Web Hacking Service ‘Araneida’ Tied to Turkish IT Firm

Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix, a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services, one of which KrebsOnSecurity traced to an information technology firm based in Turkey.

Cyber threat analysts at Silent Push said they recently received reports from a partner organization that identified an aggressive scanning effort against their website using an Internet address previously associated with a campaign by FIN7, a notorious Russia-based hacking group.

But on closer inspection they discovered the address contained an HTML title of “Araneida Customer Panel,” and found they could search on that text string to find dozens of unique addresses hosting the same service.

It soon became apparent that Araneida was being resold as a cloud-based service using a cracked version of Acunetix, allowing paying customers to conduct offensive reconnaissance on potential target websites, scrape user data, and find vulnerabilities for exploitation.

Silent Push also learned Araneida bundles its service with a robust proxy offering, so that customer scans appear to come from Internet addresses that are randomly selected from a large pool of available traffic relays.

The makers of Acunetix, Texas-based application security vendor Invicti Security, confirmed Silent Push’s findings, saying someone had figured out how to crack the free trial version of the software so that it runs without a valid license key.

“We have been playing cat and mouse for a while with these guys,” said Matt Sciberras, chief information security officer at Invicti.

Silent Push said Araneida is being advertised by an eponymous user on multiple cybercrime forums. The service’s Telegram channel boasts nearly 500 subscribers and explains how to use the tool for malicious purposes.

In a “Fun Facts” list posted to the channel in late September, Araneida said their service was used to take over more than 30,000 websites in just six months, and that one customer used it to buy a Porsche with the payment card data (“dumps”) they sold.

“They are constantly bragging with their community about the crimes that are being committed, how it’s making criminals money,” said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at Silent Push. “They are also selling bulk data and dumps which appear to have been acquired with this tool or due to vulnerabilities found with the tool.”

Silent Push also found a cracked version of Acunetix was powering at least 20 instances of a similar cloud-based vulnerability testing service catering to Mandarin speakers, but they were unable to find any apparently related sales threads about them on the dark web.

Rumors of a cracked version of Acunetix being used by attackers surfaced in June 2023 on Twitter/X, when researchers first posited a connection between observed scanning activity and Araneida.

According to an August 2023 report (PDF) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Acunetix (presumably a cracked version) is among several tools used by APT 41, a prolific Chinese state-sponsored hacking group.

THE TURKISH CONNECTION

Silent Push notes that the website where Araneida is being sold — araneida[.]co — first came online in February 2023. But a review of this Araneida nickname on the cybercrime forums shows they have been active in the criminal hacking scene since at least 2018.

A search in the threat intelligence platform Intel 471 shows a user by the name Araneida promoted the scanner on two cybercrime forums since 2022, including Breached and Nulled. In 2022, Araneida told fellow Breached members they could be reached on Discord at the username “Ornie#9811.”

According to Intel 471, this same Discord account was advertised in 2019 by a person on the cybercrime forum Cracked who used the monikers “ORN” and “ori0n.” The user “ori0n” mentioned in several posts that they could be reached on Telegram at the username “@sirorny.”

The Sirorny Telegram identity also was referenced as a point of contact for a current user on the cybercrime forum Nulled who is selling website development services, and who references araneida[.]co as one of their projects. That user, “Exorn,” has posts dating back to August 2018.

In early 2020, Exorn promoted a website called “orndorks[.]com,” which they described as a service for automating the scanning for web-based vulnerabilities. A passive DNS lookup on this domain at DomainTools.com shows that its email records pointed to the address ori0nbusiness@protonmail.com.

Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks information exposed in data breaches, finds this email address was used to register an account at Breachforums in July 2024 under the nickname “Ornie.” Constella also finds the same email registered at the website netguard[.]codes in 2021 using the password “ceza2003” [full disclosure: Constella is currently an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity].

A search on the password ceza2003 in Constella finds roughly a dozen email addresses that used it in an exposed data breach, most of them featuring some variation on the name “altugsara,” including altugsara321@gmail.com. Constella further finds altugsara321@gmail.com was used to create an account at the cybercrime community RaidForums under the username “ori0n,” from an Internet address in Istanbul.

According to DomainTools, altugsara321@gmail.com was used in 2020 to register the domain name altugsara[.]com. Archive.org’s history for that domain shows that in 2021 it featured a website for a then 18-year-old Altuğ Şara from Ankara, Turkey.

LinkedIn finds this same altugsara[.]com domain listed in the “contact info” section of a profile for an Altug Sara from Ankara, who says he has worked the past two years as a senior software developer for a Turkish IT firm called Bilitro Yazilim.

Neither Altug Sara nor Bilitro Yazilim responded to requests for comment.

Invicti’s website states that it has offices in Ankara, but the company’s CEO said none of their employees recognized either name.

“We do have a small team in Ankara, but as far as I know we have no connection to the individual other than the fact that they are also in Ankara,” Invicti CEO Neil Roseman told KrebsOnSecurity.

Researchers at Silent Push say despite Araneida using a seemingly endless supply of proxies to mask the true location of its users, it is a fairly “noisy” scanner that will kick off a large volume of requests to various API endpoints, and make requests to random URLs associated with different content management systems.

What’s more, the cracked version of Acunetix being resold to cybercriminals invokes legacy Acunetix SSL certificates on active control panels, which Silent Push says provides a solid pivot for finding some of this infrastructure, particularly from the Chinese threat actors.

Further reading: Silent Push’s research on Araneida Scanner.

The Stark Truth Behind the Resurgence of Russia’s Fin7

The Russia-based cybercrime group dubbed “Fin7,” known for phishing and malware attacks that have cost victim organizations an estimated $3 billion in losses since 2013, was declared dead last year by U.S. authorities. But experts say Fin7 has roared back to life in 2024 — setting up thousands of websites mimicking a range of media and technology companies — with the help of Stark Industries Solutions, a sprawling hosting provider that is a persistent source of cyberattacks against enemies of Russia.

In May 2023, the U.S. attorney for Washington state declared “Fin7 is an entity no more,” after prosecutors secured convictions and prison sentences against three men found to be high-level Fin7 hackers or managers. This was a bold declaration against a group that the U.S. Department of Justice described as a criminal enterprise with more than 70 people organized into distinct business units and teams.

The first signs of Fin7’s revival came in April 2024, when Blackberry wrote about an intrusion at a large automotive firm that began with malware served by a typosquatting attack targeting people searching for a popular free network scanning tool.

Now, researchers at security firm Silent Push say they have devised a way to map out Fin7’s rapidly regrowing cybercrime infrastructure, which includes more than 4,000 hosts that employ a range of exploits, from typosquatting and booby-trapped ads to malicious browser extensions and spearphishing domains.

Silent Push said it found Fin7 domains targeting or spoofing brands including American Express, Affinity Energy, Airtable, Alliant, Android Developer, Asana, Bitwarden, Bloomberg, Cisco (Webex), CNN, Costco, Dropbox, Grammarly, Google, Goto.com, Harvard, Lexis Nexis, Meta, Microsoft 365, Midjourney, Netflix, Paycor, Quickbooks, Quicken, Reuters, Regions Bank Onepass, RuPay, SAP (Ariba), Trezor, Twitter/X, Wall Street Journal, Westlaw, and Zoom, among others.

Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at Silent Push, said many of the Fin7 domains are innocuous-looking websites for generic businesses that sometimes include text from default website templates (the content on these sites often has nothing to do with the entity’s stated business or mission).

Edwards said Fin7 does this to “age” the domains and to give them a positive or at least benign reputation before they’re eventually converted for use in hosting brand-specific phishing pages.

“It took them six to nine months to ramp up, but ever since January of this year they have been humming, building a giant phishing infrastructure and aging domains,” Edwards said of the cybercrime group.

In typosquatting attacks, Fin7 registers domains that are similar to those for popular free software tools. Those look-alike domains are then advertised on Google so that sponsored links to them show up prominently in search results, which is usually above the legitimate source of the software in question.

According to Silent Push, the software currently being targeted by Fin7 includes 7-zip, PuTTY, ProtectedPDFViewer, AIMP, Notepad++, Advanced IP Scanner, AnyDesk, pgAdmin, AutoDesk, Bitwarden, Rest Proxy, Python, Sublime Text, and Node.js.

In May 2024, security firm eSentire warned that Fin7 was spotted using sponsored Google ads to serve pop-ups prompting people to download phony browser extensions that install malware. Malwarebytes blogged about a similar campaign in April, but did not attribute the activity to any particular group.

Edwards said Silent Push discovered the new Fin7 domains after a hearing from an organization that was targeted by Fin7 in years past and suspected the group was once again active. Searching for hosts that matched Fin7’s known profile revealed just one active site. But Edwards said that one site pointed to many other Fin7 properties at Stark Industries Solutions, a large hosting provider that materialized just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

As KrebsOnSecurity wrote in May, Stark Industries Solutions is being used as a staging ground for wave after wave of cyberattacks against Ukraine that have been tied to Russian military and intelligence agencies.

“FIN7 rents a large amount of dedicated IP on Stark Industries,” Edwards said. “Our analysts have discovered numerous Stark Industries IPs that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure.”

Fin7 once famously operated behind fake cybersecurity companies — with names like Combi Security and Bastion Secure — which they used for hiring security experts to aid in ransomware attacks. One of the new Fin7 domains identified by Silent Push is cybercloudsec[.]com, which promises to “grow your business with our IT, cyber security and cloud solutions.”

Like other phishing groups, Fin7 seizes on current events, and at the moment it is targeting tourists visiting France for the Summer Olympics later this month. Among the new Fin7 domains Silent Push found are several sites phishing people seeking tickets at the Louvre.

“We believe this research makes it clear that Fin7 is back and scaling up quickly,” Edwards said. “It’s our hope that the law enforcement community takes notice of this and puts Fin7 back on their radar for additional enforcement actions, and that quite a few of our competitors will be able to take this pool and expand into all or a good chunk of their infrastructure.”

Further reading:

Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud.

A 2022 deep dive on Fin7 from the Swiss threat intelligence firm Prodaft (PDF).

FIN7 Hacker Group Leverages Malicious Google Ads to Deliver NetSupport RAT

The financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7 has been observed leveraging malicious Google ads spoofing legitimate brands as a means to deliver MSIX installers that culminate in the deployment of NetSupport RAT. "The threat actors used malicious websites to impersonate well-known brands, including AnyDesk, WinSCP, BlackRock, Asana, Concur, The Wall

FIN7 Cybercrime Group Targeting U.S. Auto Industry with Carbanak Backdoor

The infamous cybercrime syndicate known as FIN7 has been linked to a spear-phishing campaign targeting the U.S. automotive industry to deliver a known backdoor called Carbanak (aka Anunak). "FIN7 identified employees at the company who worked in the IT department and had higher levels of administrative rights," the BlackBerry research and intelligence team said in a new write-up. "They

Carbanak Banking Malware Resurfaces with New Ransomware Tactics

The banking malware known as Carbanak has been observed being used in ransomware attacks with updated tactics. "The malware has adapted to incorporate attack vendors and techniques to diversify its effectiveness," cybersecurity firm NCC Group said in an analysis of ransomware attacks that took place in November 2023. "Carbanak returned last month through new

Notorious Cyber Gang FIN7 Returns With Cl0p Ransomware in New Wave of Attacks

The notorious cybercrime group known as FIN7 has been observed deploying Cl0p (aka Clop) ransomware, marking the threat actor's first ransomware campaign since late 2021. Microsoft, which detected the activity in April 2023, is tracking the financially motivated actor under its new taxonomy Sangria Tempest. "In these recent attacks, Sangria Tempest uses the PowerShell script POWERTRASH to load

FIN7 and Ex-Conti Cybercrime Gangs Join Forces in Domino Malware Attacks

A new strain of malware developed by threat actors likely affiliated with the FIN7 cybercrime group has been put to use by the members of the now-defunct Conti ransomware gang, indicating collaboration between the two crews. The malware, dubbed Domino, is primarily designed to facilitate follow-on exploitation on compromised systems, including delivering a lesser-known information stealer that