for LastPass to tell her to change everything. Meanwhile, I’m telling her to do it now.”
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.
Microsoft Corp. today issued software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including multiple zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild.
Six of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning malware or miscreants could use them to install software on a vulnerable Windows system without any help from users.
Last month, Microsoft acknowledged a series of zero-day vulnerabilities in a variety of Microsoft products that were discovered and exploited in-the-wild attacks. They were assigned a single placeholder designation of CVE-2023-36884.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said the August patch batch addresses CVE-2023-36884, which involves bypassing the Windows Search Security feature.
“Microsoft also released ADV230003, a defense-in-depth update designed to stop the attack chain associated that leads to the exploitation of this CVE,” Narang said. “Given that this has already been successfully exploited in the wild as a zero-day, organizations should prioritize patching this vulnerability and applying the defense-in-depth update as soon as possible.”
Redmond patched another flaw that is already seeing active attacks — CVE-2023-38180 — a weakness in .NET and Visual Studio that leads to a denial-of-service condition on vulnerable servers.
“Although the attacker would need to be on the same network as the target system, this vulnerability does not require the attacker to have acquired user privileges,” on the target system, wrote Nikolas Cemerikic, cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs.
Narang said the software giant also patched six vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, including CVE-2023-21709, an elevation of privilege flaw that was assigned a CVSSv3 (threat) score of 9.8 out of a possible 10, even though Microsoft rates it as an important flaw, not critical.
“An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by conducting a brute-force attack against valid user accounts,” Narang said. “Despite the high rating, the belief is that brute-force attacks won’t be successful against accounts with strong passwords. However, if weak passwords are in use, this would make brute-force attempts more successful. The remaining five vulnerabilities range from a spoofing flaw and multiple remote code execution bugs, though the most severe of the bunch also require credentials for a valid account.”
Experts at security firm Automox called attention to CVE-2023-36910, a remote code execution bug in the Microsoft Message Queuing service that can be exploited remotely and without privileges to execute code on vulnerable Windows 10, 11 and Server 2008-2022 systems. Microsoft says it considers this vulnerability “less likely” to be exploited, and Automox says while the message queuing service is not enabled by default in Windows and is less common today, any device with it enabled is at critical risk.
Separately, Adobe has issued a critical security update for Acrobat and Reader that resolves at least 30 security vulnerabilities in those products. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild targeting these flaws. The company also issued security updates for Adobe Commerce and Adobe Dimension.
If you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a fair chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with useful tips.
Additional reading:
-SANS Internet Storm Center listing of each Microsoft vulnerability patched today, indexed by severity and affected component.
–AskWoody.com, which keeps tabs on any developing problems related to the availability or installation of these updates.
Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online.
Image: Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs.
In a report released July 12, researchers at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs called the AVrecon botnet “one of the largest botnets targeting small-office/home-office (SOHO) routers seen in recent history,” and a crime machine that has largely evaded public attention since first being spotted in mid-2021.
“The malware has been used to create residential proxy services to shroud malicious activity such as password spraying, web-traffic proxying and ad fraud,” the Lumen researchers wrote.
Malware-based anonymity networks are a major source of unwanted and malicious web traffic directed at online retailers, Internet service providers (ISPs), social networks, email providers and financial institutions. And a great many of these “proxy” networks are marketed primarily to cybercriminals seeking to anonymize their traffic by routing it through an infected PC, router or mobile device.
Proxy services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source. Proxy services also let users appear to be getting online from nearly anywhere in the world, which is useful if you’re a cybercriminal who is trying to impersonate someone from a specific place.
Spur.us, a startup that tracks proxy services, told KrebsOnSecurity that the Internet addresses Lumen tagged as the AVrecon botnet’s “Command and Control” (C2) servers all tie back to a long-running proxy service called SocksEscort.
SocksEscort[.]com, is what’s known as a “SOCKS Proxy” service. The SOCKS (or SOCKS5) protocol allows Internet users to channel their Web traffic through a proxy server, which then passes the information on to the intended destination. From a website’s perspective, the traffic of the proxy network customer appears to originate from a rented/malware-infected PC tied to a residential ISP customer, not from the proxy service customer.
The SocksEscort home page says its services are perfect for people involved in automated online activity that often results in IP addresses getting blocked or banned, such as Craigslist and dating scams, search engine results manipulation, and online surveys.
Spur tracks SocksEscort as a malware-based proxy offering, which means the machines doing the proxying of traffic for SocksEscort customers have been infected with malicious software that turns them into a traffic relay. Usually, these users have no idea their systems are compromised.
Spur says the SocksEscort proxy service requires customers to install a Windows based application in order to access a pool of more than 10,000 hacked devices worldwide.
“We created a fingerprint to identify the call-back infrastructure for SocksEscort proxies,” Spur co-founder Riley Kilmer said. “Looking at network telemetry, we were able to confirm that we saw victims talking back to it on various ports.”
According to Kilmer, AVrecon is the malware that gives SocksEscort its proxies.
“When Lumen released their report and IOCs [indicators of compromise], we queried our system for which proxy service call-back infrastructure overlapped with their IOCs,” Kilmer continued. “The second stage C2s they identified were the same as the IPs we labeled for SocksEscort.”
Lumen’s research team said the purpose of AVrecon appears to be stealing bandwidth – without impacting end-users – in order to create a residential proxy service to help launder malicious activity and avoid attracting the same level of attention from Tor-hidden services or commercially available VPN services.
“This class of cybercrime activity threat may evade detection because it is less likely than a crypto-miner to be noticed by the owner, and it is unlikely to warrant the volume of abuse complaints that internet-wide brute-forcing and DDoS-based botnets typically draw,” Lumen’s Black Lotus researchers wrote.
Preserving bandwidth for both customers and victims was a primary concern for SocksEscort in July 2022, when 911S5 — at the time the world’s largest known malware proxy network — got hacked and imploded just days after being exposed in a story here. Kilmer said after 911’s demise, SocksEscort closed its registration for several months to prevent an influx of new users from swamping the service.
Danny Adamitis, principal information security researcher at Lumen and co-author of the report on AVrecon, confirmed Kilmer’s findings, saying the C2 data matched up with what Spur was seeing for SocksEscort dating back to September 2022.
Adamitis said that on July 13 — the day after Lumen published research on AVrecon and started blocking any traffic to the malware’s control servers — the people responsible for maintaining the botnet reacted quickly to transition infected systems over to a new command and control infrastructure.
“They were clearly reacting and trying to maintain control over components of the botnet,” Adamitis said. “Probably, they wanted to keep that revenue stream going.”
Frustratingly, Lumen was not able to determine how the SOHO devices were being infected with AVrecon. Some possible avenues of infection include exploiting weak or default administrative credentials on routers, and outdated, insecure firmware that has known, exploitable security vulnerabilities.
KrebsOnSecurity briefly visited SocksEscort last year and promised a follow-up on the history and possible identity of its proprietors. A review of the earliest posts about this service on Russian cybercrime forums suggests the 12-year-old malware proxy network is tied to a Moldovan company that also offers VPN software on the Apple Store and elsewhere.
SocksEscort began in 2009 as “super-socks[.]com,” a Russian-language service that sold access to thousands of compromised PCs that could be used to proxy traffic. Someone who picked the nicknames “SSC” and “super-socks” and email address “michvatt@gmail.com” registered on multiple cybercrime forums and began promoting the proxy service.
According to DomainTools.com, the apparently related email address “michdomain@gmail.com” was used to register SocksEscort[.]com, super-socks[.]com, and a few other proxy-related domains, including ip-score[.]com, segate[.]org seproxysoft[.]com, and vipssc[.]us. Cached versions of both super-socks[.]com and vipssc[.]us show these sites sold the same proxy service, and both displayed the letters “SSC” prominently at the top of their homepages.
Image: Archive.org. Page translation from Russian via Google Translate.
According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the very first “SSC” identity registered on the cybercrime forums happened in 2009 at the Russian language hacker community Antichat, where SSC asked fellow forum members for help in testing the security of a website they claimed was theirs: myiptest[.]com, which promised to tell visitors whether their proxy address was included on any security or anti-spam block lists.
Myiptest[.]com is no longer responding, but a cached copy of it from Archive.org shows that for about four years it included in its HTML source a Google Analytics code of US-2665744, which was also present on more than a dozen other websites.
Most of the sites that once bore that Google tracking code are no longer online, but nearly all of them centered around services that were similar to myiptest[.]com, such as abuseipdb[.]com, bestiptest[.]com, checkdnslbl[.]com, dnsbltools[.]com and dnsblmonitor[.]com.
Each of these services were designed to help visitors quickly determine whether the Internet address they were visiting the site from was listed by any security firms as spammy, malicious or phishous. In other words, these services were designed so that proxy service users could easily tell if their rented Internet address was still safe to use for online fraud.
Another domain with the Google Analytics code US-2665744 was sscompany[.]net. An archived copy of the site says SSC stands for “Server Support Company,” which advertised outsourced solutions for technical support and server administration.
Leaked copies of the hacked Antichat forum indicate the SSC identity registered on the forum using the IP address 71.229.207.214. That same IP was used to register the nickname “Deem3n®,” a prolific poster on Antichat between 2005 and 2009 who served as a moderator on the forum.
There was a Deem3n® user on the webmaster forum Searchengines.guru whose signature in their posts says they run a popular community catering to programmers in Moldova called sysadmin[.]md, and that they were a systems administrator for sscompany[.]net.
That same Google Analytics code is also now present on the homepages of wiremo[.]co and a VPN provider called HideIPVPN[.]com.
Wiremo sells software and services to help website owners better manage their customer reviews. Wiremo’s Contact Us page lists a “Server Management LLC” in Wilmington, DE as the parent company. Server Management LLC is currently listed in Apple’s App Store as the owner of a “free” VPN app called HideIPVPN.
“The best way to secure the transmissions of your mobile device is VPN,” reads HideIPVPN’s description on the Apple Store. “Now, we provide you with an even easier way to connect to our VPN servers. We will hide your IP address, encrypt all your traffic, secure all your sensitive information (passwords, mail credit card details, etc.) form [sic] hackers on public networks.”
When asked about the company’s apparent connection to SocksEscort, Wiremo responded, “We do not control this domain and no one from our team is connected to this domain.” Wiremo did not respond when presented with the findings in this report.
[This is Part III in a series on research conducted for a recent Hulu documentary on the 2015 hack of marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com.]
In 2019, a Canadian company called Defiant Tech Inc. pleaded guilty to running LeakedSource[.]com, a service that sold access to billions of passwords and other data exposed in countless data breaches. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the owner of Defiant Tech, a 32-year-old Ontario man named Jordan Evan Bloom, was hired in late 2014 as a developer for the marital infidelity site AshleyMadison.com. Bloom resigned from AshleyMadison citing health reasons in June 2015 — less than one month before unidentified hackers stole data on 37 million users — and launched LeakedSource three months later.
Jordan Evan Bloom, posing in front of his Lamborghini.
On Jan. 15, 2018, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) charged then 27-year-old Bloom, of Thornhill, Ontario, with selling stolen personal identities online through the website LeakedSource[.]com.
LeakedSource was advertised on a number of popular cybercrime forums as a service that could help hackers break into valuable or high-profile accounts. LeakedSource also tried to pass itself off as a legal, legitimate business that was marketing to security firms and professionals.
The RCMP arrested Bloom in December 2017, and said he made approximately $250,000 selling hacked data, which included information on 37 million user accounts leaked in the 2015 Ashley Madison breach.
Subsequent press releases from the RCMP about the LeakedSource investigation omitted any mention of Bloom, and referred to the defendant only as Defiant Tech. In a legal settlement that is quintessentially Canadian, the matter was resolved in 2019 after Defiant Tech agreed to plead guilty. The RCMP declined to comment for this story.
The Impact Team, the hacker group that claimed responsibility for stealing and leaking the AshleyMadison user data, also leaked several years worth of email from then-CEO Noel Biderman. A review of those messages shows that Ashley Madison hired Jordan Evan Bloom as a PHP developer in December 2014 — even though the company understood that Bloom’s success as a programmer and businessman was tied to shady and legally murky enterprises.
Bloom’s recommendation came to Biderman via Trevor Sykes, then chief technology officer for Ashley Madison parent firm Avid Life Media (ALM). The following is an email from Sykes to Biderman dated Nov. 14, 2014:
“Greetings Noel,
“We’d like to offer Jordan Bloom the position of PHP developer reporting to Mike Morris for 75k CAD/Year. He did well on the test, but he also has a great understanding of the business side of things having run small businesses himself. This was an internal referral.”
When Biderman responded that he needed more information about the candidate, Sykes replied that Bloom was independently wealthy as a result of his forays into the shadowy world of “gold farming” — the semi-automated use of large numbers of player accounts to win some advantage that is usually related to cashing out game accounts or inventory. Gold farming is particularly prevalent in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as RuneScape and World of Warcraft.
“In his previous experience he had been doing RMT (Real Money Trading),” Sykes wrote. “This is the practice of selling virtual goods in games for real world money. This is a grey market, which is usually against the terms and services of the game companies.” Here’s the rest of his message to Biderman:
“RMT sellers traditionally have a lot of problems with chargebacks, and payment processor compliance. During my interview with him, I spent some time focusing in on this. He had to demonstrate to the processor, Paypal, at the time he had a business and technical strategy to address his charge back rate.”
“He ran this company himself, and did all the coding, including the integration with the processors,” Sykes continued in his assessment of Bloom. “Eventually he was squeezed out by Chinese gold farmers, and their ability to market with much more investment than he could. In addition the cost of ‘farming’ the virtual goods was cheaper in China to do than in North America.”
The gold farming reference is fascinating because in 2017 KrebsOnSecurity published Who Ran LeakedSource?, which examined clues suggesting that one of the administrators of LeakedSource also was the admin of abusewith[.]us, a site unabashedly dedicated to helping people hack email and online gaming accounts.
An administrator account Xerx3s on Abusewithus.
Abusewith[.]us began in September 2013 as a forum for learning and teaching how to hack accounts at Runescape, an MMORPG set in a medieval fantasy realm where players battle for kingdoms and riches.
The currency with which Runescape players buy and sell weapons, potions and other in-game items are virtual gold coins, and many of Abusewith[dot]us’s early members traded in a handful of commodities: Phishing kits and exploits that could be used to steal Runescape usernames and passwords from fellow players; virtual gold plundered from hacked accounts; and databases from hacked forums and websites related to Runescape and other online games.
That 2017 report here interviewed a Michigan man who acknowledged being administrator of Abusewith[.]us, but denied being the operator of LeakedSource. Still, the story noted that LeakedSource likely had more than one operator, and breached records show Bloom was a prolific member of Abusewith[.]us.
In an email to all employees on Dec. 1, 2014, Ashley Madison’s director of HR said Bloom graduated from York University in Toronto with a degree in theoretical physics, and that he has been an active programmer since high school.
“He’s a proprietor of a high traffic multiplayer game and developer/publisher of utilities such as PicTrace,” the HR director enthused. “He will be a great addition to the team.”
PicTrace appears to have been a service that allowed users to glean information about anyone who viewed an image hosted on the platform, such as their Internet address, browser type and version number. A copy of pictrace[.]com from Archive.org in 2012 redirects to the domain qksnap.com, which DomainTools.com says was registered to a Jordan Bloom from Thornhill, ON that same year.
The street address listed in the registration records for qksnap.com — 204 Beverley Glen Blvd — also shows up in the registration records for leakadvisor[.]com, a domain registered in 2017 just months after Canadian authorities seized the servers running LeakedSource.
Pictrace, one of Jordan Bloom’s early IT successes.
A review of passive DNS records from DomainTools indicates that in 2013 pictrace[.]com shared a server with just a handful of other domains, including Near-Reality[.]com — a popular RuneScape Private Server (RSPS) game based on the RuneScape MMORPG.
Copies of near-reality[.]com from 2013 via Archive.org show the top of the community’s homepage was retrofitted with a message saying Near Reality was no longer available due to a copyright dispute. Although the site doesn’t specify the other party to the copyright dispute, it appears Near-Reality got sued by Jagex, the owner of RuneScape.
The message goes on to say the website will no longer “encourage, facilitate, enable or condone (i) any infringement of copyright in RuneScape or any other Jagex product; nor (ii) any breach of the terms and conditions of RuneScape or any other Jagex product.”
A scene from the MMORPG RuneScape.
Near Reality also has a Facebook page that was last updated in 2019, when its owner posted a link to a news story about Defiant Tech’s guilty plea in the LeakedSource investigation. That Facebook page indicates Bloom also went by the nickname “Agentjags.”
“Just a quick PSA,” reads a post to the Near Reality Facebook page dated Jan. 21, 2018, which linked to a story about the charges against Bloom and a photo of Bloom standing in front of his lime-green Lamborghini. “Agentjags has got involved in some shady shit that may have compromised your personal details. I advise anyone who is using an old NR [Near Reality] password for anything remotely important should change it ASAP.”
By the beginning of 2016, Bloom was nowhere to be found, and was suspected of having fled his country for the Caribbean, according to the people commenting on the Near Reality Facebook page:
“Jordan aka Agentjags has gone missing,” wrote a presumed co-owner of the Facebook page. “He is supposedly hiding in St. Lucia, doing what he loved, scuba-diving. Any information to his whereabouts will be appreciated.”
KrebsOnSecurity ran the unusual nickname “AgentJags” through a search at Constella Intelligence, a commercial service that tracks breached data sets. That search returned just a few dozen results — and virtually all were accounts at various RuneScape-themed sites, including a half-dozen accounts at Abusewith[.]us.
Constella found other “AgentJags” accounts tied to the email address ownagegaming1@gmail.com. The marketing firm Apollo.io experienced a data breach several years back, and according to Apollo the email address ownagegaming1@gmail.com belongs to Jordan Bloom in Ontario.
Constella also revealed that the password frequently used by ownagegaming1@gmail.com across many sites was some variation on “niggapls,” which my 2017 report found was also the password used by the administrator of LeakedSource.
Constella discovered that the email eric.malek@rogers.com comes up when one searches for “AgentJags.” This is curious because emails leaked from Ashley Madison’s then-CEO Biderman show that Eric Malek from Toronto was the Ashley Madison employee who initially recommended Bloom for the PHP developer job.
According to DomainTools.com, Eric.Malek@rogers.com was used to register the domain devjobs.ca, which previously advertised “the most exciting developer jobs in Canada, delivered to you weekly.” Constella says eric.malek@rogers.com also had an account at Abusewith[.]us — under the nickname “Jags.”
Biderman’s email records show Eric Malek was also a PHP developer for Ashley Madison, and that he was hired into this position just a few months before Bloom — on Sept. 2, 2014. The CEO’s leaked emails show Eric Malek resigned from his developer position at Ashley Madison on June 19, 2015.
“Please note that Eric Malek has resigned from this position with Avid and his last day will be June 19th,” read a June 5, 2015 email from ALM’s HR director. “He is resigning to deal with some personal issues which include health issues. Because he is not sure how much time it will take to resolve, he is not requesting a leave of absence (his time off will be indefinite). Overall, he likes the company and plans to reach out to Trevor or I when the issues are resolved to see what is available at that time.”
A follow-up email from Biderman demanded, “want to know where he’s truly going….,” and it’s unclear whether there was friction with Malek’s departure. But ALM General Counsel Avi Weisman replied indicating that Malek probably would not sign an “Exit Acknowledgment Form” prior to leaving, and that the company had unanswered questions for Malek.
“Aneka should dig during exit interview,” Weisman wrote. “Let’s see if he balks at signing the Acknowledgment.”
Bloom’s departure notice from Ashley Madison’s HR person, dated June 23, 2015, read:
“Please note that Jordan Bloom has resigned from his position as PHP Developer with Avid. He is leaving for personal reasons. He has a neck issue that will require surgery in the upcoming months and because of his medical appointment schedule and the pain he is experiencing he can no longer commit to a full-time schedule. He may pick up contract work until he is back to 100%.”
A follow-up note to Biderman about this announcement read:
“Note that he has disclosed that he is independently wealthy so he can get by without FT work until he is on the mend. He has signed the Exit Acknowledgement Form already without issue. He also says he would consider reapplying to Avid in the future if we have opportunities available at that time.”
Perhaps Mr. Bloom hurt his neck from craning it around blind spots in his Lamborghini. Maybe it was from a bad scuba outing. Whatever the pain in Bloom’s neck was, it didn’t stop him from launching himself fully into LeakedSource[.]com, which was registered roughly one month after the Impact Team leaked data on 37 million Ashley Madison accounts.
Mr. Malek declined a request for comment. A now-deleted LinkedIn profile for Malek from December 2018 listed him as a “technical recruiter” from Toronto who also attended Mr. Bloom’s alma mater — York University. That resume did not mention Mr. Malek’s brief stint as a PHP developer at Ashley Madison.
“Developer, entrepreneur, and now technical recruiter of the most uncommon variety!” Mr. Malek’s LinkedIn profile enthused. “Are you a developer, or other technical specialist, interested in working with a recruiter who can properly understand your concerns and aspirations, technical, environmental and financial? Don’t settle for a ‘hack’; this is your career, let’s do it right! Connect with me on LinkedIn. Note: If you are not a resident of Canada/Toronto, I cannot help you.”
Mr. Bloom told KrebsOnSecurity he had no role in harming or hacking Ashley Madison. Bloom validated his identity by responding at one of the email addresses mentioned above, and agreed to field questions so long as KrebsOnSecurity agreed to publish our email conversation in full (PDF).
Bloom said Mr. Malek did recommend him for the Ashley Madison job, but that Mr. Malek also received a $5,000 referral bonus for doing so. Given Mr. Malek’s stated role as a technical recruiter, it seems likely he also recommended several other employees to Ashley Madison.
Bloom was asked whether anyone at the RCMP, Ashley Madison or any authority anywhere ever questioned him in connection with the July 2015 hack of Ashley Madison. He replied that he was called once by someone claiming to be from the Toronto Police Service asking if he knew anything about the Ashley Madison hack.
“The AM situation was not something they pursued according to the RCMP disclosure,” Bloom wrote. “Learning about the RCMP’s most advanced cyber investigative techniques and capabilities was very interesting though. I was eventually told information by a third party which included knowledge that law enforcement effectively knew who the hacker was, but didn’t have enough evidence to proceed with a case. That is the extent of my involvement with any authorities.”
As to his company’s guilty plea for operating LeakedSource, Bloom maintains that the judge at his preliminary inquiry found that even if everything the Canadian government alleged was true it would not constitute a violation of any law in Canada with respect the charges the RCMP leveled against him, which included unauthorized use of a computer and “mischief to data.”
“In Canada at the lower court level we are allowed to possess stolen information and manipulate our copies of them as we please,” Bloom said. “The judge however decided that a trial was required to determine whether any activities of mine were reckless, as the other qualifier of intentionally criminal didn’t apply. I will note here that nothing I was accused of doing would have been illegal if done in the United States of America according to their District Attorney. +1 for free speech in America vs freedom of expression in Canada.”
“Shortly after their having most of their case thrown out, the Government proposed an offer during a closed door meeting where they would drop all charges against me, provide full and complete personal immunity, and in exchange the Corporation which has since been dissolved would plead guilty,” Bloom continued. “The Corporation would also pay a modest fine.”
Bloom said he left Ashley Madison because he was bored, but he acknowledged starting LeakedSource partly in response to the Ashley Madison hack.
“I intended to leverage my gaming connections to get into security work including for other private servers such as Minecraft communities and others,” Bloom said. “After months of asking management for more interesting tasks, I became bored. Some days I had virtually nothing to do except spin in my chair so I would browse the source code for security holes to fix because I found it enjoyable.”
“I believe the decision to start LS [LeakedSource] was partly inspired by the AM hack itself, and the large number of people from a former friend group messaging me asking if XYZ person was in the leak after I revealed to them that I downloaded a copy and had the ability to browse it,” Bloom continued. “LS was never my idea – I was just a builder, and the only Canadian. In other countries it was never thought to be illegal on closer examination of their laws.”
Bloom said he still considers himself independently wealthy, and that still has the lime green Lambo. But he said he’s currently unemployed and can’t seem to land a job in what he views as his most promising career path: Information security.
“As I’m sure you’re aware, having negative media attention associated with alleged (key word) criminal activity can have a detrimental effect on employment, banking and relationships,” Bloom wrote. “I have no current interest in being a business owner, nor do I have any useful business ideas to be honest. I was and am interested in interesting Information Security/programming work but it’s too large of a risk for any business to hire someone who was formerly accused of a crime.”
If you liked this story, please consider reading the first two pieces in this series:
SEO Expert Hired and Fired by Ashley Madison Turned on Company, Promising Revenge
Top Suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison Hack Committed Suicide in 2014
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to quash 130 security bugs in its Windows operating systems and related software, including at least five flaws that are already seeing active exploitation. Meanwhile, Apple customers have their own zero-day woes again this month: On Monday, Apple issued (and then quickly pulled) an emergency update to fix a zero-day vulnerability that is being exploited on MacOS and iOS devices.
On July 10, Apple pushed a “Rapid Security Response” update to fix a code execution flaw in the Webkit browser component built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Ventura. Almost as soon as the patch went out, Apple pulled the software because it was reportedly causing problems loading certain websites. MacRumors says Apple will likely re-release the patches when the glitches have been addressed.
Launched in May, Apple’s Rapid Security Response updates are designed to address time-sensitive vulnerabilities, and this is the second month Apple has used it. July marks the sixth month this year that Apple has released updates for zero-day vulnerabilities — those that get exploited by malware or malcontents before there is an official patch available.
If you rely on Apple devices and don’t have automatic updates enabled, please take a moment to check the patch status of your various iDevices. The latest security update that includes the fix for the zero-day bug should be available in iOS/iPadOS 16.5.1, macOS 13.4.1, and Safari 16.5.2.
On the Windows side, there are at least four vulnerabilities patched this month that earned high CVSS (badness) scores and that are already being exploited in active attacks, according to Microsoft. They include CVE-2023-32049, which is a hole in Windows SmartScreen that lets malware bypass security warning prompts; and CVE-2023-35311 allows attackers to bypass security features in Microsoft Outlook.
The two other zero-day threats this month for Windows are both privilege escalation flaws. CVE-2023-32046 affects a core Windows component called MSHTML, which is used by Windows and other applications, like Office, Outlook and Skype. CVE-2023-36874 is an elevation of privilege bug in the Windows Error Reporting Service.
Many security experts expected Microsoft to address a fifth zero-day flaw — CVE-2023-36884 — a remote code execution weakness in Office and Windows.
“Surprisingly, there is no patch yet for one of the five zero-day vulnerabilities,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7. “Microsoft is actively investigating publicly disclosed vulnerability, and promises to update the advisory as soon as further guidance is available.”
Barnett notes that Microsoft links exploitation of this vulnerability with Storm-0978, the software giant’s name for a cybercriminal group based out of Russia that is identified by the broader security community as RomCom.
“Exploitation of CVE-2023-36884 may lead to installation of the eponymous RomCom trojan or other malware,” Barnett said. “[Microsoft] suggests that RomCom / Storm-0978 is operating in support of Russian intelligence operations. The same threat actor has also been associated with ransomware attacks targeting a wide array of victims.”
Microsoft’s advisory on CVE-2023-36884 is pretty sparse, but it does include a Windows registry hack that should help mitigate attacks on this vulnerability. Microsoft has also published a blog post about phishing campaigns tied to Storm-0978 and to the exploitation of this flaw.
Barnett said it’s while it’s possible that a patch will be issued as part of next month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft Office is deployed just about everywhere, and this threat actor is making waves.
“Admins should be ready for an out-of-cycle security update for CVE-2023-36884,” he said.
Microsoft also today released new details about how it plans to address the existential threat of malware that is cryptographically signed by…wait for it….Microsoft.
In late 2022, security experts at Sophos, Trend Micro and Cisco warned that ransomware criminals were using signed, malicious drivers in an attempt to evade antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.
In a blog post today, Sophos’s Andrew Brandt wrote that Sophos identified 133 malicious Windows driver files that were digitally signed since April 2021, and found 100 of those were actually signed by Microsoft. Microsoft said today it is taking steps to ensure those malicious driver files can no longer run on Windows computers.
As KrebsOnSecurity noted in last month’s story on malware signing-as-a-service, code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software.
Dan Goodin at Ars Technica contends that whatever Microsoft may be doing to keep maliciously signed drivers from running on Windows is being bypassed by hackers using open source software that is popular with video game cheaters.
“The software comes in the form of two software tools that are available on GitHub,” Goodin explained. “Cheaters use them to digitally sign malicious system drivers so they can modify video games in ways that give the player an unfair advantage. The drivers clear the considerable hurdle required for the cheat code to run inside the Windows kernel, the fortified layer of the operating system reserved for the most critical and sensitive functions.”
Meanwhile, researchers at Cisco’s Talos security team found multiple Chinese-speaking threat groups have repurposed the tools—one apparently called “HookSignTool” and the other “FuckCertVerifyTimeValidity.”
“Instead of using the kernel access for cheating, the threat actors use it to give their malware capabilities it wouldn’t otherwise have,” Goodin said.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today, check out the always-thorough Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
And as ever, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. If you encounter any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
If you operate a cybercrime business that relies on disseminating malicious software, you probably also spend a good deal of time trying to disguise or “crypt” your malware so that it appears benign to antivirus and security products. In fact, the process of “crypting” malware is sufficiently complex and time-consuming that most serious cybercrooks will outsource this critical function to a handful of trusted third parties. This story explores the history and identity behind Cryptor[.]biz, a long-running crypting service that is trusted by some of the biggest names in cybercrime.
Virtually all malware that is deployed for use in data stealing at some point needs to be crypted. This highly technical, laborious process involves iteratively altering the appearance and behavior of a malicious file until it no longer sets off alarm bells when scanned by different antivirus tools.
Experienced malware purveyors understand that if they’re not continuously crypting their malware before sending it out, then a lot more of whatever digital disease they are trying to spread is going to get flagged by security tools. In short, if you are running a cybercrime enterprise and you’re not equipped to handle this crypting process yourself, you probably need to pay someone else to do it for you.
Thanks to the high demand for reliable crypting services, there are countless cybercriminals who’ve hung out their shingles as crypting service providers. However, most of these people do not appear to be very good at what they do, because most are soon out of business.
One standout is Cryptor[.]biz. This service is actually recommended by the purveyors of the RedLine information stealer malware, which is a popular and powerful malware kit that specializes in stealing victim data and is often used to lay the groundwork for ransomware attacks. Cryptor[.]biz also has been recommended to customers of the Vidar information stealer malware family (via the malware’s Telegram support channels).
As good as Cryptor[.]biz may be at obfuscating malware, its proprietor does not appear to have done a great job covering his own tracks. The registration records for the website Cryptor[.]biz are hidden behind privacy protection services, but the site’s homepage says potential customers should register by visiting the domain crypt[.]guru, or by sending a Jabber instant message to the address “masscrypt@exploit.im.”
Crypt[.]guru’s registration records also are hidden, yet passive domain name system (DNS) records for both cryptor[.]biz and crypt[.]guru show that in 2018 the domains were forwarding incoming email to the address obelisk57@gmail.com.
Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 reports that obelisk57@gmail.com was used to register an account on the forum Blacksoftware under the nickname “Kerens.” Meanwhile, the Jabber address masscrypt@exploit.im has been associated with the user Kerens on the Russian hacking forum Exploit from 2011 to the present day.
The login page for Cryptor dot biz contains several clues about who runs the service.
The very first post by Kerens on Exploit in 2011 was a negative review of a popular crypting service that predated Cryptor[.]biz called VIP Crypt, which Kerens accused of being “shitty” and unreliable. But Intel 471 finds that after his critical review of VIP Crypt, Kerens did not post publicly on Exploit again for another four years until October 2016, when they suddenly began advertising Cryptor[.]biz.
Intel 471 found that Kerens used the email address pepyak@gmail.com, which also was used to register Kerens accounts on the Russian language hacking forums Verified and Damagelab.
Ironically, Verified has itself been hacked multiple times over the years, with its private messages and user registration details leaked online. Those records indicate the user Kerens registered on Verified in March 2009 from an Internet address in Novosibirsk, a city in the southern Siberian region of Russia.
In 2010, someone with the username Pepyak on the Russian language affiliate forum GoFuckBiz[.]com shared that they typically split their time during the year between living in Siberia (during the milder months) and Thailand (when Novosibirsk is typically -15 °C/°5F).
For example, in one conversation about the best car to buy for navigating shoddy roads, Pepyak declared, “We have shitty roads in Siberia.” In January 2010, Pepyak asked the GoFuckBiz community where one might find a good USB-based modem in Phuket, Thailand.
DomainTools.com says the email address pepyak@gmail.com was used to register 28 domain names over the years, including a now-defunct Russian automobile sales website called “autodoska[.]biz.” DomainTools shows this website was registered in 2008 to a Yuri Churnov from Sevastpol, Crimea (prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the peninsula was part of Ukraine).
The WHOIS records for autodoska[.]biz were changed in 2010 to Sergey Purtov (pepyak@gmail.com) from Yurga, a town in Russia’s Kemerovo Oblast, which is a relatively populous area in Western Siberia that is adjacent to Novosibirsk.
A satellite view of the region including Novosibirsk, Yurga and Kemerovo Oblast. Image: Google Maps.
Many of the 28 domains registered to pepyak@gmail.com have another email address in their registration records: unforgiven57@mail.ru. According to DomainTools, the Unforgiven email address was used to register roughly a dozen domains, including three that were originally registered to Keren’s email address — pepyak@gmail.com (e.g., antivirusxp09[.]com).
One of the domains registered in 2006 to the address unforgiven57@mail.ru was thelib[.]ru, which for many years was a place to download pirated e-books. DomainTools says thelib[.]ru was originally registered to a Sergey U Purtov.
Most of the two-dozen domains registered to pepyak@gmail.com shared a server at one point with a small number of other domains, including mobile-soft[.]su, which was registered to the email address spurtov@gmail.com.
CDEK, an express delivery company based in Novosibirsk, was apparently hacked at some point because cyber intelligence firm Constella Intelligence found that its database shows the email address spurtov@gmail.com was assigned to a Sergey Yurievich Purtov (Сергей Юрьевич Пуртов).
DomainTools says the same phone number in the registration records for autodoska[.]biz (+7.9235059268) was used to secure two other domains — bile[.]ru and thelibrary[.]ru, both of which were registered to a Sergey Y Purtov.
A search on the phone number 79235059268 in Skype reveals these digits belong to a “Sergey” from Novosibirsk with the now-familiar username — Pepyak.
Bringing things full circle, Constella Intelligence shows that various online accounts tied to the email address unforgiven57@mail.ru frequently relied on the somewhat unique password, “plk139t51z.” Constella says that same password was used for just a handful of other email addresses, including gumboldt@gmail.com.
Hacked customer records from CDEK show gumboldt@gmail.com was tied to a customer named Sergey Yurievich Purtov. DomainTools found that virtually all of the 15 domain names registered to gumboldt@gmail.com (including the aforementioned mobile-soft[.]su) were at one point registered to spurtov@gmail.com.
Intel 471 reports that gumboldt@gmail.com was used in 2009 to register a user by the nickname “Kolumb” on the Russian hacking forum Antichat. From Kolumb’s posts on Antichat, it seems this user was mostly interested in buying access to compromised computers inside of Russia.
Then in December 2009, Kolumb said they were in desperate need of a reliable crypting service or full-time cryptor.
“We need a person who will crypt software every day, sometimes even a couple of times a day,” Kolumb wrote on Antichat.
Mr. Purtov did not respond to requests for comment sent to any of the email addresses referenced in this report. Mail.ru responded that the email address spurtov@mail.ru is no longer active.
As KrebsOnSecurity opined on Mastodon earlier this week, it makes a lot of sense for cybersecurity researchers and law enforcement alike to focus attention on the top players in the crypting space — for several reasons. Most critically, the cybercriminals offering time-tested crypting services also tend to be among the most experienced and connected malicious coders on the planet.
Think of it this way: By definition, a crypting service scans and examines all types of malware before those new nasties are first set loose in the wild. This fact alone should make these criminal enterprises a primary target of cybersecurity firms looking to gain more timely intelligence about new malware.
Also, a review of countless posts and private messages from Pepyak and other crypting providers shows that a successful crypting service will have direct and frequent contact with some of the world’s most advanced malware authors.
In short, infiltrating or disrupting a trusted crypting service can be an excellent way to slow down or even sideline a large number of cybercrime operations all at once.
Further reading on the crypting industry:
This Service Helps Malware Authors Fix Flaws in Their Code
Antivirus is Dead: Long Live Antivirus!
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to fix dozens of security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. This month’s relatively light patch load has another added bonus for system administrators everywhere: It appears to be the first Patch Tuesday since March 2022 that isn’t marred by the active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s products.
June’s Patch Tuesday features updates to plug at least 70 security holes, and while none of these are reported by Microsoft as exploited in-the-wild yet, Redmond has flagged several in particular as “more likely to be exploited.”
Top of the list on that front is CVE-2023-29357, which is a “critical” bug in Microsoft SharePoint Server that can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker on the same network. This SharePoint flaw earned a CVSS rating of 9.8 (10.0 is the most dangerous).
“An attacker able to gain admin access to an internal SharePoint server could do a lot of harm to an organization,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “Gaining access to sensitive and privileged documents, stealing and deleting documents as part of a ransomware attack or replacing real documents with malicious copies to further infect users in the organization.”
There are at least three other vulnerabilities fixed this month that earned a collective 9.8 CVSS score, and they all concern a widely-deployed component called the Windows Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM), which is used for delivering multicast data — such as video streaming or online gaming.
Security firm Action1 says all three bugs (CVE-2023-32015, CVE-2023-32014, and CVE-2023-29363) can be exploited over the network without requiring any privileges or user interaction, and affected systems include all versions of Windows Server 2008 and later, as well as Windows 10 and later.
It wouldn’t be a proper Patch Tuesday if we also didn’t also have scary security updates for organizations still using Microsoft Exchange for email. Breen said this month’s Exchange bugs (CVE-2023-32031 and CVE-2023-28310) closely mirror the vulnerabilities identified as part of ProxyNotShell exploits, where an authenticated user in the network could exploit a vulnerability in the Exchange to gain code execution on the server.
Breen said while Microsoft’s patch notes indicate that an attacker must already have gained access to a vulnerable host in the network, this is typically achieved through social engineering attacks with spear phishing to gain initial access to a host before searching for other internal targets.
“Just because your Exchange server doesn’t have internet-facing authentication doesn’t mean it’s protected,” Breen said, noting that Microsoft says the Exchange flaws are not difficult for attackers to exploit.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software. This post is a deep dive on “Megatraffer,” a veteran Russian hacker who has practically cornered the underground market for malware focused code-signing certificates since 2015.
One of Megatraffer’s ads on an English-language cybercrime forum.
A review of Megatraffer’s posts on Russian crime forums shows this user began peddling individual stolen code-signing certs in 2015 on the Russian-language forum Exploit, and soon expanded to selling certificates for cryptographically signing applications and files designed to run in Microsoft Windows, Java, Adobe AIR, Mac and Microsoft Office.
Megatraffer explained that malware purveyors need a certificate because many antivirus products will be far more interested in unsigned software, and because signed files downloaded from the Internet don’t tend to get blocked by security features built into modern web browsers. Additionally, newer versions of Microsoft Windows will complain with a bright yellow or red alert message if users try to install a program that is not signed.
“Why do I need a certificate?” Megatraffer asked rhetorically in their Jan. 2016 sales thread on Exploit. “Antivirus software trusts signed programs more. For some types of software, a digital signature is mandatory.”
At the time, Megatraffer was selling unique code-signing certificates for $700 apiece, and charging more than twice that amount ($1,900) for an “extended validation” or EV code-signing cert, which is supposed to only come with additional identity vetting of the certificate holder. According to Megatraffer, EV certificates were a “must-have” if you wanted to sign malicious software or hardware drivers that would reliably work in newer Windows operating systems.
Part of Megatraffer’s ad. Image: Ke-la.com.
Megatraffer has continued to offer their code-signing services across more than a half-dozen other Russian-language cybercrime forums, mostly in the form of sporadically available EV and non-EV code-signing certificates from major vendors like Thawte and Comodo.
More recently, it appears Megatraffer has been working with ransomware groups to help improve the stealth of their malware. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, someone leaked several years of internal chat logs from the Conti ransomware gang, and those logs show Megatraffer was working with the group to help code-sign their malware between July and October 2020.
According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Megatraffer has been active on more than a half-dozen crime forums from September 2009 to the present day. And on most of these identities, Megatraffer has used the email address 774748@gmail.com. That same email address also is tied to two forum accounts for a user with the handle “O.R.Z.”
Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks exposed databases, finds that 774748@gmail.com was used in connection with just a handful of passwords, but most frequently the password “featar24“. Pivoting off of that password reveals a handful of email addresses, including akafitis@gmail.com.
Intel 471 shows akafitis@gmail.com was used to register another O.R.Z. user account — this one on Verified[.]ru in 2008. Prior to that, akafitis@gmail.com was used as the email address for the account “Fitis,” which was active on Exploit between September 2006 and May 2007. Constella found the password “featar24” also was used in conjunction with the email address spampage@yandex.ru, which is tied to yet another O.R.Z. account on Carder[.]su from 2008.
The email address akafitis@gmail.com was used to create a Livejournal blog profile named Fitis that has a large bear as its avatar. In November 2009, Fitis wrote, “I am the perfect criminal. My fingerprints change beyond recognition every few days. At least my laptop is sure of it.”
Fitis’s Livejournal account. Image: Archive.org.
Fitis’s real-life identity was exposed in 2010 after two of the biggest sponsors of pharmaceutical spam went to war with each other, and large volumes of internal documents, emails and chat records seized from both spam empires were leaked to this author. That protracted and public conflict formed the backdrop of my 2014 book — “Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime, from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door.”
One of the leaked documents included a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the real names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, street addresses and WebMoney addresses for dozens of top earners in Spamit — at the time the most successful pharmaceutical spam affiliate program in the Russian hacking scene and one that employed most of the top Russian botmasters.
That document shows Fitis was one of Spamit’s most prolific recruiters, bringing more than 75 affiliates to the Spamit program over several years prior to its implosion in 2010 (and earning commissions on any future sales from all 75 affiliates).
The document also says Fitis got paid using a WebMoney account that was created when its owner presented a valid Russian passport for a Konstantin Evgenievich Fetisov, born Nov. 16, 1982 and residing in Moscow. Russian motor vehicle records show two different vehicles are registered to this person at the same Moscow address.
The most interesting domain name registered to the email address spampage@yahoo.com, fittingly enough, is fitis[.]ru, which DomainTools.com says was registered in 2005 to a Konstantin E. Fetisov from Moscow.
The Wayback Machine at archive.org has a handful of mostly blank pages indexed for fitis[.]ru in its early years, but for a brief period in 2007 it appears this website was inadvertently exposing all of its file directories to the Internet.
One of the exposed files — Glavmed.html — is a general invitation to the infamous Glavmed pharmacy affiliate program, a now-defunct scheme that paid tens of millions of dollars to affiliates who advertised online pill shops mainly by hacking websites and manipulating search engine results. Glavmed was operated by the same Russian cybercriminals who ran the Spamit program.
A Google translated ad circa 2007 recruiting for the pharmacy affiliate program Glavmed, which told interested applicants to contact the ICQ number used by Fitis, a.k.a. MegaTraffer. Image: Archive.org.
Archive.org shows the fitis[.]ru webpage with the Glavmed invitation was continuously updated with new invite codes. In their message to would-be Glavmed affiliates, the program administrator asked applicants to contact them at the ICQ number 165540027, which Intel 471 found was an instant messenger address previously used by Fitis on Exploit.
The exposed files in the archived version of fitis[.]ru include source code for malicious software, lists of compromised websites used for pharmacy spam, and a handful of what are apparently personal files and photos. Among the photos is a 2007 image labeled merely “fitis.jpg,” which shows a bespectacled, bearded young man with a ponytail standing next to what appears to be a newly-married couple at a wedding ceremony.
Mr. Fetisov did not respond to requests for comment.
As a veteran organizer of affiliate programs, Fitis did not waste much time building a new moneymaking collective after Spamit closed up shop. New York City-based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint found that Megatraffer’s ICQ was the contact number for Himba[.]ru, a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) program launched in 2012 that paid handsomely for completed application forms tied to a variety of financial instruments, including consumer credit cards, insurance policies, and loans.
“Megatraffer’s entrenched presence on cybercrime forums strongly suggests that malicious means are used to source at least a portion of traffic delivered to HIMBA’s advertisers,” Flashpoint observed in a threat report on the actor.
Intel 471 finds that Himba was an active affiliate program until around May 2019, when it stopping paying its associates.
Fitis’s Himba affiliate program, circa February 2014. Image: Archive.org.
Flashpoint notes that in September 2015, Megatraffer posted a job ad on Exploit seeking experienced coders to work on browser plugins, installers and “loaders” — basically remote access trojans (RATs) that establish communication between the attacker and a compromised system.
“The actor specified that he is looking for full-time, onsite help either in his Moscow or Kiev locations,” Flashpoint wrote.
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.”
One of the crypto investment scam messages promoted in the spam campaigns on Mastodon this month.
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.
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.
Quotpw/Ahick/Edgard/ципа advertising his coding services in this Google-translated forum posting.
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.”
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.
Microsoft today released software updates to fix at least four dozen security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.
First up in May’s zero-day flaws is CVE-2023-29336, which is an “elevation of privilege” weakness in Windows which has a low attack complexity, requires low privileges, and no user interaction. However, as the SANS Internet Storm Center points out, the attack vector for this bug is local.
“Local Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are a key part of attackers’ objectives,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “Once they gain initial access they will seek administrative or SYSTEM-level permissions. This can allow the attacker to disable security tooling and deploy more attacker tools like Mimikatz that lets them move across the network and gain persistence.”
The zero-day patch that has received the most attention so far is CVE-2023-24932, which is a Secure Boot Security Feature Bypass flaw that is being actively exploited by “bootkit” malware known as “BlackLotus.” A bootkit is dangerous because it allows the attacker to load malicious software before the operating system even starts up.
According to Microsoft’s advisory, an attacker would need physical access or administrative rights to a target device, and could then install an affected boot policy. Microsoft gives this flaw a CVSS score of just 6.7, rating it as “Important.”
Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said CVE-2023-24932 deserves a considerably higher threat score.
“Microsoft warns that an attacker who already has Administrator access to an unpatched asset could exploit CVE-2023-24932 without necessarily having physical access,” Barnett said. “Therefore, the relatively low CVSSv3 base score of 6.7 isn’t necessarily a reliable metric in this case.”
Barnett said Microsoft has provided a supplementary guidance article specifically calling out the threat posed by BlackLotus malware, which loads ahead of the operating system on compromised assets, and provides attackers with an array of powerful evasion, persistence, and Command & Control (C2) techniques, including deploying malicious kernel drivers, and disabling Microsoft Defender or Bitlocker.
“Administrators should be aware that additional actions are required beyond simply applying the patches,” Barnett advised. “The patch enables the configuration options necessary for protection, but administrators must apply changes to UEFI config after patching. The attack surface is not limited to physical assets, either; Windows assets running on some VMs, including Azure assets with Secure Boot enabled, also require these extra remediation steps for protection. Rapid7 has noted in the past that enabling Secure Boot is a foundational protection against driver-based attacks. Defenders ignore this vulnerability at their peril.”
In addition to the two zero-days fixed this month, Microsoft also patched five remote code execution (RCE) flaws in Windows, two of which have notably high CVSS scores.
CVE-2023-24941 affects the Windows Network File System, and can be exploited over the network by making an unauthenticated, specially crafted request. Microsoft’s advisory also includes mitigation advice. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 9.8 – the highest of all the flaws addressed this month.
Meanwhile, CVE-2023-28283 is a critical bug in the Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute malicious code on the vulnerable device. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 8.1, but Microsoft says exploiting the flaw may be tricky and unreliable for attackers.
Another vulnerability patched this month that was disclosed publicly before today (but not yet seen exploited in the wild) is CVE-2023-29325, a weakness in Microsoft Outlook and Explorer that can be exploited by attackers to remotely install malware. Microsoft says this vulnerability can be exploited merely by viewing a specially-crafted email in the Outlook Preview Pane.
“To help protect against this vulnerability, we recommend users read email messages in plain text format,” Microsoft’s writeup on CVE-2023-29325 advises.
“If an attacker were able to exploit this vulnerability, they would gain remote access to the victim’s account, where they could deploy additional malware,” Immersive’s Breen said. “This kind of exploit will be highly sought after by e-crime and ransomware groups where, if successfully weaponized, could be used to target hundreds of organizations with very little effort.”
For more details on the updates released today, check out roundups by Action1, Automox and Qualys, If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
The U.S. government this week put a $10 million bounty on a Russian man who for the past 18 years operated Try2Check, one of the cybercrime underground’s most trusted services for checking the validity of stolen credit card data. U.S. authorities say 43-year-old Denis Kulkov‘s card-checking service made him at least $18 million, which he used to buy a Ferrari, Land Rover, and other luxury items.
Denis Kulkov, a.k.a. “Nordex,” in his Ferrari. Image: USDOJ.
Launched in 2005, Try2Check soon was processing more than a million card-checking transactions per month — charging 20 cents per transaction. Cybercriminals turned to services like this after purchasing stolen credit card data from an underground shop, with an eye toward minimizing the number of cards that are inactive by the time they are put to criminal use.
Try2Check was so reliable that it eventually became the official card-checking service for some of the underground’s most bustling crime bazaars, including Vault Market, Unicc, and Joker’s Stash. Customers of these carding shops who chose to use the shop’s built-in (but a-la-carte) card checking service from Try2Check could expect automatic refunds on any cards that were found to be inactive or canceled at the time of purchase.
Many established stolen card shops will allow customers to request refunds on dead cards based on official reports from trusted third-party checking services. But in general, the bigger shops have steered customers toward using their own white-labeled version of the Try2Check service — primarily to help minimize disputes over canceled cards.
On Wednesday, May 3, Try2Check’s websites were replaced with a domain seizure notice from the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Justice, as prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York unsealed an indictment and search warrant naming Denis Gennadievich Kulkov of Samara, Russia as the proprietor.
Try2Check’s login pages have been replaced with a seizure notice from U.S. law enforcement.
At the same time, the U.S. Department of State issued a $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Kulkov. In November 2021, the State Department began offering up to to $10 million for the name or location of any key leaders of REvil, a major Russian ransomware gang.
As noted in the Secret Service’s criminal complaint (PDF), the Try2Check service was first advertised on the closely-guarded Russian cybercrime forum Mazafaka, by someone using the handle “KreenJo.” That handle used the same ICQ instant messenger account number (555724) as a Mazafaka denizen named “Nordex.”
In February 2005, Nordex posted to Mazafaka that he was in the market for hacked bank accounts, and offered 50 percent of the take. He asked interested partners to contact him at the ICQ number 228427661 or at the email address polkas@bk.ru. As the government noted in its search warrant, Nordex exchanged messages with forum users at the time identifying himself as a then-24-year-old “Denis” from Samara, RU.
In 2017, U.S. law enforcement seized the cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, and the Secret Service said those records show that a Denis Kulkov from Samara supplied the username “Nordexin,” email address nordexin@ya.ru, and an address in Samara.
Investigators had already found Instagram accounts where Kulkov posted pictures of his Ferrari and his family. Authorities were able to identify that Kulkov had an iCloud account tied to the address nordexin@icloud.com, and upon subpoenaing that found passport photos of Kulkov, and well as more photos of his family and pricey cars.
Like many other top cybercriminals based in Russia or in countries with favorable relations to the Kremlin, the proprietor of Try2Check was not particularly difficult to link to a real-life identity. In Kulkov’s case, it no doubt was critical to U.S. investigators that they had access to a wealth of personal information tied to a cryptocurrency exchange Kulkov had used.
However, the link between Kulkov and Try2Check can be made — ironically — based on records that have been plundered by hackers and published online over the years — including Russian email services, Russian government records, and hacked cybercrime forums.
Kulkov posing with his passport, in a photo authorities obtained by subpoenaing his iCloud account.
According to cybersecurity firm Constella Intelligence, the address polkas@bk.ru was used to register an account with the username “Nordex” at bankir[.]com, a now defunct news website that was almost standard reading for Russian speakers interested in news about various Russian financial markets.
Nordex appears to have been a finance nerd. In his early days on the forums, Nordex posted several long threads on his views about the Russian stock market and mutual fund investments.
That Bankir account was registered from the Internet address 193.27.237.66 in Samara, Russia, and included Nordex’s date of birth as April 8, 1980, as well as their ICQ number (228427661).
Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 found that Internet address also was used to register the account “Nordex” on the Russian hacking forum Exploit back in 2006.
Constella tracked another Bankir[.]com account created from that same Internet address under the username “Polkas.” This account had the same date of birth as Nordex, but a different email address: nordia@yandex.ru. This and other “nordia@” emails shared a password: “anna59.”
Nordia@yandex.ru shares several passwords with nordia@list.ru, which Constella says was used to create an account at a religious website for an Anna Kulikova from Samara. At the Russian home furnishing store Westwing.ru, Ms. Kulikova listed her full name as Anna Vnrhoturkina Kulikova, and her address as 29 Kommunistrecheskya St., Apt. 110.
A search on that address in Constella brings up a record for an Anna Denis Vnrhoturkina Kulkov, and the phone number 879608229389.
Russian vehicle registration records have also been hacked and leaked online over the years. Those records show that Anna’s Apt 110 address is tied to a Denis Gennadyvich Kulkov, born April 8, 1980.
The vehicle Kolkov registered in 2015 at that address was a 2010 Ferrari Italia, with the license plate number K022YB190. The phone number associated with this record — 79608229389 — is exactly like Anna’s, only minus the (mis?)leading “8”. That number also is tied to a now-defunct Facebook account, and to the email addresses nordexin@ya.ru and nordexin@icloud.com.
Kulkov’s Ferrari has been photographed numerous times over the years by Russian car aficionados, including this one with the driver’s face redacted by the photographer:
The Ferrari owned by Denis Kulkov, spotted in Moscow in 2016. Image: Migalki.net.
As the title of this story suggests, the hard part for Western law enforcement isn’t identifying the Russian cybercriminals who are major players in the scene. Rather, it’s finding creative ways to capture high-value suspects if and when they do leave the protection that Russia generally extends to domestic cybercriminals within its borders who do not also harm Russian companies or consumers, or interfere with state interests.
But Russia’s war against Ukraine has caused major fault lines to appear in the cybercrime underground: Cybercriminal syndicates that previously straddled Russia and Ukraine with ease were forced to reevaluate many comrades who were suddenly working for The Other Side.
Many cybercriminals who operated with impunity from Russia and Ukraine prior to the war chose to flee those countries following the invasion, presenting international law enforcement agencies with rare opportunities to catch most-wanted cybercrooks. One of those was Mark Sokolovsky, a 26-year-old Ukrainian man who operated the popular “Raccoon” malware-as-a-service offering; Sokolovsky was apprehended in March 2022 after fleeing Ukraine’s mandatory military service orders.
Also nabbed on the lam last year was Vyacheslav “Tank” Penchukov, a senior Ukrainian member of a transnational cybercrime group that stole tens of millions of dollars over nearly a decade from countless hacked businesses. Penchukov was arrested after leaving Ukraine to meet up with his wife in Switzerland.
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.
The proxy lookup page inside the malware-based anonymity service Faceless. Image: spur.us.
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.
Notices posted for Faceless users, advertising an email flooding service and soliciting zero-day vulnerabilities in Internet of Things devices.
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.'”
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.
MrMurza’s Faceless advertised on the Russian-language cybercrime forum ProCrd. Image: Darkbeast/Ke-la.com.
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.
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.
A mind map simplifying the research detailed here.
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.
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.
Microsoft today released software updates to plug 100 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day vulnerability that is already being used in active attacks. Not to be outdone, Apple has released a set of important updates addressing two zero-day vulnerabilities that are being used to attack iPhones, iPads and Macs.
On April 7, Apple issued emergency security updates to fix two weaknesses that are being actively exploited, including CVE-2023-28206, which can be exploited by apps to seize control over a device. CVE-2023-28205 can be used by a malicious or hacked website to install code.
Both vulnerabilities are addressed in iOS/iPadOS 16.4.1, iOS 15.7.5, and macOS 12.6.5 and 11.7.6. If you use Apple devices and you don’t have automatic updates enabled (they are on by default), you should probably take care of that soon as detailed instructions on how to attack CVE-2023-28206 are now public.
Microsoft’s bevy of 100 security updates released today include CVE-2023-28252, which is a weakness in Windows that Redmond says is under active attack. The vulnerability is in the Windows Common Log System File System (CLFS) driver, a core Windows component that was the source of attacks targeting a different zero-day vulnerability in February 2023.
“If it seems familiar, that’s because there was a similar 0-day patched in the same component just two months ago,” said Dustin Childs at the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative. “To me, that implies the original fix was insufficient and attackers have found a method to bypass that fix. As in February, there is no information about how widespread these attacks may be. This type of exploit is typically paired with a code execution bug to spread malware or ransomware.”
According to the security firm Qualys, this vulnerability has been leveraged by cyber criminals to deploy Nokoyawa ransomware.
“This is a relatively new strain for which there is some open source intel to suggest that it is possibly related to Hive ransomware – one of the most notable ransomware families of 2021 and linked to breaches of over 300+ organizations in a matter of just a few months,” said Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys.
Jogi said while it is still unclear which exact threat actor is targeting CVE-2023-28252, targets have been observed in South and North America, regions across Asia and at organizations in the Middle East.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that CVE-2023-28252 is also the second CLFS zero-day disclosed to Microsoft by researchers from Mandiant and DBAPPSecurity (CVE-2022-37969), though it is unclear if both of these discoveries are related to the same attacker.
Seven of the 100 vulnerabilities Microsoft fixed today are rated “Critical,” meaning they can be used to install malicious code with no help from the user. Ninety of the flaws earned Redmond’s slightly less-dire “Important” label, which refers to weaknesses that can be used to undermine the security of the system but which may require some amount of user interaction.
Narang said Microsoft has rated nearly 90% of this month’s vulnerabilities as “Exploitation Less Likely,” while just 9.3% of flaws were rated as “Exploitation More Likely.” Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs zeroed in on several notable flaws in that 9.3%, including CVE-2023-28231, a remote code execution vulnerability in a core Windows network process (DHCP) with a CVSS score of 8.8.
“‘Exploitation more likely’ means it’s not being actively exploited but adversaries may look to try and weaponize this one,” Breen said. “Micorosft does note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to have already gained initial access to the network. This could be via social engineering, spear phishing attacks, or exploitation of other services.”
Breen also called attention to CVE-2023-28220 and CVE-2023-28219 — a pair of remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting Windows Remote Access Servers (RAS) that also earned Microsoft’s “exploitation more likely” label.
“An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted connection request to a RAS server, which could lead to remote code execution,” Breen said. While not standard in all organizations, RAS servers typically have direct access from the Internet where most users and services are connected. This makes it extremely enticing for attackers as they don’t need to socially engineer their way into an organization. They can simply scan the internet for RAS servers and automate the exploitation of vulnerable devices.”
For more details on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
Several domain names tied to Genesis Market, a bustling cybercrime store that sold access to passwords and other data stolen from millions of computers infected with malicious software, were seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today. The domain seizures coincided with more than a hundred arrests in the United States and abroad targeting those who allegedly operated the service, as well as suppliers who continuously fed Genesis Market with freshly-stolen data.
Several websites tied to the cybercrime store Genesis Market had their homepages changed today to this seizure notice.
Active since 2018, Genesis Market’s slogan was, “Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints.” Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stolen credentials.
But earlier today, multiple domains associated with Genesis had their homepages replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI, which said the domains were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
Update, April 5, 11:40 a.m. ET: The U.S. Department of Justice just released a statement on its investigation into Genesis Market. In a press briefing this morning, FBI and DOJ officials said the international law enforcement investigation involved 14 countries and resulted in 400 law enforcement actions, including 119 arrests and 208 searches and interviews worldwide. The FBI confirmed that some American suspects are among those arrested, although officials declined to share more details on the arrests.
The DOJ said investigators were able to access the user database for Genesis Market, and found the invite-only service had more than 59,000 registered users. The database contained the purchase and activity history on all users, which the feds say helped them uncover the true identities of many users.
Original story: But sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada and across Europe are currently serving arrest warrants on dozens of individuals thought to support Genesis, either by maintaining the site or selling the service bot logs from infected systems.
The seizure notice includes the seals of law enforcement entities from several countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
When Genesis customers purchase a bot, they’re purchasing the ability to have all of the victim’s authentication cookies loaded into their browser, so that online accounts belonging to that victim can be accessed without the need of a password, and in some cases without multi-factor authentication.
“You can buy a bot with a real fingerprint, access to e-mail, social networks, bank accounts, payment systems!,” a cybercrime forum ad for Genesis enthused. “You also get all previous digital life (history) of the bot – most services won’t even ask for login and password and identify you as their returning customer. Purchasing a bot kit with the fingerprint, cookies and accesses, you become the unique user of all his or her services and other web-sites. The other use of our kit of real fingerprints is to cover-up the traces of your real internet activity.”
The Genesis Store had more than 450,000 bots for sale as of Mar. 21, 2023. Image: KrebsOnSecurity.
The pricing for Genesis bots ranged quite a bit, but in general bots with large amounts of passwords and authentication cookies — or those with access to specific financial websites such as PayPal and Coinbase — tended to fetch far higher prices.
New York based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint says that in addition to containing a large number of resources, the most expensive bots overwhelmingly seem to have access to accounts that are easy to monetize.
“The high incidence of Google and Facebook is expected, as they are such widely used platforms,” Flashpoint noted in an analysis of Genesis Market, observing that all ten of the ten most expensive bots at the time included Coinbase credentials.
Genesis Market has introduced a number of cybercriminal innovations throughout its existence. Probably the best example is Genesis Security, a custom Web browser plugin which can load a Genesis bot profile so that the browser mimics virtually every important aspect of the victim’s device, from screen size and refresh rate to the unique user agent string tied to the victim’s web browser.
Flashpoint said the administrators of Genesis Market claim they are a team of specialists with “extensive experience in the field of systems metrics.” They say they developed the Genesis Security software by analyzing the top forty-seven browser fingerprinting and tracking systems, as well as those utilized by 283 different banking and payment systems.
Cybersecurity experts say Genesis and a handful of other bot shops are also popular among cybercriminals who work to identify and purchase bots inside corporate networks, and then turn around and resell that access to ransomware gangs.
Michael Debolt, chief intelligence officer for Intel 471, said so-called “network access brokers” will scour automated bot shops for high value targets, and then resell them for a bigger profit.
“From ‘used’ or ‘processed’ logs — it is actually quite common for the same log to be used by multiple different actors who are all using it for different purposes – for instance, some actors are only interested in crypto wallet or banking credentials so they bypass credentials that network access brokers are interested in,” Debolt said. “These network access brokers buy these ‘used’ logs for very cheap (or sometimes for free) and search for big fish targets from there.”
In June 2021, hackers who broke into and stole a wealth of source code and game data from the computer gaming giant EA told Motherboard they gained access by purchasing a $10 bot from Genesis Market that let them log into a company Slack account.
One feature of Genesis that sets it apart from other bot shops is that customers can retain access to infected systems in real-time, so that if the rightful owner of an infected system creates a new account online, those new credentials will get stolen and displayed in the web-based panel of the Genesis customer who purchased that bot.
“While some infostealers are designed to remove themselves after execution, others create persistent access,” reads a March 2023 report from cybersecurity firm SpyCloud. “That means bad actors have access to the current data for as long as the device remains infected, even if the user changes passwords.”
SpyCloud says Genesis even advertises its commitment to keep the stolen data and the compromised systems’ fingerprints up to date.
“According to our research, Genesis Market had more than 430,000 stolen identities for sale as of early last year – and there are many other marketplaces like this one,” the SpyCloud report concludes.
It appears this week’s action targeted only the clear web versions of Genesis Market, and that the store is still operating on a dark web address that is only reachable through the Tor network. In today’s press briefing, DOJ officials said their investigation is ongoing, and that actions taken already have allowed them to disrupt Genesis in a way that may not be readily apparent.
In a blog post today, security firm Trellix said it was approached by the Dutch Police, who were seeking assistance with the analysis and detection of the malicious files linked to Genesis Market.
“The primary goal was to render the market’s scripts and binaries useless,” Trellix researchers wrote.
As described in the Trellix blog, a major part of this effort against Genesis Market involves targeting its suppliers, or cybercriminals who are constantly feeding the market with freshly-stolen bot data. The company says Genesis partnered with multiple cybercriminals responsible for selling, distributing and maintaining different strains of infostealer malware, including malware families such as Raccoon Stealer.
“Over the years, Genesis Market has worked with a large variety of malware families to infect victims, where their info stealing scripts were used to steal information, which was used to populate the Genesis Market store,” the Trellix researchers continued. “It comes as no surprise that the malware families linked to Genesis Market belong to the usual suspects of common info-stealers, like AZORult, Raccoon, Redline and DanaBot. In February 2023, Genesis Market started to actively recruit sellers. We believe with a moderate level of confidence that this was done to keep up with the growing demand of their users.”
How does one’s computer become a bot in one of these fraud networks? Infostealers are continuously mass-deployed via several methods, including malicious attachments in email; manipulating search engine results for popular software titles; and malware that is secretly attached to legitimate software made available for download via software crack websites and file-sharing networks.
John Fokker, head of threat intelligence at Trellix, told KrebsOnSecurity that the Dutch Police tracked down several people whose data was for sale on Genesis Market, and discovered that the victims had installed infostealer malware that was bundled with pirated software.
The Dutch Police have stood up a website that lets visitors check whether their information was part of the stolen data for sale on Genesis. Troy Hunt‘s Have I Been Pwned website is also offering a lookup service based on data seized by the FBI.
Ruben van Well, team leader of the Dutch police cybercrime unit in Rotterdam, said more than 800,000 visitors have already checked their website, and that more than 2,000 of those visitors were alerted to active infostealer malware infections.
Van Well said Dutch authorities executed at least 17 arrests in connection with the investigation so far. He added that while the cybercriminals running Genesis Market promised their customers that user account security was a high priority, the service stored all of its data in plain text.
“If users would say can you please delete my account, they’d do it, but we can still see in the logs that they asked for that,” van Well said. “Genesis Market was not very good at protecting the security of its users, which made a mess for them but it’s been great for law enforcement.”
According to the Dutch Police, Microsoft this morning shipped an update to supported Windows computers that can remove infections from infostealer malware families associated with Genesis Market.
The Dutch computer security firm Computest worked with Trellix and the Dutch Police to analyze the Genesis Market malware. Their highly technical deep-dive is available here.
This is a developing story. Any updates will be added with notice and timestamp here.
Apr. 5, 11:00 am ET: Added statement from Justice Department, and background from a press briefing this morning.
Apr. 5, 12:24 pm ET: Added perspective from Trellix, and context from DOJ officials.
Apr. 5, 1:27 pm ET: Added links to lookup services by the Dutch Police and Troy Hunt.
The Biden administration today issued its vision for beefing up the nation’s collective cybersecurity posture, including calls for legislation establishing liability for software products and services that are sold with little regard for security. The White House’s new national cybersecurity strategy also envisions a more active role by cloud providers and the U.S. military in disrupting cybercriminal infrastructure, and it names China as the single biggest cyber threat to U.S. interests.
The strategy says the White House will work with Congress and the private sector to develop legislation that would prevent companies from disavowing responsibility for the security of their software products or services.
Coupled with this stick would be a carrot: An as-yet-undefined “safe harbor framework” that would lay out what these companies could do to demonstrate that they are making cybersecurity a central concern of their design and operations.
“Any such legislation should prevent manufacturers and software publishers with market power from fully disclaiming liability by contract, and establish higher standards of care for software in specific high-risk scenarios,” the strategy explains. “To begin to shape standards of care for secure software development, the Administration will drive the development of an adaptable safe harbor framework to shield from liability companies that securely develop and maintain their software products and services.”
Brian Fox, chief technology officer and founder of the software supply chain security firm Sonatype, called the software liability push a landmark moment for the industry.
“Market forces are leading to a race to the bottom in certain industries, while contract law allows software vendors of all kinds to shield themselves from liability,” Fox said. “Regulations for other industries went through a similar transformation, and we saw a positive result — there’s now an expectation of appropriate due care, and accountability for those who fail to comply. Establishing the concept of safe harbors allows the industry to mature incrementally, leveling up security best practices in order to retain a liability shield, versus calling for sweeping reform and unrealistic outcomes as previous regulatory attempts have.”
In 2012 (approximately three national cyber strategies ago), then director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander made headlines when he remarked that years of successful cyber espionage campaigns from Chinese state-sponsored hackers represented “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
The document released today says the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “now presents the broadest, most active, and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks,” and says China is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”
Many of the U.S. government’s efforts to restrain China’s technology prowess involve ongoing initiatives like the CHIPS Act, a new law signed by President Biden last year that sets aside more than $50 billion to expand U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and research and to make the U.S. less dependent on foreign suppliers; the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative; and the National Strategy to Secure 5G.
As the maker of most consumer gizmos with a computer chip inside, China is also the source of an incredible number of low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are not only poorly secured, but are probably more accurately described as insecure by design.
The Biden administration said it would continue its previously announced plans to develop a system of labeling that could be applied to various IoT products and give consumers some idea of how secure the products may be. But it remains unclear how those labels might apply to products made by companies outside of the United States.
One could convincingly make the case that the world has witnessed yet another historic transfer of wealth and trade secrets over the past decade — in the form of ransomware and data ransom attacks by Russia-based cybercriminal syndicates, as well as Russian intelligence agency operations like the U.S. government-wide Solar Winds compromise.
On the ransomware front, the White House strategy seems to focus heavily on building the capability to disrupt the digital infrastructure used by adversaries that are threatening vital U.S. cyber interests. The document points to the 2021 takedown of the Emotet botnet — a cybercrime machine that was heavily used by multiple Russian ransomware groups — as a model for this activity, but says those disruptive operations need to happen faster and more often.
To that end, the Biden administration says it will expand the capacity of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), the primary federal agency for coordinating cyber threat investigations across law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense.
“To increase the volume and speed of these integrated disruption campaigns, the Federal Government must further develop technological and organizational platforms that enable continuous, coordinated operations,” the strategy observes. “The NCIJTF will expand its capacity to coordinate takedown and disruption campaigns with greater speed, scale, and frequency. Similarly, DoD and the Intelligence Community are committed to bringing to bear their full range of complementary authorities to disruption campaigns.”
The strategy anticipates the U.S. government working more closely with cloud and other Internet infrastructure providers to quickly identify malicious use of U.S.-based infrastructure, share reports of malicious use with the government, and make it easier for victims to report abuse of these systems.
“Given the interest of the cybersecurity community and digital infrastructure owners and operators in continuing this approach, we must sustain and expand upon this model so that collaborative disruption operations can be carried out on a continuous basis,” the strategy argues. “Threat specific collaboration should take the form of nimble, temporary cells, comprised of a small number of trusted operators, hosted and supported by a relevant hub. Using virtual collaboration platforms, members of the cell would share information bidirectionally and work rapidly to disrupt adversaries.”
But here, again, there is a carrot-and-stick approach: The administration said it is taking steps to implement Executive Order (EO) 13984 –issued by the Trump administration in January 2021 — which requires cloud providers to verify the identity of foreign persons using their services.
“All service providers must make reasonable attempts to secure the use of their infrastructure against abuse or other criminal behavior,” the strategy states. “The Administration will prioritize adoption and enforcement of a risk-based approach to cybersecurity across Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers that addresses known methods and indicators of malicious activity including through implementation of EO 13984.”
Ted Schlein, founding partner of the cybersecurity venture capital firm Ballistic Ventures, said how this gets implemented will determine whether it can be effective.
“Adversaries know the NSA, which is the elite portion of the nation’s cyber defense, cannot monitor U.S.-based infrastructure, so they just use U.S.-based cloud infrastructure to perpetrate their attacks,” Schlein said. “We have to fix this. I believe some of this section is a bit pollyannaish, as it assumes a bad actor with a desire to do a bad thing will self-identify themselves, as the major recommendation here is around KYC (‘know your customer’).”
One brief but interesting section of the strategy titled “Explore a Federal Cyber Insurance Backdrop” contemplates the government’s liability and response to a too-big-to-fail scenario or “catastrophic cyber incident.”
“We will explore how the government can stabilize insurance markets against catastrophic risk to drive better cybersecurity practices and to provide market certainty when catastrophic events do occur,” the strategy reads.
When the Bush administration released the first U.S. national cybersecurity strategy 20 years ago after the 9/11 attacks, the popular term for that same scenario was a “digital Pearl Harbor,” and there was a great deal of talk then about how the cyber insurance market would soon help companies shore up their cybersecurity practices.
In the wake of countless ransomware intrusions, many companies now hold cybersecurity insurance to help cover the considerable costs of responding to such intrusions. Leaving aside the question of whether insurance coverage has helped companies improve security, what happens if every one of these companies has to make a claim at the same time?
The notion of a Digital Pearl Harbor incident struck many experts at the time as a hyperbolic justification for expanding the government’s digital surveillance capabilities, and an overstatement of the capabilities of our adversaries. But back in 2003, most of the world’s companies didn’t host their entire business in the cloud.
Today, nobody questions the capabilities, goals and outcomes of dozens of nation-state level cyber adversaries. And these days, a catastrophic cyber incident could be little more than an extended, simultaneous outage at multiple cloud providers.
The full national cybersecurity strategy is available from the White House website (PDF).
Image: Shutterstock.com
Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device.
The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at “SIM-swapping,” which involves temporarily seizing control over a target’s mobile phone number.
Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number.
All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities.
Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief “Tmobile up!” or “Tmo up!” message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber.
The information required from the customer of the SIM-swapping service includes the target’s phone number, and the serial number tied to the new SIM card that will be used to receive text messages and phone calls from the hijacked phone number.
Initially, the goal of this project was to count how many times each entity claimed access to T-Mobile throughout 2022, by cataloging the various “Tmo up!” posts from each day and working backwards from Dec. 31, 2022.
But by the time we got to claims made in the middle of May 2022, completing the rest of the year’s timeline seemed unnecessary. The tally shows that in the last seven-and-a-half months of 2022, these groups collectively made SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile on 104 separate days — often with multiple groups claiming access on the same days.
The 104 days in the latter half of 2022 in which different known SIM-swapping groups claimed access to T-Mobile employee tools.
KrebsOnSecurity shared a large amount of data gathered for this story with T-Mobile. The company declined to confirm or deny any of these claimed intrusions. But in a written statement, T-Mobile said this type of activity affects the entire wireless industry.
“And we are constantly working to fight against it,” the statement reads. “We have continued to drive enhancements that further protect against unauthorized access, including enhancing multi-factor authentication controls, hardening environments, limiting access to data, apps or services, and more. We are also focused on gathering threat intelligence data, like what you have shared, to help further strengthen these ongoing efforts.”
While it is true that each of these cybercriminal actors periodically offer SIM-swapping services for other mobile phone providers — including AT&T, Verizon and smaller carriers — those solicitations appear far less frequently in these group chats than T-Mobile swap offers. And when those offers do materialize, they are considerably more expensive.
The prices advertised for a SIM-swap against T-Mobile customers in the latter half of 2022 ranged between USD $1,000 and $1,500, while SIM-swaps offered against AT&T and Verizon customers often cost well more than twice that amount.
To be clear, KrebsOnSecurity is not aware of specific SIM-swapping incidents tied to any of these breach claims. However, the vast majority of advertisements for SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile tracked in this story had two things in common that set them apart from random SIM-swapping ads on Telegram.
First, they included an offer to use a mutually trusted “middleman” or escrow provider for the transaction (to protect either party from getting scammed). More importantly, the cybercriminal handles that were posting ads for SIM-swapping opportunities from these groups generally did so on a daily or near-daily basis — often teasing their upcoming swap events in the hours before posting a “Tmo up!” message announcement.
In other words, if the crooks offering these SIM-swapping services were ripping off their customers or claiming to have access that they didn’t, this would be almost immediately obvious from the responses of the more seasoned and serious cybercriminals in the same chat channel.
There are plenty of people on Telegram claiming to have SIM-swap access at major telecommunications firms, but a great many such offers are simply four-figure scams, and any pretenders on this front are soon identified and banned (if not worse).
One of the groups that reliably posted “Tmo up!” messages to announce SIM-swap availability against T-Mobile customers also reliably posted “Tmo down!” follow-up messages announcing exactly when their claimed access to T-Mobile employee tools was discovered and revoked by the mobile giant.
A review of the timestamps associated with this group’s incessant “Tmo up” and “Tmo down” posts indicates that while their claimed access to employee tools usually lasted less than an hour, in some cases that access apparently went undiscovered for several hours or even days.
How could these SIM-swapping groups be gaining access to T-Mobile’s network as frequently as they claim? Peppered throughout the daily chit-chat on their Telegram channels are solicitations for people urgently needed to serve as “callers,” or those who can be hired to social engineer employees over the phone into navigating to a phishing website and entering their employee credentials.
Allison Nixon is chief research officer for the New York City-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon said these SIM-swapping groups will typically call employees on their mobile devices, pretend to be someone from the company’s IT department, and then try to get the person on the other end of the line to visit a phishing website that mimics the company’s employee login page.
Nixon argues that many people in the security community tend to discount the threat from voice phishing attacks as somehow “low tech” and “low probability” threats.
“I see it as not low-tech at all, because there are a lot of moving parts to phishing these days,” Nixon said. “You have the caller who has the employee on the line, and the person operating the phish kit who needs to spin it up and down fast enough so that it doesn’t get flagged by security companies. Then they have to get the employee on that phishing site and steal their credentials.”
In addition, she said, often there will be yet another co-conspirator whose job it is to use the stolen credentials and log into employee tools. That person may also need to figure out how to make their device pass “posture checks,” a form of device authentication that some companies use to verify that each login is coming only from employer-issued phones or laptops.
For aspiring criminals with little experience in scam calling, there are plenty of sample call transcripts available on these Telegram chat channels that walk one through how to impersonate an IT technician at the targeted company — and how to respond to pushback or skepticism from the employee. Here’s a snippet from one such tutorial that appeared recently in one of the SIM-swapping channels:
“Hello this is James calling from Metro IT department, how’s your day today?”
(yea im doing good, how r u)
i’m doing great, thank you for asking
i’m calling in regards to a ticket we got last week from you guys, saying you guys were having issues with the network connectivity which also interfered with [Microsoft] Edge, not letting you sign in or disconnecting you randomly. We haven’t received any updates to this ticket ever since it was created so that’s why I’m calling in just to see if there’s still an issue or not….”
The TMO UP data referenced above, combined with comments from the SIM-swappers themselves, indicate that while many of their claimed accesses to T-Mobile tools in the middle of 2022 lasted hours on end, both the frequency and duration of these events began to steadily decrease as the year wore on.
T-Mobile declined to discuss what it may have done to combat these apparent intrusions last year. However, one of the groups began to complain loudly in late October 2022 that T-Mobile must have been doing something that was causing their phished access to employee tools to die very soon after they obtained it.
One group even remarked that they suspected T-Mobile’s security team had begun monitoring their chats.
Indeed, the timestamps associated with one group’s TMO UP/TMO DOWN notices show that their claimed access was often limited to less than 15 minutes throughout November and December of 2022.
Whatever the reason, the calendar graphic above clearly shows that the frequency of claimed access to T-Mobile decreased significantly across all three SIM-swapping groups in the waning weeks of 2022.
T-Mobile US reported revenues of nearly $80 billion last year. It currently employs more than 71,000 people in the United States, any one of whom can be a target for these phishers.
T-Mobile declined to answer questions about what it may be doing to beef up employee authentication. But Nicholas Weaver, a researcher and lecturer at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, said T-Mobile and all the major wireless providers should be requiring employees to use physical security keys for that second factor when logging into company resources.
A U2F device made by Yubikey.
“These breaches should not happen,” Weaver said. “Because T-Mobile should have long ago issued all employees security keys and switched to security keys for the second factor. And because security keys provably block this style of attack.”
The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB key and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.
The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.
Nixon said one confounding aspect of SIM-swapping is that these criminal groups tend to recruit teenagers to do their dirty work.
“A huge reason this problem has been allowed to spiral out of control is because children play such a prominent role in this form of breach,” Nixon said.
Nixon said SIM-swapping groups often advertise low-level jobs on places like Roblox and Minecraft, online games that are extremely popular with young adolescent males.
“Statistically speaking, that kind of recruiting is going to produce a lot of people who are underage,” she said. “They recruit children because they’re naive, you can get more out of them, and they have legal protections that other people over 18 don’t have.”
For example, she said, even when underage SIM-swappers are arrested, the offenders tend to go right back to committing the same crimes as soon as they’re released.
In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that a “bad actor” stole records on roughly 37 million current customers, including their name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, and T-Mobile account number.
In August 2021, T-Mobile acknowledged that hackers made off with the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license/ID information on more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. That breach came to light after a hacker began selling the records on a cybercrime forum.
In the shadow of such mega-breaches, any damage from the continuous attacks by these SIM-swapping groups can seem insignificant by comparison. But Nixon says it’s a mistake to dismiss SIM-swapping as a low volume problem.
“Logistically, you may only be able to get a few dozen or a hundred SIM-swaps in a day, but you can pick any customer you want across their entire customer base,” she said. “Just because a targeted account takeover is low volume doesn’t mean it’s low risk. These guys have crews that go and identify people who are high net worth individuals and who have a lot to lose.”
Nixon said another aspect of SIM-swapping that causes cybersecurity defenders to dismiss the threat from these groups is the perception that they are full of low-skilled “script kiddies,” a derisive term used to describe novice hackers who rely mainly on point-and-click hacking tools.
“They underestimate these actors and say this person isn’t technically sophisticated,” she said. “But if you’re rolling around in millions worth of stolen crypto currency, you can buy that sophistication. I know for a fact some of these compromises were at the hands of these ‘script kiddies,’ but they’re not ripping off other people’s scripts so much as hiring people to make scripts for them. And they don’t care what gets the job done, as long as they get to steal the money.”
Web hosting giant GoDaddy made headlines this month when it disclosed that a multi-year breach allowed intruders to steal company source code, siphon customer and employee login credentials, and foist malware on customer websites. Media coverage understandably focused on GoDaddy’s admission that it suffered three different cyberattacks over as many years at the hands of the same hacking group. But it’s worth revisiting how this group typically got in to targeted companies: By calling employees and tricking them into navigating to a phishing website.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GoDaddy said it determined that the same “sophisticated threat actor group” was responsible for three separate intrusions, including:
-March 2020: A spear-phishing attack on a GoDaddy employee compromised the hosting login credentials of approximately 28,000 GoDaddy customers, as well as login credentials for a small number employees;
-November 2021: A compromised GoDaddy password let attackers steal source code and information tied to 1.2 million customers, including website administrator passwords, sFTP credentials, and private SSL keys;
-December 2022: Hackers gained access to and installed malware on GoDaddy’s cPanel hosting servers that “intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.”
“Based on our investigation, we believe these incidents are part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group that, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained pieces of code related to some services within GoDaddy,” the company stated in its SEC filing.
What else do we know about the cause of these incidents? We don’t know much about the source of the November 2021 incident, other than GoDaddy’s statement that it involved a compromised password, and that it took about two months for the company to detect the intrusion. GoDaddy has not disclosed the source of the breach in December 2022 that led to malware on some customer websites.
But we do know the March 2020 attack was precipitated by a spear-phishing attack against a GoDaddy employee. GoDaddy described the incident at the time in general terms as a social engineering attack, but one of its customers affected by that March 2020 breach actually spoke to one of the hackers involved.
The hackers were able to change the Domain Name System (DNS) records for the transaction brokering site escrow.com so that it pointed to an address in Malaysia that was host to just a few other domains, including the then brand-new phishing domain servicenow-godaddy[.]com.
The general manager of Escrow.com found himself on the phone with one of the GoDaddy hackers, after someone who claimed they worked at GoDaddy called and said they needed him to authorize some changes to the account.
In reality, the caller had just tricked a GoDaddy employee into giving away their credentials, and he could see from the employee’s account that Escrow.com required a specific security procedure to complete a domain transfer.
The general manager of Escrow.com said he suspected the call was a scam, but decided to play along for about an hour — all the while recording the call and coaxing information out of the scammer.
“This guy had access to the notes, and knew the number to call,” to make changes to the account, the CEO of Escrow.com told KrebsOnSecurity. “He was literally reading off the tickets to the notes of the admin panel inside GoDaddy.”
About halfway through this conversation — after being called out by the general manager as an imposter — the hacker admitted that he was not a GoDaddy employee, and that he was in fact part of a group that enjoyed repeated success with social engineering employees at targeted companies over the phone.
Absent from GoDaddy’s SEC statement is another spate of attacks in November 2020, in which unknown intruders redirected email and web traffic for multiple cryptocurrency services that used GoDaddy in some capacity.
It is possible this incident was not mentioned because it was the work of yet another group of intruders. But in response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity at the time, GoDaddy said that incident also stemmed from a “limited” number of GoDaddy employees falling for a sophisticated social engineering scam.
“As threat actors become increasingly sophisticated and aggressive in their attacks, we are constantly educating employees about new tactics that might be used against them and adopting new security measures to prevent future attacks,” GoDaddy said in a written statement back in 2020.
Voice phishing or “vishing” attacks typically target employees who work remotely. The phishers will usually claim that they’re calling from the employer’s IT department, supposedly to help troubleshoot some issue. The goal is to convince the target to enter their credentials at a website set up by the attackers that mimics the organization’s corporate email or VPN portal.
Experts interviewed for an August 2020 story on a steep rise in successful voice phishing attacks said there are generally at least two people involved in each vishing scam: One who is social engineering the target over the phone, and another co-conspirator who takes any credentials entered at the phishing page — including multi-factor authentication codes shared by the victim — and quickly uses them to log in to the company’s website.
The attackers are usually careful to do nothing with the phishing domain until they are ready to initiate a vishing call to a potential victim. And when the attack or call is complete, they disable the website tied to the domain.
This is key because many domain registrars will only respond to external requests to take down a phishing website if the site is live at the time of the abuse complaint. This tactic also can stymie efforts by companies that focus on identifying newly-registered phishing domains before they can be used for fraud.
A U2F device made by Yubikey.
GoDaddy’s latest SEC filing indicates the company had nearly 7,000 employees as of December 2022. In addition, GoDaddy contracts with another 3,000 people who work full-time for the company via business process outsourcing companies based primarily in India, the Philippines and Colombia.
Many companies now require employees to supply a one-time password — such as one sent via SMS or produced by a mobile authenticator app — in addition to their username and password when logging in to company assets online. But both SMS and app-based codes can be undermined by phishing attacks that simply request this information in addition to the user’s password.
One multifactor option — physical security keys — appears to be immune to these advanced scams. The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.
The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.
In July 2018, Google disclosed that it had not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical security keys in place of one-time codes.
A security firm has discovered that a six-year-old crafty botnet known as Mylobot appears to be powering a residential proxy service called BHProxies, which offers paying customers the ability to route their web traffic anonymously through compromised computers. Here’s a closer look at Mylobot, and a deep dive into who may be responsible for operating the BHProxies service.
The BHProxies website.
First identified in 2017 by the security firm Deep Instinct, Mylobot employs a number of fairly sophisticated methods to remain undetected on infected hosts, such as running exclusively in the computer’s temporary memory, and waiting 14 days before attempting to contact the botnet’s command and control servers.
Last year, researchers at Minerva Labs spotted the botnet being used to blast out sextortion scams. But according to a new report from BitSight, the Mylobot botnet’s main functionality has always been about transforming the infected system into a proxy.
The Mylobot malware includes more than 1,000 hard-coded and encrypted domain names, any one of which can be registered and used as control networks for the infected hosts. BitSight researchers found significant overlap in the Internet addresses used by those domains and a domain called BHproxies[.]com.
BHProxies sells access to “residential proxy” networks, which allow someone to rent a residential IP address to use as a relay for their Internet communications, providing anonymity and the advantage of being perceived as a residential user surfing the web. The service is currently advertising access to more than 150,000 devices globally.
“At this point, we cannot prove that BHProxies is linked to Mylobot, but we have a strong suspicion,” wrote BitSight’s Stanislas Arnoud.
To test their hypothesis, BitSight obtained 50 proxies from BHProxies. The researchers were able to use 48 of those 50 proxies to browse to a website they controlled — allowing them to record the true IP addresses of each proxy device.
“Among these 48 recovered residential proxies IP addresses, 28 (58.3%) of those were already present in our sinkhole systems, associated with the Mylobot malware family,” Arnoud continued. “This number is probably higher, but we don’t have a full visibility of the botnet. This gave us clear evidence that Mylobot infected computers are used by the BHProxies service.”
BitSight said it is currently seeing more than 50,000 unique Mylobot infected systems every day, and that India appears to be the most targeted country, followed by the United States, Indonesia and Iran.
“We believe we are only seeing part of the full botnet, which may lead to more than 150,000 infected computers as advertised by BHProxies’ operators,” Arnoud wrote.
The website BHProxies[.]com has been advertised for nearly a decade on the forum Black Hat World by the user BHProxies. BHProxies has authored 129 posts on Black Hat World since 2012, and their last post on the forum was in December 2022.
BHProxies initially was fairly active on Black Hat World between May and November 2012, after which it suddenly ceased all activity. The account didn’t resume posting on the forum until April 2014.
According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the user BHProxies also used the handle “hassan_isabad_subar” and marketed various software tools, including “Subar’s free email creator” and “Subar’s free proxy scraper.”
Intel 471’s data shows that hassan_isabad_subar registered on the forum using the email address jesus.fn.christ@gmail.com. In a June 2012 private message exchange with a website developer on Black Hat World, hassan_isabad_subar confided that they were working at the time to develop two websites, including the now-defunct customscrabblejewelry.com.
DomainTools.com reports that customscrabblejewelry.com was registered in 2012 to a Teresa Shotliff in Chesterland, Ohio. A search on jesus.fn.christ@gmail.com at Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks compromised databases, shows this email address is tied to an account at the fundraising platform omaze.com, for a Brian Shotliff from Chesterland, Ohio.
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Shotliff said he sold his BHProxies account to another Black Hat World forum user from Egypt back in 2014. Shotliff shared an April 2014 password reset email from Black Hat World, which shows he forwarded the plaintext password to the email address legendboy2050@yahoo.com. He also shared a PayPal receipt and snippets of Facebook Messenger logs showing conversations in March 2014 with legendboy2050@yahoo.com.
Constella Intelligence confirmed that legendboy2050@yahoo.com was indeed another email address tied to the hassan_isabad_subar/BHProxies identity on Black Hat World. Constella also connects legendboy2050 to Facebook and Instagram accounts for one Abdala Tawfik from Cairo. This user’s Facebook page says Tawfik also uses the name Abdalla Khafagy.
Tawfik’s Instagram account says he is a former operations manager at the social media network TikTok, as well as a former director at Crypto.com.
Abdalla Khafagy’s LinkedIn profile says he was “global director of community” at Crypto.com for about a year ending in January 2022. Before that, the resume says he was operations manager of TikTok’s Middle East and North Africa region for approximately seven months ending in April 2020.
Khafagy’s LinkedIn profile says he is currently founder of LewkLabs, a Dubai-based “blockchain-powered, SocialFi content monetization platform” that last year reported funding of $3.26 million from private investors.
The only experience listed for Khafagy prior to the TikTok job is labeled “Marketing” at “Confidential,” from February 2014 to October 2019.
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Khafagy told KrebsOnSecurity that he had a Black Hat World account at some point, but that he didn’t recall ever having used an account by the name BHProxies or hassan_isabad_subar. Khafagy said he couldn’t remember the name of the account he had on the forum.
“I had an account that was simply hacked from me shortly after and I never bothered about it because it wasn’t mine in the first place,” he explained.
Khafagy declined to elaborate on the five-year stint in his resume marked “Confidential.” When asked directly whether he had ever been associated with the BHProxies service, Mr. Khafagy said no.
That Confidential job listing is interesting because its start date lines up with the creation of BHproxies[.]com. Archive.org indexed its first copy of BHProxies[.]com on Mar. 5, 2014, but historic DNS records show BHproxies[.]com first came online Feb. 25, 2014.
Shortly after that conversation with Mr. Khafagy, Mr. Shotliff shared a Facebook/Meta message he received that indicated Mr. Khafagy wanted him to support the claim that the BHProxies account had somehow gone missing.
“Hey mate, it’s been a long time. Hope you are doing well. Someone from Krebs on Security reached out to me about the account I got from you on BHW,” Khafagy’s Meta account wrote. “Didn’t we try to retrieve this account? I remember mentioning to you that it got stolen and I was never able to retrieve it.”
Mr. Shotliff said Khafagy’s sudden message this week was the first time he’d heard that claim.
“He bought the account,” Shotliff said. “He might have lost the account or had it stolen, but it’s not something I remember.”
If you liked this story, you may also enjoy these other investigations into botnet-based proxy services:
A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’
911 Proxy Service Implodes After Disclosing Breach
Meet the Administrators of the RSOCKS Proxy Botnet
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Microsoft is sending the world a whole bunch of love today, in the form of patches to plug dozens of security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. This year’s special Valentine’s Day Patch Tuesday includes fixes for a whopping three different “zero-day” vulnerabilities that are already being used in active attacks.
Microsoft’s security advisories are somewhat sparse with details about the zero-day bugs. Redmond flags CVE-2023-23376 as an “Important” elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System Driver, which is present in Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as many server versions of Windows.
“Sadly, there’s just a little solid information about this privilege escalation,” said Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Microsoft does note that the vulnerability would allow an attacker to exploit code as SYSTEM, which would allow them to completely take over a target. This is likely being chained with a remote code execution bug to spread malware or ransomware. Considering this was discovered by Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center, it could mean it was used by advanced threat actors. Either way, make sure you test and roll these fixes quickly.”
The zero-day CVE-2023-21715 is a weakness in Microsoft Office that Redmond describes as a “security feature bypass vulnerability.”
“Microsoft lists this as under active exploit, but they offer no info on how widespread these exploits may be,” Childs said. “Based on the write-up, it sounds more like a privilege escalation than a security feature bypass, but regardless, active attacks in a common enterprise application shouldn’t be ignored. It’s always alarming when a security feature is not just bypassed but exploited. Let’s hope the fix comprehensively addresses the problem.”
The third zero-day flaw already seeing exploitation is CVE-2023-21823, which is another elevation of privilege weakness — this one in the Microsoft Windows Graphic component. Researchers at cybersecurity forensics firm Mandiant were credited with reporting the bug.
Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, pointed out that the security bulletin for CVE-2023-21823 specifically calls out OneNote as being a vulnerable component for the vulnerability.
“In recent weeks, we have seen an increase in the use of OneNote files as part of targeted malware campaigns,” Breen said. “Patches for this are delivered via the app stores and not through the typical formats, so it’s important to double check your organization’s policies.”
Microsoft fixed another Office vulnerability in CVE-2023-21716, which is a Microsoft Word bug that can lead to remote code execution — even if a booby-trapped Word document is merely viewed in the preview pane of Microsoft Outlook. This security hole has a CVSS (severity) score of 9.8 out of a possible 10.
Microsoft also has more valentines for organizations that rely on Microsoft Exchange Server to handle email. Redmond patched three Exchange Server flaws (CVE-2023-21706, CVE-2023-21707, and CVE-2023-21529), all of which Microsoft says are remote code execution flaws that are likely to be exploited.
Microsoft said authentication is required to exploit these bugs, but then again threat groups that attack Exchange vulnerabilities also tend to phish targets for their Exchange credentials.
Microsoft isn’t alone in dropping fixes for scary, ill-described zero-day flaws. Apple on Feb. 13 released an update for iOS that resolves a zero-day vulnerability in Webkit, Apple’s open source browser engine. Johannes Ullrich at the SANS Internet Storm Center notes that in addition to the WebKit problem, Apple fixed a privilege escalation issue. Both flaws are fixed in iOS 16.3.1.
“This privilege escalation issue could be used to escape the browser sandbox and gain full system access after executing code via the WebKit vulnerability,” Ullrich warned.
On a lighter note (hopefully), Microsoft drove the final nail in the coffin for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). According to Redmond, the out-of-support IE11 desktop application was permanently disabled on certain versions of Windows 10 on February 14, 2023 through a Microsoft Edge update.
“All remaining consumer and commercial devices that were not already redirected from IE11 to Microsoft Edge were redirected with the Microsoft Edge update. Users will be unable to reverse the change,” Microsoft explained. “Additionally, redirection from IE11 to Microsoft Edge will be included as part of all future Microsoft Edge updates. IE11 visual references, such as the IE11 icons on the Start Menu and taskbar, will be removed by the June 2023 Windows security update (“B” release) scheduled for June 13, 2023.”
For a more granular rundown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
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Authorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating “Trickbot,” a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S. Department of the Treasury says the Trickbot group is associated with Russian intelligence services, and that this alliance led to the targeting of many U.S. companies and government entities.
Initially a stealthy trojan horse program delivered via email and used to steal passwords, Trickbot evolved into “a highly modular malware suite that provides the Trickbot Group with the ability to conduct a variety of illegal cyber activities, including ransomware attacks,” the Treasury Department said.
A spam email from 2020 containing a Trickbot-infected attachment. Image: Microsoft.
“During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Trickbot targeted hospitals and healthcare centers, launching a wave of ransomware attacks against hospitals across the United States,” the sanctions notice continued. “In one of these attacks, the Trickbot Group deployed ransomware against three Minnesota medical facilities, disrupting their computer networks and telephones, and causing a diversion of ambulances. Members of the Trickbot Group publicly gloated over the ease of targeting the medical facilities and the speed with which the ransoms were paid to the group.”
Only one of the men sanctioned today is known to have been criminally charged in connection with hacking activity. According to the Treasury Department, the alleged senior leader of the Trickbot group is 34-year-old Russian national Vitaly “Bentley” Kovalev.
A New Jersey grand jury indicted Kovalev in 2012 after an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service determined that he ran a massive “money mule” scheme, which used phony job offers to trick people into laundering money stolen from hacked small to mid-sized businesses in the United States. The 2012 indictment against Kovalev relates to cybercrimes he allegedly perpetrated prior to the creation of Trickbot.
In 2015, Kovalev reportedly began filming a movie in Russia about cybercrime called “Botnet.” According to a 2016 story from Forbes.ru, Botnet’s opening scene was to depict the plight of Christina Svechinskaya, a Russian student arrested by FBI agents in September 2010.
Christina Svechinskaya, a money mule hired by Bentley who was arrested by the FBI in 2010.
Svechinskaya was one of Bentley’s money mules, most of whom were young Russian students on temporary travel visas in the United States. She was among 37 alleged mules charged with aiding an international cybercrime operation — basically, setting up phony corporate bank accounts for the sole purpose of laundering stolen funds.
Although she possessed no real hacking skills, Svechinskaya’s mugshot and social media photos went viral online and she was quickly dubbed “the world’s sexiest computer hacker” by the tabloids.
Kovalev’s Botnet film project was disrupted after Russian authorities raided the film production company’s offices as part of a cybercrime investigation. In February 2016, Reuters reported that the raid was connected to a crackdown on “Dyre,” a sophisticated trojan that U.S. federal investigators say was the precursor to the Trickbot malware. The Forbes.ru article cited sources close to the investigation who said the film studio was operating as a money-laundering front for the cybercrooks behind Dyre.
But shifting political winds in Russia would soon bring high treason charges against three of the Russian cybercrime investigators tied to the investigation into the film studio. In a major shakeup in 2017, the Kremlin levied treason charges against Sergey Mikhaylov, then deputy chief of Russia’s top anti-cybercrime unit.
Also charged with treason was Ruslan Stoyanov, then a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab [the Forbes.ru report from 2016 said investigators from Mikhaylov’s unit and Kaspersky Lab were present at the film company raid].
Russian media outlets have speculated that the men were accused of treason for helping American cybercrime investigators pursue top Russian hackers. However, the charges against both men were classified and have never been officially revealed. After their brief, closed trial, both men were convicted of treason. Mikhaylov was given a 22 year prison sentence; Stoyanov was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason charges against Ilya Sachkov, formerly head of the cybersecurity firm Group-IB. According to Reuters, Sachkov and his company were hired by the film studio “to advise the Botnet director and writers on the finer points of cybercrime.” Sachkov remains imprisoned in Russia pending his treason trial.
Trickbot was heavily used by Conti and Ryuk, two of Russia’s most ruthless and successful ransomware groups. Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis estimates that in 2021 alone, Conti extorted more than USD $100 million from its hacking victims; Chainalysis estimates Ryuk extorted more than USD $150 million from its ransomware victims.
The U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has long tracked the activities of Trickbot, Ryuk and Conti under the same moniker — “Wizard Spider” — which CrowdStrike describes as “a Russia-nexus cybercriminal group behind the core development and distribution of a sophisticated arsenal of criminal tools, that allow them to run multiple different types of operations.”
“CrowdStrike Intelligence has observed WIZARD SPIDER targeting multiple countries and industries such as academia, energy, financial services, government, and more,” said Adam Meyers, head of intelligence at CrowdStrike.
This is not the U.S. government’s first swipe at the Trickbot group. In early October 2020, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that someone had launched a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt the Trickbot botnet. A week later, The Washington Post ran a story saying the attack on Trickbot was the work of U.S. Cyber Command, a branch of the Department of Defense headed by the director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a Ukrainian researcher leaked several years of internal chat logs from the Conti ransomware gang. Those candid conversations offer a fascinating view into the challenges of running a sprawling criminal enterprise with more than 100 salaried employees. They also showed that Conti enjoyed protection from prosecution by Russian authorities, as long as the hacker group took care not to target Russian organizations.
In addition, the leaked Conti chats confirmed there was considerable overlap in the operation and leadership of Conti, Trickbot and Ryuk.
Michael DeBolt, chief intelligence officer at cybersecurity firm Intel 471, said the leaked Conti chats showed Bentley oversaw a team of coders tasked with ensuring that the Trickbot and Conti malware remained undetected by the different antivirus and security software vendors.
In the years prior to the emergence of Trickbot in 2016, Bentley worked closely on the Gameover ZeuS trojan, a peer-to-peer malware threat that infected between 500,000 and a million computers with an automated ransomware strain called Cryptolocker, DeBolt said.
The FBI has a standing $3 million bounty offered for the capture of Evgeny “Slavik” Bogachev, the alleged author of the Zeus trojan. And there are indications that Bentley worked directly with Bogachev. DeBolt pointed to an October 2014 discussion on the exclusive Russian hacking forum Mazafaka that included a complaint by a Russian hosting firm against a forum user by the name “Ferrari” who had failed to pay a $30,000 hosting bill.
In that discussion thread, it emerged that the hosting company thought it was filing a complaint against Slavik. But the Mazafaka member who vouched for Ferrari’s membership on the forum said they knew Ferrari as Bentley the mule handler, and at some point Slavik and Bentley must have been sharing the Ferrari user account.
“It is likely that Slavik (aka. Bogachev) and Bentley (aka. Kovalev) shared the same ‘Ferrari’ handle on the Mazafaka forum circa 2014, which suggests the two had a working relationship at that time, and supports the recent US and UK Government announcements regarding Kovalev’s past involvement in cybercrime predating Dyre or the Trickbot Group,” DeBolt said.
CrowdStrike’s Meyers said while Wizard Spider operations have significantly reduced following the demise of Conti in June 2022, today’s sanctions will likely cause temporary disruptions for the cybercriminal group while they look for ways to circumvent the financial restrictions — which make it illegal to transact with or hold the assets of sanctioned persons or entities.
“Often, when cybercriminal groups are disrupted, they will go dark for a time only to rebrand under a new name,” Meyers said.
The prosecution of Kovalev is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. A copy of the now-unsealed 2012 indictment of Kovalev is here (PDF).
When the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced the TLS 1.3 standard in RFC 8446 in August 2018, plenty of tools and utilities were already supporting it (even as early as the year prior, some web browsers had implemented it as their default standard, only having to roll it back due to compatibility issues. Needless to say, the rollout was not perfect).
Toward the end of 2018, EMA conducted a survey of customers regarding their TLS 1.3 implementation and migration plans. In the January 2019 report, EMA concluded:
Some participants’ organizations may find they have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a Plan B to enable TLS 1.3 without losing visibility, introducing unacceptable performance bottlenecks and greatly increasing operational overhead. Whether they feel they have no choice but to enable TLS 1.3 because major web server and browser vendors have already pushed ahead with it or because they need to keep pace with the industry as it embraces the new standard is unclear. What is clear is that security practitioners see the new standard as offering greater privacy and end-to-end data security for their organizations, and that the long wait for its advancement is over.
When EMA asked many of the same questions in an updated survey of 204 technology and business leaders toward the end of 2022, they found that nearly all the conclusions in the 2018/2019 report still hold true today. Here are the three biggest takeaways from this most recent survey:
While regulatory frameworks and vendor controls continue to push the adoption of the TLS 1.3 standard, adoption still comes with a significant price tag – one that many organizations are just not yet ready or able to consume. Technology improvements will increase rates of adoption over time, such as Cisco Secure Firewall’s ability to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic. More recent and unique technologies, like Cisco’s encrypted visibility engine, allow the firewall to recognize attack patterns in encrypted traffic without decryption. This latter functionality preserves performance and privacy of the encrypted flows without sacrificing the visibility and monitoring that 94% of respondents were concerned about.
Readers wishing to read the full EMA report can do so here and readers wishing to learn more about Cisco Secure Firewall’s encyrpted visibility engine can do so here.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Most people who operate DDoS-for-hire businesses attempt to hide their true identities and location. Proprietors of these so-called “booter” or “stresser” services — designed to knock websites and users offline — have long operated in a legally murky area of cybercrime law. But until recently, their biggest concern wasn’t avoiding capture or shutdown by the feds: It was minimizing harassment from unhappy customers or victims, and insulating themselves against incessant attacks from competing DDoS-for-hire services.
And then there are booter store operators like John Dobbs, a 32-year-old computer science graduate student living in Honolulu, Hawaii. For at least a decade until late last year, Dobbs openly operated IPStresser[.]com, a popular and powerful attack-for-hire service that he registered with the state of Hawaii using his real name and address. Likewise, the domain was registered in Dobbs’s name and hometown in Pennsylvania.
Dobbs, in an undated photo from his Github profile. Image: john-dobbs.github.io
The only work experience Dobbs listed on his resume was as a freelance developer from 2013 to the present day. Dobbs’s resume doesn’t name his booter service, but in it he brags about maintaining websites with half a million page views daily, and “designing server deployments for performance, high-availability and security.”
In December 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice seized Dobbs’s IPStresser website and charged him with one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusions. Prosecutors say his service attracted more than two million registered users, and was responsible for launching a staggering 30 million distinct DDoS attacks.
The government seized four-dozen booter domains, and criminally charged Dobbs and five other U.S. men for allegedly operating stresser services. This was the Justice Department’s second such mass takedown targeting DDoS-for-hire services and their accused operators. In 2018, the feds seized 15 stresser sites, and levied cybercrime charges against three men for their operation of booter services.
Dobbs’s booter service, IPStresser, in June 2020. Image: archive.org.
Many accused stresser site operators have pleaded guilty over the years after being hit with federal criminal charges. But the government’s core claim — that operating a booter site is a violation of U.S. computer crime laws — wasn’t properly tested in the courts until September 2021.
That was when a jury handed down a guilty verdict against Matthew Gatrel, a then 32-year-old St. Charles, Ill. man charged in the government’s first 2018 mass booter bust-up. Despite admitting to FBI agents that he ran two booter services (and turning over plenty of incriminating evidence in the process), Gatrel opted to take his case to trial, defended the entire time by court-appointed attorneys.
Prosecutors said Gatrel’s booter services — downthem[.]org and ampnode[.]com — helped some 2,000 paying customers launch debilitating digital assaults on more than 20,000 targets, including many government, banking, university and gaming websites.
Gatrel was convicted on all three charges of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, including conspiracy to commit unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
Now, it appears Dobbs is also planning to take his chances with a jury. On Jan. 4, Dobbs entered a plea of not guilty. Neither Dobbs nor his court-appointed attorney responded to requests for comment.
But as it happens, Dobbs himself provided some perspective on his thinking in an email exchange with KrebsOnSecurity back in 2020. I’d reached out to Dobbs because it was obvious he didn’t mind if people knew he operated one of the world’s most popular DDoS-for-hire sites, and I was genuinely curious why he was so unafraid of getting raided by the feds.
“Yes, I am the owner of the domain you listed, however you are not authorized to post an article containing said domain name, my name or this email address without my prior written permission,” Dobbs replied to my initial outreach on March 10, 2020 using his email address from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
A few hours later, I received more strident instructions from Dobbs, this time via his official email address at ipstresser[.]com.
“I will state again for absolute clarity, you are not authorized to post an article containing ipstresser.com, my name, my GitHub profile and/or my hawaii.edu email address,” Dobbs wrote, as if taking dictation from a lawyer who doesn’t understand how the media works.
When pressed for particulars on his business, Dobbs replied that the number of IPStresser customers was “privileged information,” and said he didn’t even advertise the service. When asked whether he was concerned that many of his competitors were by then serving jail time for operating similar booter services, Dobbs maintained that the way he’d set up the business insulated him from any liability.
“I have been aware of the recent law enforcement actions against other operators of stress testing services,” Dobbs explained. “I cannot speak to the actions of these other services, but we take proactive measures to prevent misuse of our service and we work with law enforcement agencies regarding any reported abuse of our service.”
What were those proactive measures? In a 2015 interview with ZDNet France, Dobbs asserted that he was immune from liability because his clients all had to submit a digital signature attesting that they wouldn’t use the site for illegal purposes.
“Our terms of use are a legal document that protects us, among other things, from certain legal consequences,” Dobbs told ZDNet. “Most other sites are satisfied with a simple checkbox, but we ask for a digital signature in order to imply real consent from our customers.”
Dobbs told KrebsOnSecurity his service didn’t generate much of a profit, but rather that he was motivated by “filling a legitimate need.”
“My reason for offering the service is to provide the ability to test network security measures before someone with malicious intent attacks said network and causes downtime,” he said. “Sure, some people see only the negatives, but there is a long list of companies I have worked with over the years who would say my service is a godsend and has helped them prevent tens of thousands of dollars in downtime resulting from a malicious attack.”
“I do not believe that providing such a service is illegal, assuming proper due diligence to prevent malicious use of the service, as is the case for IPstresser[.]com,” Dobbs continued. “Someone using such a service to conduct unauthorized testing is illegal in many countries, however, the legal liability is that of the user, not of the service provider.”
Dobbs’s profile on GitHub includes more of his ideas about his work, including a curious piece on “software engineering ethics.” In his January 2020 treatise “My Software Engineering Journey,” Dobbs laments that nothing in his formal education prepared him for the reality that a great deal of his work would be so tedious and repetitive (this tracks closely with a 2020 piece here called Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring).
“One area of software engineering that I think should be covered more in university classes is maintenance,” Dobbs wrote. “Projects are often worked on for at most a few months, and students do not experience the maintenance aspect of software engineering until they reach the workplace. Let’s face it, ongoing maintenance of a project is boring; there is nothing like the euphoria of completing a project you have been working on for months and releasing it to the world, but I would say that half of my professional career has been related to maintenance.”
Allison Nixon is chief research officer at the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon is part of a small group of researchers who have been closely tracking the DDoS-for-hire industry for years, and she said Dobbs’s claim that what he’s doing is legal makes sense given that it took years for the government to recognize the size of the problem.
“These guys are arguing that their services are legal because for a long time nothing happened to them,” Nixon said. “It’s difficult to argue something is illegal if no one has ever been arrested for it before.”
Nixon says the government’s fight against the booter services — and by extension other types of cybercrimes — is hampered by a legal system that often takes years to cycle through cybercrime cases.
“With cybercrime, the cycle between the crime and investigation and arrest can often take a year or more, and that’s for a really fast case,” Nixon said. “If someone robbed a store, we’d expect a police response within a few minutes. If someone robs a bank’s website, there might be some indication of police activity within a year.”
Nixon praised the 2022 and 2018 booter takedown operations as “huge steps forward,” but added that “there need to be more of them, and faster.”
“This time lag is part of the reason it’s so difficult to shut down the pipeline of new talent going into cybercrime,” she said. “They think what they’re doing is legal because nothing has happened, and because of the amount of time it takes to shut these things down. And it’s really a big problem, where we see a lot of people becoming criminals on the basis that what they’re doing isn’t really illegal because the cops won’t do anything.”
In December 2020, Dobbs filed an application with the state of Hawaii to withdraw IP Stresser Inc. from its roster of active companies. But according to prosecutors, Dobbs would continue to operate his DDoS-for-hire site until at least November 2022.
Two months after our 2020 email interview, Dobbs would earn his second bachelor’s degree (in computer science; his resume says he earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering from Drexel University in 2013). The federal charges against Dobbs came just as he was preparing to enter his final semester toward a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Hawaii.
Nixon says she has a message for anyone involved in operating a DDoS-for-hire service.
“Unless you are verifying that the target owns the infrastructure you’re targeting, there is no legal way to operate a DDoS-for-hire service,” she said. “There is no Terms of Service you could put on the site that would somehow make it legal.”
And her message to the customers of those booter services? It’s a compelling one to ponder, particularly now that investigators in the United States, U.K. and elsewhere have started going after booter service customers.
“When a booter service claims they don’t share logs, they’re lying because logs are legal leverage for when the booter service operator gets arrested,” Nixon said. “And when they do, you’re going to be the first people they throw under the bus.”
Microsoft today released updates to fix nearly 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. Highlights from the first Patch Tuesday of 2023 include a zero-day vulnerability in Windows, printer software flaws reported by the U.S. National Security Agency, and a critical Microsoft SharePoint Server bug that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to make an anonymous connection.
At least 11 of the patches released today are rated “Critical” by Microsoft, meaning they could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize remote control over vulnerable Windows systems with little or no help from users.
Of particular concern for organizations running Microsoft SharePoint Server is CVE-2023-21743. This is a Critical security bypass flaw that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to make an anonymous connection to a vulnerable SharePoint server. Microsoft says this flaw is “more likely to be exploited” at some point.
But patching this bug may not be as simple as deploying Microsoft updates. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, said sysadmins need to take additional measures to be fully protected from this vulnerability.
“To fully resolve this bug, you must also trigger a SharePoint upgrade action that’s also included in this update,” Childs said. “Full details on how to do this are in the bulletin. Situations like this are why people who scream ‘Just patch it!’ show they have never actually had to patch an enterprise in the real world.”
Eighty-seven of the vulnerabilities earned Redmond’s slightly less dire “Important” severity rating. That designation describes vulnerabilities “whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources.”
Among the more Important bugs this month is CVE-2023-21674, which is an “elevation of privilege” weakness in most supported versions of Windows that has already been abused in active attacks.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said although details about the flaw were not available at the time Microsoft published its advisory on Patch Tuesday, it appears this was likely chained together with a vulnerability in a Chromium-based browser such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge in order to break out of a browser’s sandbox and gain full system access.
“Vulnerabilities like CVE-2023-21674 are typically the work of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups as part of targeted attacks,” Narang said. “The likelihood of future widespread exploitation of an exploit chain like this is limited due to auto-update functionality used to patch browsers.”
By the way, when was the last time you completely closed out your Web browser and restarted it? Some browsers will automatically download and install new security updates, but the protection from those updates usually only happens after you restart the browser.
Speaking of APT groups, the U.S. National Security Agency is credited with reporting CVE-2023-21678, which is another “important” vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler software.
There have been so many vulnerabilities patched in Microsoft’s printing software over the past year (including the dastardly PrintNightmare attacks and borked patches) that KrebsOnSecurity has joked about Patch Tuesday reports being sponsored by Print Spooler. Tenable’s Narang points out that this is the third Print Spooler flaw the NSA has reported in the last year.
Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs called special attention to CVE-2023-21563, which is a security feature bypass in BitLocker, the data and disk encryption technology built into enterprise versions of Windows.
“For organizations that have remote users, or users that travel, this vulnerability may be of interest,” Breen said. “We rely on BitLocker and full-disk encryption tools to keep our files and data safe in the event a laptop or device is stolen. While information is light, this appears to suggest that it could be possible for an attacker to bypass this protection and gain access to the underlying operating system and its contents. If security teams are not able to apply this patch, one potential mitigation could be to ensure Remote Device Management is deployed with the ability to remotely disable and wipe assets.”
There are also two Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities patched this month — CVE-2023-21762 and CVE-2023-21745. Given the rapidity with which threat actors exploit new Exchange bugs to steal corporate email and infiltrate vulnerable systems, organizations using Exchange should patch immediately. Microsoft’s advisory says these Exchange flaws are indeed “more likely to be exploited.”
Adobe released four patches addressing 29 flaws in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, InDesign, InCopy, and Adobe Dimension. The update for Reader fixes 15 bugs with eight of these being ranked Critical in severity (allowing arbitrary code execution if an affected system opened a specially crafted file).
For a more granular rundown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. Nearly 100 updates is a lot, and there are bound to be a few patches that cause problems for organizations and end users. When that happens, AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And please sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
Hybrid work and hybrid play now merge into hybrid living, but where is the line between the two? Is there one?
The post Hybrid work: Turning business platforms into preferred social spaces appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.
The security updates include patches for Azure, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint Server, SysInternals, and the .NET framework. Six of the update bundles earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix vulnerabilities that malware or malcontents can use to remotely commandeer an unpatched Windows system — with little to no interaction on the part of the user.
The bug already seeing exploitation is CVE-2022-44698, which allows attackers to bypass the Windows SmartScreen security feature. The vulnerability allows attackers to craft documents that won’t get tagged with Microsoft’s “Mark of the Web,” despite being downloaded from untrusted sites.
“This means no Protected View for Microsoft Office documents, making it easier to get users to do sketchy things like execute malicious macros, said Greg Wiseman, product manager at security firm Rapid7. This is the second Mark of the Web flaw Microsoft has patched in as many months; both were first publicly detailed over the past two months on Twitter by security researcher Will Dormann.
Publicly disclosed (but not actively exploited for now) is CVE-2022-44710, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in the DirectX graphics component of Windows 11.
Another notable critical bug is CVE-2022-41076, a remote code execution flaw in PowerShell — a key component of Windows that makes it easier to automate system tasks and configurations.
Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs said while Microsoft doesn’t share much detail about CVE-2022-41076 apart from the designation ‘Exploitation More Likely,’ they also note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to take additional actions to prepare the target environment.
“What actions are required is not clear; however, we do know that exploitation requires an authenticated user level of access,” Breen said. “This combination suggests that the exploit requires a social engineering element, and would likely be seen in initial infections using attacks like MalDocs or LNK files.”
Speaking of malicious documents, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative highlights CVE-2022-44713, a spoofing vulnerability in Outlook for Mac.
“We don’t often highlight spoofing bugs, but anytime you’re dealing with a spoofing bug in an e-mail client, you should take notice,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “This vulnerability could allow an attacker to appear as a trusted user when they should not be. Now combine this with the SmartScreen Mark of the Web bypass and it’s not hard to come up with a scenario where you receive an e-mail that appears to be from your boss with an attachment entitled “Executive_Compensation.xlsx”. There aren’t many who wouldn’t open that file in that scenario.”
Microsoft also released guidance on reports that certain software drivers certified by Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Developer Program were being used maliciously in post-exploitation activity.
Three different companies reported evidence that malicious hackers were using these signed malicious driver files to lay the groundwork for ransomware deployment inside victim organizations. One of those companies, Sophos, published a blog post Tuesday detailing how the activity was tied to the Russian ransomware group Cuba, which has extorted an estimated $60 million from victims since 2019.
Of course, not all scary and pressing security threats are Microsoft-based. Also on Tuesday, Apple released a bevy of security updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and Safari, including a patch for a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution.
Anyone responsible for maintaining Fortinet or Citrix remote access products probably needs to update, as both are dealing with active attacks on just-patched flaws.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today (indexed by severity and other metrics) check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
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