Alleged ‘Scattered Spider’ Member Extradited to U.S.

A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims.

Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms.

As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity, Buchanan (a.k.a. “tylerb”) fled the United Kingdom in February 2023, after a rival cybercrime gang hired thugs to invade his home, assault his mother, and threaten to burn him with a blowtorch unless he gave up the keys to his cryptocurrency wallet. Buchanan was arrested in June 2024 at the airport in Palma de Mallorca while trying to board a flight to Italy. His extradition to the United States was first reported last week by Bloomberg.

Members of Scattered Spider have been tied to the 2023 ransomware attacks against MGM and Caesars casinos in Las Vegas, but it remains unclear whether Buchanan was implicated in that incident. The Justice Department’s complaint against Buchanan makes no mention of the 2023 ransomware attack.

Rather, the investigation into Buchanan appears to center on the SMS phishing campaigns from 2022, and on SIM-swapping attacks that siphoned funds from individual cryptocurrency investors. In a SIM-swapping attack, crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control and intercept any text messages or phone calls to the victim’s device — including one-time passcodes for authentication and password reset links sent via SMS.

In August 2022, KrebsOnSecurity reviewed data harvested in a months-long cybercrime campaign by Scattered Spider involving countless SMS-based phishing attacks against employees at major corporations. The security firm Group-IB called them by a different name — 0ktapus, because the group typically spoofed the identity provider Okta in their phishing messages to employees at targeted firms.

The complaint against Buchanan (PDF) says the FBI tied him to the 2022 SMS phishing attacks after discovering the same username and email address was used to register numerous Okta-themed phishing domains seen in the campaign. The domain registrar NameCheap found that less than a month before the phishing spree, the account that registered those domains logged in from an Internet address in the U.K. FBI investigators said the Scottish police told them the address was leased to Buchanan from January 26, 2022 to November 7, 2022.

Authorities seized at least 20 digital devices when they raided Buchanan’s residence, and on one of those devices they found usernames and passwords for employees of three different companies targeted in the phishing campaign.

“The FBI’s investigation to date has gathered evidence showing that Buchanan and his co-conspirators targeted at least 45 companies in the United States and abroad, including Canada, India, and the United Kingdom,” the FBI complaint reads. “One of Buchanan’s devices contained a screenshot of Telegram messages between an account known to be used by Buchanan and other unidentified co-conspirators discussing dividing up the proceeds of SIM swapping.”

U.S. prosecutors allege that records obtained from Discord showed the same U.K. Internet address was used to operate a Discord account that specified a cryptocurrency wallet when asking another user to send funds. The complaint says the publicly available transaction history for that payment address shows approximately 391 bitcoin was transferred in and out of this address between October 2022 and
February 2023; 391 bitcoin is presently worth more than $26 million.

In November 2024, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles unsealed criminal charges against Buchanan and four other alleged Scattered Spider members, including Ahmed Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas; Joel Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; Evans Osiebo, 20, of Dallas; and Noah Urban, 20, of Palm Coast, Florida. KrebsOnSecurity reported last year that another suspected Scattered Spider member — a 17-year-old from the United Kingdom — was arrested as part of a joint investigation with the FBI into the MGM hack.

Mr. Buchanan’s court-appointed attorney did not respond to a request for comment. The accused faces charges of wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, and aggravated identity theft. Convictions on the latter charge carry a minimum sentence of two years in prison.

Documents from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California indicate Buchanan is being held without bail pending trial. A preliminary hearing in the case is slated for May 6.

Alleged Co-Founder of Garantex Arrested in India

Authorities in India today arrested the alleged co-founder of Garantex, a cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for facilitating tens of billions of dollars in money laundering by transnational criminal and cybercriminal organizations. Sources close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Lithuanian national Aleksej Besciokov, 46, was apprehended while vacationing on the coast of India with his family.

On March 7, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment against Besciokov and the other alleged co-founder of Garantex, Aleksandr Mira Serda, 40, a Russian national living in the United Arab Emirates.

Launched in 2019, Garantex was first sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control in April 2022 for receiving hundreds of millions in criminal proceeds, including funds used to facilitate hacking, ransomware, terrorism and drug trafficking. Since those penalties were levied, Garantex has processed more than $60 billion, according to the blockchain analysis company Elliptic.

“Garantex has been used in sanctions evasion by Russian elites, as well as to launder proceeds of crime including ransomware, darknet market trade and thefts attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group,” Elliptic wrote in a blog post. “Garantex has also been implicated in enabling Russian oligarchs to move their wealth out of the country, following the invasion of Ukraine.”

The DOJ alleges Besciokov was Garantex’s primary technical administrator and responsible for obtaining and maintaining critical Garantex infrastructure, as well as reviewing and approving transactions. Mira Serda is allegedly Garantex’s co-founder and chief commercial officer.

In conjunction with the release of the indictments, German and Finnish law enforcement seized servers hosting Garantex’s operations. A “most wanted” notice published by the U.S. Secret Service states that U.S. authorities separately obtained earlier copies of Garantex’s servers, including customer and accounting databases. Federal investigators say they also froze over $26 million in funds used to facilitate Garantex’s money laundering activities.

Besciokov was arrested within the past 24 hours while vacationing with his family in Varkala, a major coastal city in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. An officer with the local police department in Varkala confirmed Besciokov’s arrest, and said the suspect will appear in a Delhi court on March 14 to face charges.

The DOJ’s indictment says Besciokov went by the hacker handle “proforg.” This nickname corresponds to the administrator of a 20-year-old Russian language forum dedicated to nudity and crudity called “udaff.”

Besciokov and Mira Serda are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Besciokov is also charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the International Economic Emergency Powers Act—which also carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in person—and with conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Notorious Malware, Spam Host “Prospero” Moves to Kaspersky Lab

One of the most notorious providers of abuse-friendly “bulletproof” web hosting for cybercriminals has started routing its operations through networks run by the Russian antivirus and security firm Kaspersky Lab, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Security experts say the Russia-based service provider Prospero OOO (the triple O is the Russian version of “LLC”) has long been a persistent source of malicious software, botnet controllers, and a torrent of phishing websites. Last year, the French security firm Intrinsec detailed Prospero’s connections to bulletproof services advertised on Russian cybercrime forums under the names Securehost and BEARHOST.

Bulletproof hosts are so named when they earn or cultivate a reputation for ignoring legal demands and abuse complaints. And BEARHOST has been cultivating its reputation since at least 2019.

“If you need a server for a botnet, for malware, brute, scan, phishing, fakes and any other tasks, please contact us,” BEARHOST’s ad on one forum advises. “We completely ignore all abuses without exception, including SPAMHAUS and other organizations.”

Intrinsec found Prospero has courted some of Russia’s nastiest cybercrime groups, hosting control servers for multiple ransomware gangs over the past two years. Intrinsec said its analysis showed Prospero frequently hosts malware operations such as SocGholish and GootLoader, which are spread primarily via fake browser updates on hacked websites and often lay the groundwork for more serious cyber intrusions — including ransomware.

BEARHOST prides itself on the ability to evade blocking by Spamhaus, an organization that many Internet service providers around the world rely on to help identify and block sources of malware and spam. Earlier this week, Spamhaus said it noticed that Prospero was suddenly connecting to the Internet by routing through networks operated by Kaspersky Lab in Moscow.

Update, March 1, 9:43 a.m. ET: In a written statement, Kaspersky said it is aware of the public claim about the company allegedly providing services to a “bulletproof” web hosting provider. Here is their full statement:

“Kaspersky denies these claims as the company does not work and has never worked with the service provider in question. The routing through networks operated by Kaspersky doesn’t by default mean provision of the company’s services, as Kaspersky’s automatic system (AS) path might appear as a technical prefix in the network of telecom providers the company works with and provides its DDoS services.”

“Kaspersky pays great attention to conducting business ethically and ensuring that its solutions are used for their original purpose of providing cybersecurity protection. The company is currently investigating the situation to inform the company whose network could have served as a transit for a “bulletproof” web hosting provider so that the former takes the necessary measures.”

Kaspersky began selling antivirus and security software in the United States in 2005, and the company’s malware researchers have earned accolades from the security community for many important discoveries over the years. But in September 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) barred U.S. federal agencies from using Kaspersky software, mandating its removal within 90 days.

Cybersecurity reporter Kim Zetter notes that DHS didn’t cite any specific justification for its ban in 2017, but media reports quoting anonymous government officials referenced two incidents. Zetter wrote:

According to one story, an NSA contractor developing offensive hacking tools for the spy agency had Kaspersky software installed on his home computer where he was developing the tools, and the software detected the source code as malicious code and extracted it from his computer, as antivirus software is designed to do. A second story claimed that Israeli spies caught Russian government hackers using Kaspersky software to search customer systems for files containing U.S. secrets.

Kaspersky denied that anyone used its software to search for secret information on customer machines and said that the tools on the NSA worker’s machine were detected in the same way that all antivirus software detects files it deems suspicious and then quarantines or extracts them for analysis. Once Kaspersky discovered that the code its antivirus software detected on the NSA worker’s machine were not malicious programs but source code in development by the U.S. government for its hacking operations, CEO Eugene Kaspersky says he ordered workers to delete the code.

Last year, the U.S. Commerce Department banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the U.S. effective July 20, 2024. U.S. officials argued the ban was needed because Russian law requires domestic companies to cooperate in all official investigations, and thus the Russian government could force Kaspersky to secretly gather intelligence on its behalf.

Phishing data gathered last year by the Interisle Consulting Group ranked hosting networks by their size and concentration of spambot hosts, and found Prospero had a higher spam score than any other provider by far.

It remains unclear why Kaspersky is providing transit to Prospero. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, said routing records show the relationship between Prospero and Kaspersky started at the beginning of December 2024.

Madory said Kaspersky’s network appears to be hosting several financial institutions, including Russia’s largest — Alfa-Bank. Kaspersky sells services to help protect customers from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and Madory said it could be that Prospero is simply purchasing that protection from Kaspersky.

But if that is the case, it doesn’t make the situation any better, said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at the security firm Silent Push.

“In some ways, providing DDoS protection to a well-known bulletproof hosting provider may be even worse than just allowing them to connect to the rest of the Internet over your infrastructure,” Edwards said.

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a secret for long: A careful review of Kiberphant0m’s daily chats across multiple cybercrime personas suggests they are a U.S. Army soldier who is or was recently stationed in South Korea.

Kiberphant0m’s identities on cybercrime forums and on Telegram and Discord chat channels have been selling data stolen from customers of the cloud data storage company Snowflake. At the end of 2023, malicious hackers discovered that many companies had uploaded huge volumes of sensitive customer data to Snowflake accounts that were protected with nothing more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication required).

After scouring darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, the hackers began raiding the data storage repositories for some of the world’s largest corporations. Among those was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information, phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people.  Wired.com reported in July that AT&T paid a hacker $370,000 to delete stolen phone records.

On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario, on a provisional arrest warrant from the United States, which has since indicted him on 20 criminal counts connected to the Snowflake breaches. Another suspect in the Snowflake hacks, John Erin Binns, is an American who is currently incarcerated in Turkey.

Investigators say Moucka, who went by the handles Judische and Waifu, had tasked Kiberphant0m with selling data stolen from Snowflake customers who refused to pay a ransom to have their information deleted. Immediately after news broke of Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m was clearly furious, and posted on the hacker community BreachForums what they claimed were the AT&T call logs for President-elect Donald J. Trump and for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“In the event you do not reach out to us @ATNT all presidential government call logs will be leaked,” Kiberphant0m threatened, signing their post with multiple “#FREEWAIFU” tags. “You don’t think we don’t have plans in the event of an arrest? Think again.”

On the same day, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed was the “data schema” from the U.S. National Security Agency.

“This was obtained from the ATNT Snowflake hack which is why ATNT paid an extortion,” Kiberphant0m wrote in a thread on BreachForums. “Why would ATNT pay Waifu for the data when they wouldn’t even pay an extortion for over 20M+ SSNs?”

Also on Nov. 5, Kiberphant0m offered call logs stolen from Verizon’s push-to-talk (PTT) customers — mainly U.S. government agencies and emergency first responders. On Nov. 9, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on BreachForums offering a “SIM-swapping” service targeting Verizon PTT customers. In a SIM-swap, fraudsters use credentials that are phished or stolen from mobile phone company employees to divert a target’s phone calls and text messages to a device they control.

MEET ‘BUTTHOLIO’

Kiberphant0m joined BreachForums in January 2024, but their public utterances on Discord and Telegram channels date back to at least early 2022. On their first post to BreachForums, Kiberphant0m said they could be reached at the Telegram handle @cyb3rph4nt0m.

A review of @cyb3rph4nt0m shows this user has posted more than 4,200 messages since January 2024. Many of these messages were attempts to recruit people who could be hired to deploy a piece of malware that enslaved host machines in an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet.

On BreachForums, Kiberphant0m has sold the source code to “Shi-Bot,” a custom Linux DDoS botnet based on the Mirai malware. Kiberphant0m had few sales threads on BreachForums prior to the Snowflake attacks becoming public in May, and many of those involved databases stolen from companies in South Korea.

On June 5, 2024, a Telegram user by the name “Buttholio” joined the fraud-focused Telegram channel “Comgirl” and claimed to be Kiberphant0m. Buttholio made the claim after being taunted as a nobody by another denizen of Comgirl, referring to their @cyb3rph4nt0m account on Telegram and the Kiberphant0m user on cybercrime forums.

“Type ‘kiberphant0m’ on google with the quotes,” Buttholio told another user. “I’ll wait. Go ahead. Over 50 articles. 15+ telecoms breached. I got the IMSI number to every single person that’s ever registered in Verizon, Tmobile, ATNT and Verifone.”

On Sept. 17, 2023, Buttholio posted in a Discord chat room dedicated to players of the video game Escape from Tarkov. “Come to Korea, servers there is pretty much no extract camper or cheater,” Buttholio advised.

In another message that same day in the gaming Discord, Buttholio told others they bought the game in the United States, but that they were playing it in Asia.

“USA is where the game was purchased from, server location is actual in game servers u play on. I am a u.s. soldier so i bought it in the states but got on rotation so i have to use asian servers,” they shared.

‘REVERSESHELL’

The account @Kiberphant0m was assigned the Telegram ID number 6953392511. A review of this ID at the cyber intelligence platform Flashpoint shows that on January 4, 2024 Kibertphant0m posted to the Telegram channel “Dstat,” which is populated by cybercriminals involved in launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and selling DDoS-for-hire services [Full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this website].

Immediately after Kiberphant0m logged on to the Dstat channel, another user wrote “hi buttholio,” to which Kiberphant0m replied with an affirmative greeting “wsg,” or “what’s good.” On Nov. 1, Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.

Flashpoint’s data shows that @kiberphant0m told a fellow member of Dstat on April 10, 2024 that their alternate Telegram username was “@reverseshell,” and did the same two weeks later in the Telegram chat The Jacuzzi. The Telegram ID for this account is 5408575119.

Way back on Nov. 15, 2022, @reverseshell told a fellow member of a Telegram channel called Cecilio Chat that they were a soldier in the U.S. Army. This user also shared the following image of someone pictured waist-down in military fatigues, with a camouflaged backpack at their feet:

In September 2022, Reverseshell was embroiled in an argument with another member who had threatened to launch a DDoS attack against Reverseshell’s Internet address. After the promised attack materialized, Reverseshell responded, “Yall just hit military base contracted wifi.”

In a chat from October 2022, Reverseshell was bragging about the speed of the servers they were using, and in reply to another member’s question said that they were accessing the Internet via South Korea Telecom.

Telegram chat logs archived by Flashpoint show that on Aug. 23, 2022, Reverseshell bragged they’d been using automated tools to find valid logins for Internet servers that they resold to others.

“I’ve hit US gov servers with default creds,” Reverseshell wrote, referring to systems with easy-to-guess usernames and/or passwords. “Telecom control servers, machinery shops, Russian ISP servers, etc. I sold a few big companies for like $2-3k a piece. You can sell the access when you get a big SSH into corporation.”

On July 29, 2023, Reverseshell posted a screenshot of a login page for a major U.S. defense contractor, claiming they had an aerospace company’s credentials to sell.

PROMAN AND VARS_SECC

Flashpoint finds the Telegram ID 5408575119 has used several aliases since 2022, including Reverseshell and Proman557.

A search on the username Proman557 at the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 shows that a hacker by the name “Proman554” registered on Hackforums in September 2022, and in messages to other users Proman554 said they can be reached at the Telegram account Buttholio.

Intel 471 also finds the Proman557 moniker is one of many used by a person on the Russian-language hacking forum Exploit in 2022 who sold a variety of Linux-based botnet malware.

Proman557 was eventually banned — allegedly for scamming a fellow member out of $350 — and the Exploit moderator warned forum users that Proman557 had previously registered under several other nicknames, including an account called “Vars_Secc.”

Vars_Secc’s thousands of comments on Telegram over two years show this user divided their time between online gaming, maintaining a DDoS botnet, and promoting the sale or renting of their botnets to other users.

“I use ddos for many things not just to be a skid,” Vars_Secc pronounced. “Why do you think I haven’t sold my net?” They then proceeded to list the most useful qualities of their botnet:

-I use it to hit off servers that ban me or piss me off
-I used to ddos certain games to get my items back since the data reverts to when u joined
-I use it for server side desync RCE vulnerabilities
-I use it to sometimes ransom
-I use it when bored as a source of entertainment

Flashpoint shows that in June 2023, Vars_Secc responded to taunting from a fellow member in the Telegram channel SecHub who had threatened to reveal their personal details to the federal government for a reward.

“Man I’ve been doing this shit for 4 years,” Vars_Secc replied nonchalantly. “I highly doubt the government is going to pay millions of dollars for data on some random dude operating a pointless ddos botnet and finding a few vulnerabilities here and there.”

For several months in 2023, Vars_Secc also was an active member of the Russian-language crime forum XSS, where they sold access to a U.S. government server for $2,000. However, Vars_Secc would be banned from XSS after attempting to sell access to the Russian telecommunications giant Rostelecom. [In this, Vars_Secc violated the Number One Rule for operating on a Russia-based crime forum: Never offer to hack or sell data stolen from Russian entities or citizens].

On June 20, 2023, Vars_Secc posted a sales thread on the cybercrime forum Ramp 2.0 titled, “Selling US Gov Financial Access.”

“Server within the network, possible to pivot,” Vars_Secc’s sparse sales post read. “Has 3-5 subroutes connected to it. Price $1,250. Telegram: Vars_Secc.”

Vars_Secc also used Ramp in June 2023 to sell access to a “Vietnam government Internet Network Information Center.”

“Selling access server allocated within the network,” Vars_Secc wrote. “Has some data on it. $500.”

BUG BOUNTIES

The Vars_Secc identity claimed on Telegram in May 2023 that they made money by submitting reports about software flaws to HackerOne, a company that helps technology firms field reports about security vulnerabilities in their products and services. Specifically, Vars_Secc said they had earned financial rewards or “bug bounties” from reddit.com, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Coinbase, among 30 others.

“I make money off bug bounties, it’s quite simple,” Vars_Secc said when asked what they do for a living. “That’s why I have over 30 bug bounty reports on HackerOne.”

A month before that, Vars_Secc said they’d found a vulnerability in reddit.com.

“I poisoned Reddit’s cache,” they explained. “I’m going to exploit it further, then report it to reddit.”

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from HackerOne, which said it would investigate the claims. This story will be updated if they respond.

The Vars_Secc telegram handle also has claimed ownership of the BreachForums member “Boxfan,” and Intel 471 shows Boxfan’s early posts on the forum had the Vars_Secc Telegram account in their signature. In their most recent post to BreachForums in January 2024, Boxfan disclosed a security vulnerability they found in Naver, the most popular search engine in South Korea (according to statista.com). Boxfan’s comments suggest they have strong negative feelings about South Korean culture.

“Have fun exploiting this vulnerability,” Boxfan wrote on BreachForums, after pasting a long string of computer code intended to demonstrate the flaw. “Fuck you South Korea and your discriminatory views. Nobody likes ur shit kpop you evil fucks. Whoever can dump this DB [database] congrats. I don’t feel like doing it so I’ll post it to the forum.”

The many identities tied to Kiberphant0m strongly suggest they are or until recently were a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea. Kiberphant0m’s alter egos never mentioned their military rank, regiment, or specialization.

However, it is likely that Kiberphant0m’s facility with computers and networking was noticed by the Army. According to the U.S. Army’s website, the bulk of its forces in South Korea reside within the Eighth Army, which has a dedicated cyber operations unit focused on defending against cyber threats.

On April 1, 2023, Vars_Secc posted to a public Telegram chat channel a screenshot of the National Security Agency’s website. The image indicated the visitor had just applied for some type of job at the NSA.

The NSA has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Reached via Telegram, Kiberphant0m acknowledged that KrebsOnSecurity managed to unearth their old handles.

“I see you found the IP behind it no way,” Kiberphant0m replied. “I see you managed to find my old aliases LOL.”

Kiberphant0m denied being in the U.S. Army or ever being in South Korea, and said all of that was a lengthy ruse designed to create a fictitious persona. “Epic opsec troll,” they claimed.

Asked if they were at all concerned about getting busted, Kiberphant0m called that an impossibility.

“I literally can’t get caught,” Kiberphant0m said, declining an invitation to explain why. “I don’t even live in the USA Mr. Krebs.”

Below is a mind map that hopefully helps illustrate some of the connections between and among Kiberphant0m’s apparent alter egos.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to extend a special note of thanks to the New York City based security intelligence firm Unit 221B for their assistance in helping to piece together key elements of Kiberphant0m’s different identities.

An Interview With the Target & Home Depot Hacker

In December 2023, KrebsOnSecurity revealed the real-life identity of Rescator, the nickname used by a Russian cybercriminal who sold more than 100 million payment cards stolen from Target and Home Depot between 2013 and 2014. Moscow resident Mikhail Shefel, who confirmed using the Rescator identity in a recent interview, also admitted reaching out because he is broke and seeking publicity for several new money making schemes.

Mr. Shefel, who recently changed his legal surname to Lenin, was the star of last year’s story, Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach. That investigation detailed how the 38-year-old Shefel adopted the nickname Rescator while working as vice president of payments at ChronoPay, a Russian financial company that paid spammers to advertise fake antivirus scams, male enhancement drugs and knockoff pharmaceuticals.

Mr. Shefel did not respond to requests for comment in advance of that December 2023 profile. Nor did he respond to reporting here in January 2024 that he ran an IT company with a 34-year-old Russian man named Aleksandr Ermakov, who was sanctioned by authorities in Australia, the U.K. and U.S. for stealing data on nearly 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank.

But not long after KrebsOnSecurity reported in April that Shefel/Rescator also was behind the theft of Social Security and tax information from a majority of South Carolina residents in 2012, Mr. Shefel began contacting this author with the pretense of setting the record straight on his alleged criminal hacking activities.

In a series of live video chats and text messages, Mr. Shefel confirmed he indeed went by the Rescator identity for several years, and that he did operate a slew of websites between 2013 and 2015 that sold payment card data stolen from Target, Home Depot and a number of other nationwide retail chains.

Shefel claims the true mastermind behind the Target and other retail breaches was Dmitri Golubov, an infamous Ukrainian hacker known as the co-founder of Carderplanet, among the earliest Russian-language cybercrime forums focused on payment card fraud. Mr. Golubov could not be reached for comment, and Shefel says he no longer has the laptop containing evidence to support that claim.

Shefel asserts he and his team were responsible for developing the card-stealing malware that Golubov’s hackers installed on Target and Home Depot payment terminals, and that at the time he was technical director of a long-running Russian cybercrime community called Lampeduza.

“My nickname was MikeMike, and I worked with Dmitri Golubov and made technologies for him,” Shefel said. “I’m also godfather of his second son.”

A week after breaking the story about the 2013 data breach at Target, KrebsOnSecurity published Who’s Selling Cards from Target?, which identified a Ukrainian man who went by the nickname Helkern as Rescator’s original identity. But Shefel claims Helkern was subordinate to Golubov, and that he was responsible for introducing the two men more than a decade ago.

“Helkern was my friend, I [set up a] meeting with Golubov and him in 2013,” Shefel said. “That was in Odessa, Ukraine. I was often in that city, and [it’s where] I met my second wife.”

Shefel claims he made several hundred thousand dollars selling cards stolen by Golubov’s Ukraine-based hacking crew, but that not long after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 Golubov cut him out of the business and replaced Shefel’s malware coding team with programmers in Ukraine.

Golubov was arrested in Ukraine in 2005 as part of a joint investigation with multiple U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, but his political connections in the country ensured his case went nowhere. Golubov later earned immunity from prosecution by becoming an elected politician and founding the Internet Party of Ukraine, which called for free internet for all, the creation of country-wide “hacker schools” and the “computerization of the entire economy.”

Mr. Shefel says he stopped selling stolen payment cards after being pushed out of the business, and invested his earnings in a now-defunct Russian search engine called tf[.]org. He also apparently ran a business called click2dad[.]net that paid people to click on ads for Russian government employment opportunities.

When those enterprises fizzled out, Shefel reverted to selling malware coding services for hire under the nickname “Getsend“; this claim checks out, as Getsend for many years advertised the same Telegram handle that Shefel used in our recent chats and video calls.

Shefel acknowledged that his outreach was motivated by a desire to publicize several new business ventures. None of those will be mentioned here because Shefel is already using my December 2023 profile of him to advertise what appears to be a pyramid scheme, and to remind others within the Russian hacker community of his skills and accomplishments.

Shefel says he is now flat broke, and that he currently has little to show for a storied hacking career. The Moscow native said he recently heard from his ex-wife, who had read last year’s story about him and was suddenly wondering where he’d hidden all of his earnings.

More urgently, Shefel needs money to stay out of prison. In February, he and Ermakov were arrested on charges of operating a short-lived ransomware affiliate program in 2021 called Sugar (a.k.a. Sugar Locker), which targeted single computers and end-users instead of corporations. Shefel is due to face those charges in a Moscow court on Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. Ermakov was recently found guilty and given two years probation.

Shefel claims his Sugar ransomware affiliate program was a bust, and never generated any profits. Russia is known for not prosecuting criminal hackers within its borders who scrupulously avoid attacking Russian businesses and consumers. When asked why he now faces prosecution over Sugar, Shefel said he’s certain the investigation was instigated by  Pyotr “Peter” Vrublevsky — the son of his former boss at ChronoPay.

ChronoPay founder and CEO Pavel Vrublevsky was the key subject of my 2014 book Spam Nation, which described his role as head of one of Russia’s most notorious criminal spam operations.

Vrublevsky Sr. recently declared bankruptcy, and is currently in prison on fraud charges. Russian 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 at the time. 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.

However, in 2022 KrebsOnSecurity reported on a more likely reason for Vrublevsky’s latest criminal charges: He’d been extensively documenting the nicknames, real names and criminal exploits of Russian hackers who worked with the protection of corrupt officials in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), and operating a Telegram channel that threatened to expose alleged nefarious dealings by Russian financial executives.

Shefel believes Vrublevsky’s son Peter paid corrupt cops to levy criminal charges against him after reporting the youth to Moscow police, allegedly for walking around in public with a loaded firearm. Shefel says the Russian authorities told the younger Vrublevsky that he had lodged the firearms complaint.

In July 2024, the Russian news outlet Izvestia published a lengthy investigation into Peter Vrublevsky, alleging that the younger son took up his father’s mantle and was responsible for advertising Sprut, a Russian-language narcotics bazaar that sprang to life after the Hydra darknet market was shut down by international law enforcement agencies in 2022.

Izvestia reports that Peter Vrublevsky is currently living in Switzerland, where he reportedly fled in 2022 after being “arrested in absentia” in Russia on charges of running a violent group that could be hired via Telegram to conduct a range of physical attacks in real life, including firebombings and muggings.

Shefel claims his former partner Golubov was involved in the development and dissemination of early ransomware strains, including Cryptolocker, and that Golubov remains active in the cybercrime community.

Meanwhile, Mr. Shefel portrays himself as someone who is barely scraping by with the few odd coding jobs that come his way each month. Incredibly, the day after our initial interview via Telegram, Shefel proposed going into business together.

By way of example, he suggested maybe a company centered around recovering lost passwords for cryptocurrency accounts, or perhaps a series of online retail stores that sold cheap Chinese goods at a steep markup in the United States.

“Hi, how are you?” he inquired. “Maybe we can open business?”

Low-Drama ‘Dark Angels’ Reap Record Ransoms

A ransomware group called Dark Angels made headlines this past week when it was revealed the crime group recently received a record $75 million data ransom payment from a Fortune 50 company. Security experts say the Dark Angels have been around since 2021, but the group doesn’t get much press because they work alone and maintain a low profile, picking one target at a time and favoring mass data theft over disrupting the victim’s operations.

Security firm Zscaler ThreatLabz this month ranked Dark Angels as the top ransomware threat for 2024, noting that in early 2024 a victim paid the ransomware group $75 million — higher than any previously recorded ransom payment. ThreatLabz found Dark Angels has conducted some of the largest ransomware attacks to date, and yet little is known about the group.

Brett Stone-Gross, senior director of threat intelligence at ThreatLabz, said Dark Angels operate using an entirely different playbook than most other ransomware groups. For starters, he said, Dark Angels does not employ the typical ransomware affiliate model, which relies on hackers-for-hire to install malicious software that locks up infected systems.

“They really don’t want to be in the headlines or cause business disruptions,” Stone-Gross said. “They’re about making money and attracting as little attention as possible.”

Most ransomware groups maintain flashy victim leak sites which threaten to publish the target’s stolen data unless a ransom demand is paid. But the Dark Angels didn’t even have a victim shaming site until April 2023. And the leak site isn’t particularly well branded; it’s called Dunghill Leak.

“Nothing about them is flashy,” Stone-Gross said. “For the longest time, they didn’t even want to cause a big headline, but they probably felt compelled to create that leaks site because they wanted to show they were serious and that they were going to post victim data and make it accessible.”

Dark Angels is thought to be a Russia-based cybercrime syndicate whose distinguishing characteristic is stealing truly staggering amounts of data from major companies across multiple sectors, including healthcare, finance, government and education. For large businesses, the group has exfiltrated between 10-100 terabytes of data, which can take days or weeks to transfer, ThreatLabz found.

Like most ransom gangs, Dark Angels will publish data stolen from victims who do not pay. Some of the more notable victims listed on Dunghill Leak include the global food distribution firm Sysco, which disclosed a ransomware attack in May 2023; and the travel booking giant Sabre, which was hit by the Dark Angels in September 2023.

Stone-Gross said Dark Angels is often reluctant to deploy ransomware malware because such attacks work by locking up the target’s IT infrastructure, which typically causes the victim’s business to grind to a halt for days, weeks or even months on end. And those types of breaches tend to make headlines quickly.

“They selectively choose whether they want to deploy ransomware or not,” he said. “If they deem they can encrypt some files that won’t cause major disruptions — but will give them a ton of data — that’s what they’ll do. But really, what separates them from the rest is the volume of data they’re stealing. It’s a whole order of magnitude greater with Dark Angels. Companies losing vast amounts of data will pay these high ransoms.”

So who paid the record $75 million ransom? Bleeping Computer posited on July 30 that the victim was the pharmaceutical giant Cencora (formerly AmeriSourceBergen Corporation), which reported a data security incident to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on February 21, 2024.

The SEC requires publicly-traded companies to disclose a potentially material cybersecurity event within four days of the incident. Cencora is currently #10 on the Fortune 500 list, generating more than $262 billion in revenue last year.

Cencora did not respond to questions about whether it had made a ransom payment in connection with the February cybersecurity incident, and referred KrebsOnSecurity to expenses listed under “Other” in the restructuring section of their latest quarterly financial report (PDF). That report states that the majority of the $30 million cost in “Other” was associated with the breach.

Cencora’s quarterly statement said the incident affected a standalone legacy information technology platform in one country and the foreign business unit’s ability to operate in that country for approximately two weeks.

In its most recent State of Ransomware report (PDF), security firm Sophos found the average ransomware payment had increased fivefold in the past year, from $400,000 in 2023 to $2 million. Sophos says that in more than four-fifths (82%) of cases funding for the ransom came from multiple sources. Overall, 40% of total ransom funding came from the organizations themselves and 23% from insurance providers.

Further reading: ThreatLabz ransomware report (PDF).

U.S. Trades Cybercriminals to Russia in Prisoner Swap

Twenty-four prisoners were freed today in an international prisoner swap between Russia and Western countries. Among the eight Russians repatriated were several convicted cybercriminals. In return, Russia has reportedly released 16 prisoners, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.

Among those in the prisoner swap is Roman Seleznev, 40, who was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for racketeering convictions tied to a lengthy career in stealing and selling payment card data. Seleznev earned this then-record sentence by operating some of the underground’s most bustling marketplaces for stolen card data.

Once known by the hacker handles “Track2,” “Bulba” and “nCux,” Seleznev is the son of Valery Seleznev, a prominent member of the Russian parliament who is considered an ally of Vladimir Putin. U.S. prosecutors showed that for years Seleznev stayed a step ahead of the law by tapping into contacts at the Russian FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, and by periodically changing hacker handles.

But in 2014 Seleznev was captured by U.S. Secret Service agents, who had zeroed in on Seleznev’s posh vacation spot in The Maldives. At the time, the South Asian island country was a popular destination for Eastern Europe-based cybercriminals, who viewed it as beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

In addition to receiving a record prison sentence, Seleznev was ordered to pay more than $50 million in restitution to his victims. That loss amount equaled the total losses inflicted by Seleznev’s various carding stores, and other thefts attributed to members of the hacking forum carder[.]su, a bustling cybercrime community of which Seleznev was a leading organizer.

Also released in the prisoner swap was Vladislav Klyushin, a 42-year-old Muscovite sentenced in September 2023 to nine years in prison for what U.S. prosecutors called a “$93 million hack-to-trade conspiracy.” Klyushin and his crew hacked into companies and used information stolen in those intrusions to make illegal stock trades.

Klyushin likewise was arrested while vacationing abroad: The Associated Press reported that Klyushin was captured in Switzerland after arriving on a private jet, and just before he and his party were about to board a helicopter to whisk them to a nearby ski resort.

Klyushin is the owner of M-13, a Russian technology company that contracts with the Russian government. According to prosecutors, M-13 offered penetration testing and “advanced persistent threat (APT) emulation.” As part of his guilty plea, Klyushin was also ordered to forfeit $34 million, and to pay restitution in an amount that was to be determined.

The U.S. government says four of Klyushin’s alleged co-conspirators remain at large, including Ivan Ermakov, who was among 12 Russians charged in 2018 with hacking into key Democratic Party email accounts.

Among the Americans freed by Russia were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, 32, who has spent the last 16 months in a Russian prison on spying charges. Also released was Alsu Kurmasheva, 47, a Russian American editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was arrested last year; and Paul Whelan, 54, a former U.S. Marine arrested in 2018 and accused of spying.

The New York Times reports several others freed by Russia were German nationals, including German Moyzhes, a lawyer who was helping Russians obtain residence permits in Germany and other E.U. countries. The Times says Slovenia, Norway and Poland released four people accused of being Russian spies.

Reuters reports that Germany released Vadim Krasikov, an FSB colonel serving a life sentence there for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park.

Update, 8:47 p.m. ET:An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that one of the Russian hackers released was the BTC-e co-founder Alexander Vinnik. KrebsOnSecurity was unable to confirm his release. The above story has been edited to reflect that change.

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).

‘Operation Endgame’ Hits Malware Delivery Platforms

Law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe today announced Operation Endgame, a coordinated action against some of the most popular cybercrime platforms for delivering ransomware and data-stealing malware. Dubbed “the largest ever operation against botnets,” the international effort is being billed as the opening salvo in an ongoing campaign targeting advanced malware “droppers” or “loaders” like IcedID, Smokeloader and Trickbot.

Operation Endgame targets the cybercrime ecosystem supporting droppers/loaders, slang terms used to describe tiny, custom-made programs designed to surreptitiously install malware onto a target system. Droppers are typically used in the initial stages of a breach, and they allow cybercriminals to bypass security measures and deploy additional harmful programs, including viruses, ransomware, or spyware.

Droppers like IcedID are most often deployed through email attachments, hacked websites, or bundled with legitimate software. For example, cybercriminals have long used paid ads on Google to trick people into installing malware disguised as popular free software, such as Microsoft Teams, Adobe Reader and Discord. In those cases, the dropper is the hidden component bundled with the legitimate software that quietly loads malware onto the user’s system.

Droppers remain such a critical, human-intensive component of nearly all major cybercrime enterprises that the most popular have turned into full-fledged cybercrime services of their own. By targeting the individuals who develop and maintain dropper services and their supporting infrastructure, authorities are hoping to disrupt multiple cybercriminal operations simultaneously.

According to a statement from the European police agency Europol, between May 27 and May 29, 2024 authorities arrested four suspects (one in Armenia and three in Ukraine), and disrupted or took down more than 100 Internet servers in Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, United States and Ukraine. Authorities say they also seized more than 2,000 domain names that supported dropper infrastructure online.

In addition, Europol released information on eight fugitives suspected of involvement in dropper services and who are wanted by Germany; their names and photos were added to Europol’s “Most Wanted” list on 30 May 2024.

“It has been discovered through the investigations so far that one of the main suspects has earned at least EUR 69 million in cryptocurrency by renting out criminal infrastructure sites to deploy ransomware,” Europol wrote. “The suspect’s transactions are constantly being monitored and legal permission to seize these assets upon future actions has already been obtained.”

There have been numerous such coordinated malware takedown efforts in the past, and yet often the substantial amount of coordination required between law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity firms involved is not sustained after the initial disruption and/or arrests.

But a new website erected to detail today’s action — operation-endgame.com — makes the case that this time is different, and that more takedowns and arrests are coming. “Operation Endgame does not end today,” the site promises. “New actions will be announced on this website.”

Perhaps in recognition that many of today’s top cybercriminals reside in countries that are effectively beyond the reach of international law enforcement, actions like Operation Endgame seem increasingly focused on mind games — i.e., trolling the hackers.

Writing in this month’s issue of Wired, Matt Burgess makes the case that Western law enforcement officials have turned to psychological measures as an added way to slow down Russian hackers and cut to the heart of the sweeping cybercrime ecosystem.

“These nascent psyops include efforts to erode the limited trust the criminals have in each other, driving subtle wedges between fragile hacker egos, and sending offenders personalized messages showing they’re being watched,” Burgess wrote.

When authorities in the U.S. and U.K. announced in February 2024 that they’d infiltrated and seized the infrastructure used by the infamous LockBit ransomware gang, they borrowed the existing design of LockBit’s victim shaming website to link instead to press releases about the takedown, and included a countdown timer that was eventually replaced with the personal details of LockBit’s alleged leader.

The Operation Endgame website also includes a countdown timer, which serves to tease the release of several animated videos that mimic the same sort of flashy, short advertisements that established cybercriminals often produce to promote their services online. At least two of the videos include a substantial amount of text written in Russian.

The coordinated takedown comes on the heels of another law enforcement action this week against what the director of the FBI called “likely the world’s largest botnet ever.” On Wednesday U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the arrest of YunHe Wang, the alleged operator of the ten-year-old online anonymity service 911 S5. The government also seized 911 S5’s domains and online infrastructure, which allegedly turned computers running various “free VPN” products into Internet traffic relays that facilitated billions of dollars in online fraud and cybercrime.

How Did Authorities Identify the Alleged Lockbit Boss?

Last week, the United States joined the U.K. and Australia in sanctioning and charging a Russian man named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the leader of the infamous LockBit ransomware group. LockBit’s leader “LockBitSupp” claims the feds named the wrong guy, saying the charges don’t explain how they connected him to Khoroshev. This post examines the activities of Khoroshev’s many alter egos on the cybercrime forums, and tracks the career of a gifted malware author who has written and sold malicious code for the past 14 years.

On May 7, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Khoroshev on 26 criminal counts, including extortion, wire fraud, and conspiracy. The government alleges Khoroshev created, sold and used the LockBit ransomware strain to personally extort more than $100 million from hundreds of victim organizations, and that LockBit as a group extorted roughly half a billion dollars over four years.

Federal investigators say Khoroshev ran LockBit as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation, wherein he kept 20 percent of any ransom amount paid by a victim organization infected with his code, with the remaining 80 percent of the payment going to LockBit affiliates responsible for spreading the malware.

Financial sanctions levied against Khoroshev by the U.S. Department of the Treasury listed his known email and street address (in Voronezh, in southwest Russia), passport number, and even his tax ID number (hello, Russian tax authorities). The Treasury filing says Khoroshev used the emails sitedev5@yandex.ru, and khoroshev1@icloud.com.

According to DomainTools.com, the address sitedev5@yandex.ru was used to register at least six domains, including a Russian business registered in Khoroshev’s name called tkaner.com, which is a blog about clothing and fabrics.

A search at the breach-tracking service Constella Intelligence on the phone number in Tkaner’s registration records  — 7.9521020220 — brings up multiple official Russian government documents listing the number’s owner as Dmitri Yurievich Khoroshev.

Another domain registered to that phone number was stairwell[.]ru, which at one point advertised the sale of wooden staircases. Constella finds that the email addresses webmaster@stairwell.ru and admin@stairwell.ru used the password 225948.

DomainTools reports that stairwell.ru for several years included the registrant’s name as “Dmitrij Ju Horoshev,” and the email address pin@darktower.su. According to Constella, this email address was used in 2010 to register an account for a Dmitry Yurievich Khoroshev from Voronezh, Russia at the hosting provider firstvds.ru.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 finds that pin@darktower.ru was used by a Russian-speaking member called Pin on the English-language cybercrime forum Opensc. Pin was active on Opensc around March 2012, and authored 13 posts that mostly concerned data encryption issues, or how to fix bugs in code.

Other posts concerned custom code Pin claimed to have written that would bypass memory protections on Windows XP and Windows 7 systems, and inject malware into memory space normally allocated to trusted applications on a Windows machine.

Pin also was active at that same time on the Russian-language security forum Antichat, where they told fellow forum members to contact them at the ICQ instant messenger number 669316.

NEROWOLFE

A search on the ICQ number 669316 at Intel 471 shows that in April 2011, a user by the name NeroWolfe joined the Russian cybercrime forum Zloy using the email address d.horoshev@gmail.com, and from an Internet address in Voronezh, RU.

Constella finds the same password tied to webmaster@stairwell.ru (225948) was used by the email address 3k@xakep.ru, which Intel 471 says was registered to more than a dozen NeroWolfe accounts across just as many Russian cybercrime forums between 2011 and 2015.

NeroWolfe’s introductory post to the forum Verified in Oct. 2011 said he was a system administrator and C++ coder.

“Installing SpyEYE, ZeuS, any DDoS and spam admin panels,” NeroWolfe wrote. This user said they specialize in developing malware, creating computer worms, and crafting new ways to hijack Web browsers.

“I can provide my portfolio on request,” NeroWolfe wrote. “P.S. I don’t modify someone else’s code or work with someone else’s frameworks.”

In April 2013, NeroWolfe wrote in a private message to another Verified forum user that he was selling a malware “loader” program that could bypass all of the security protections on Windows XP and Windows 7.

“The access to the network is slightly restricted,” NeroWolfe said of the loader, which he was selling for $5,000. “You won’t manage to bind a port. However, it’s quite possible to send data. The code is written in C.”

In an October 2013 discussion on the cybercrime forum Exploit, NeroWolfe weighed in on the karmic ramifications of ransomware. At the time, ransomware-as-a-service didn’t exist yet, and many members of Exploit were still making good money from “lockers,” relatively crude programs that locked the user out of their system until they agreed to make a small payment (usually a few hundred dollars via prepaid Green Dot cards).

Lockers, which presaged the coming ransomware scourge, were generally viewed by the Russian-speaking cybercrime forums as harmless moneymaking opportunities, because they usually didn’t seek to harm the host computer or endanger files on the system. Also, there were still plenty of locker programs that aspiring cybercriminals could either buy or rent to make a steady income.

NeroWolfe reminded forum denizens that they were just as vulnerable to ransomware attacks as their would-be victims, and that what goes around comes around.

“Guys, do you have a conscience?,” NeroWolfe wrote. “Okay, lockers, network gopstop aka business in Russian. The last thing was always squeezed out of the suckers. But encoders, no one is protected from them, including the local audience.”

If Khoroshev was ever worried that someone outside of Russia might be able to connect his early hacker handles to his real life persona, that’s not clear from reviewing his history online. In fact, the same email address tied to so many of NeroWolfe’s accounts on the forums — 3k@xakep.ru — was used in 2011 to create an account for a Dmitry Yurevich Khoroshev on the Russian social media network Vkontakte.

NeroWolfe seems to have abandoned all of his forum accounts sometime in 2016. In November 2016, an exploit[.]ru member filed an official complaint against NeroWolfe, saying NeroWolfe had been paid $2,000 to produce custom code but never finished the project and vanished.

It’s unclear what happened to NeroWolfe or to Khoroshev during this time. Maybe he got arrested, or some close associates did. Perhaps he just decided it was time to lay low and hit the reset on his operational security efforts, given his past failures in this regard. It’s also possible NeroWolfe landed a real job somewhere for a few years, fathered a child, and/or had to put his cybercrime career on hold.

PUTINKRAB

Or perhaps Khoroshev saw the coming ransomware industry for the endless pot of gold that it was about to become, and then dedicated himself to working on custom ransomware code. That’s what the government believes.

The indictment against Khoroshev says he used the hacker nickname Putinkrab, and Intel 471 says this corresponds to a username that was first registered across three major Russian cybercrime forums in early 2019.

KrebsOnSecurity could find no obvious connections between Putinkrab and any of Khoroshev’s older identities. However, if Putinkrab was Khoroshev, he would have learned from his past mistakes and started fresh with a new identity (which he did). But also, it is likely the government hasn’t shared all of the intelligence it has collected against him (more on that in a bit).

Putinkrab’s first posts on the Russian cybercrime forums XSS, Exploit and UFOLabs saw this user selling ransomware source code written in C.

In April 2019, Putkinkrab offered an affiliate program that would run on top of his custom-made ransomware code.

“I want to work for a share of the ransoms: 20/80,” Putinkrab wrote on Exploit. “20 percent is my percentage for the work, you get 80% of the ransoms. The percentage can be reduced up to 10/90 if the volumes are good. But now, temporarily, until the service is fully automated, we are working using a different algorithm.”

Throughout the summer of 2019, Putinkrab posted multiple updates to Exploit about new features being added to his ransomware strain, as well as novel evasion techniques to avoid detection by security tools. He also told forum members he was looking for investors for a new ransomware project based on his code.

In response to an Exploit member who complained that the security industry was making it harder to profit from ransomware, Putinkrab said that was because so many cybercriminals were relying on crappy ransomware code.

“The vast majority of top antiviruses have acquired behavioral analysis, which blocks 95% of crypto-lockers at their root,” Putinkrab wrote. “Cryptolockers made a lot of noise in the press, but lazy system administrators don’t make backups after that. The vast majority of cryptolockers are written by people who have little understanding of cryptography. Therefore, decryptors appear on the Internet, and with them the hope that files can be decrypted without paying a ransom. They just sit and wait. Contact with the owner of the key is lost over time.”

Putinkrab said he had every confidence his ransomware code was a game-changer, and a huge money machine.

“The game is just gaining momentum,” Putinkrab wrote. “Weak players lose and are eliminated.”

The rest of his response was structured like a poem:

“In this world, the strongest survive.
Our life is just a struggle.
The winner will be the smartest,
Who has his head on his shoulders.”

Putinkrab’s final post came on August 23, 2019. The Justice Department says the LockBit ransomware affiliate program was officially launched five months later. From there on out, the government says, Khoroshev adopted the persona of LockBitSupp. In his introductory post on Exploit, LockBit’s mastermind said the ransomware strain had been in development since September 2019.

The original LockBit malware was written in C (a language that NeroWolfe excelled at). Here’s the original description of LockBit, from its maker:

“The software is written in C and Assembler; encryption is performed through the I/O Completion Port; there is a port scanning local networks and an option to find all DFS, SMB, WebDAV network shares, an admin panel in Tor, automatic test decryption; a decryption tool is provided; there is a chat with Push notifications, a Jabber bot that forwards correspondence and an option to terminate services/processes in line which prevent the ransomware from opening files at a certain moment. The ransomware sets file permissions and removes blocking attributes, deletes shadow copies, clears logs and mounts hidden partitions; there is an option to drag-and-drop files/folders and a console/hidden mode. The ransomware encrypts files in parts in various places: the larger the file size, the more parts there are. The algorithms used are AES + RSA.

You are the one who determines the ransom amount after communicating with the victim. The ransom paid in any currency that suits you will be transferred to your wallets. The Jabber bot serves as an admin panel and is used for banning, providing decryption tools, chatting – Jabber is used for absolutely everything.”

CONCLUSION

Does the above timeline prove that NeroWolfe/Khoroshev is LockBitSupp? No. However, it does indicate Khoroshev was for many years deeply invested in countless schemes involving botnets, stolen data, and malware he wrote that others used to great effect. NeroWolfe’s many private messages from fellow forum members confirm this.

NeroWolfe’s specialty was creating custom code that employed novel stealth and evasion techniques, and he was always quick to volunteer his services on the forums whenever anyone was looking help on a malware project that called for a strong C or C++ programmer.

Someone with those qualifications — as well as demonstrated mastery of data encryption and decryption techniques — would have been in great demand by the ransomware-as-a-service industry that took off at around the same time NeroWolfe vanished from the forums.

Someone like that who is near or at the top of their game vis-a-vis their peers does not simply walk away from that level of influence, community status, and potential income stream unless forced to do so by circumstances beyond their immediate control.

It’s important to note that Putinkrab didn’t just materialize out of thin air in 2019 — suddenly endowed with knowledge about how to write advanced, stealthy ransomware strains. That knowledge clearly came from someone who’d already had years of experience building and deploying ransomware strains against real-life victim organizations.

Thus, whoever Putinkrab was before they adopted that moniker, it’s a safe bet they were involved in the development and use of earlier, highly successful ransomware strains. One strong possible candidate is Cerber ransomware, the most popular and effective affiliate program operating between early 2016 and mid-2017. Cerber thrived because it emerged as an early mover in the market for ransomware-as-a-service offerings.

In February 2024, the FBI seized LockBit’s cybercrime infrastructure on the dark web, following an apparently lengthy infiltration of the group’s operations. The United States has already indicted and sanctioned at least five other alleged LockBit ringleaders or affiliates, so presumably the feds have been able to draw additional resources from those investigations.

Also, it seems likely that the three national intelligence agencies involved in bringing these charges are not showing all of their cards. For example, the Treasury documents on Khoroshev mention a single cryptocurrency address, and yet experts interviewed for this story say there are no obvious clues connecting this address to Khoroshev or Putinkrab.

But given that LockBitSupp has been actively involved in Lockbit ransomware attacks against organizations for four years now, the government almost certainly has an extensive list of the LockBit leader’s various cryptocurrency addresses — and probably even his bank accounts in Russia. And no doubt the money trail from some of those transactions was traceable to its ultimate beneficiary (or close enough).

Not long after Khoroshev was charged as the leader of LockBit, a number of open-source intelligence accounts on Telegram began extending the information released by the Treasury Department. Within hours, these sleuths had unearthed more than a dozen credit card accounts used by Khoroshev over the past decade, as well as his various bank account numbers in Russia.

The point is, this post is based on data that’s available to and verifiable by KrebsOnSecurity. Woodward & Bernstein’s source in the Watergate investigation — Deep Throat — famously told the two reporters to “follow the money.” This is always excellent advice. But these days, that can be a lot easier said than done — especially with people who a) do not wish to be found, and b) don’t exactly file annual reports.

BlackCat Ransomware Group Implodes After Apparent $22M Payment by Change Healthcare

There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ALPHV“) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However, the cybercriminal who claims to have given BlackCat access to Change’s network says the crime gang cheated them out of their share of the ransom, and that they still have the sensitive data Change reportedly paid the group to destroy. Meanwhile, the affiliate’s disclosure appears to have prompted BlackCat to cease operations entirely.

In the third week of February, a cyber intrusion at Change Healthcare began shutting down important healthcare services as company systems were taken offline. It soon emerged that BlackCat was behind the attack, which has disrupted the delivery of prescription drugs for hospitals and pharmacies nationwide for nearly two weeks.

On March 1, a cryptocurrency address that security researchers had already mapped to BlackCat received a single transaction worth approximately $22 million. On March 3, a BlackCat affiliate posted a complaint to the exclusive Russian-language ransomware forum Ramp saying that Change Healthcare had paid a $22 million ransom for a decryption key, and to prevent four terabytes of stolen data from being published online.

The affiliate claimed BlackCat/ALPHV took the $22 million payment but never paid him his percentage of the ransom. BlackCat is known as a “ransomware-as-service” collective, meaning they rely on freelancers or affiliates to infect new networks with their ransomware. And those affiliates in turn earn commissions ranging from 60 to 90 percent of any ransom amount paid.

“But after receiving the payment ALPHV team decide to suspend our account and keep lying and delaying when we contacted ALPHV admin,” the affiliate “Notchy” wrote. “Sadly for Change Healthcare, their data [is] still with us.”

Change Healthcare has neither confirmed nor denied paying, and has responded to multiple media outlets with a similar non-denial statement — that the company is focused on its investigation and on restoring services.

Assuming Change Healthcare did pay to keep their data from being published, that strategy seems to have gone awry: Notchy said the list of affected Change Healthcare partners they’d stolen sensitive data from included Medicare and a host of other major insurance and pharmacy networks.

On the bright side, Notchy’s complaint seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for the BlackCat ransomware group, which was infiltrated by the FBI and foreign law enforcement partners in late December 2023. As part of that action, the government seized the BlackCat website and released a decryption tool to help victims recover their systems.

BlackCat responded by re-forming, and increasing affiliate commissions to as much as 90 percent. The ransomware group also declared it was formally removing any restrictions or discouragement against targeting hospitals and healthcare providers.

However, instead of responding that they would compensate and placate Notchy, a representative for BlackCat said today the group was shutting down and that it had already found a buyer for its ransomware source code.

“There’s no sense in making excuses,” wrote the RAMP member “Ransom.” “Yes, we knew about the problem, and we were trying to solve it. We told the affiliate to wait. We could send you our private chat logs where we are shocked by everything that’s happening and are trying to solve the issue with the transactions by using a higher fee, but there’s no sense in doing that because we decided to fully close the project. We can officially state that we got screwed by the feds.”

BlackCat’s website now features a seizure notice from the FBI, but several researchers noted that this image seems to have been merely cut and pasted from the notice the FBI left in its December raid of BlackCat’s network. The FBI has not responded to requests for comment.

Fabian Wosar, head of ransomware research at the security firm Emsisoft, said it appears BlackCat leaders are trying to pull an “exit scam” on affiliates by withholding many ransomware payment commissions at once and shutting down the service.

“ALPHV/BlackCat did not get seized,” Wosar wrote on Twitter/X today. “They are exit scamming their affiliates. It is blatantly obvious when you check the source code of their new takedown notice.”

Dmitry Smilyanets, a researcher for the security firm Recorded Future, said BlackCat’s exit scam was especially dangerous because the affiliate still has all the stolen data, and could still demand additional payment or leak the information on his own.

“The affiliates still have this data, and they’re mad they didn’t receive this money, Smilyanets told Wired.com. “It’s a good lesson for everyone. You cannot trust criminals; their word is worth nothing.”

BlackCat’s apparent demise comes closely on the heels of the implosion of another major ransomware group — LockBit, a ransomware gang estimated to have extorted over $120 million in payments from more than 2,000 victims worldwide. On Feb. 20, LockBit’s website was seized by the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) following a months-long infiltration of the group.

LockBit also tried to restore its reputation on the cybercrime forums by resurrecting itself at a new darknet website, and by threatening to release data from a number of major companies that were hacked by the group in the weeks and days prior to the FBI takedown.

But LockBit appears to have since lost any credibility the group may have once had. After a much-promoted attack on the government of Fulton County, Ga., for example, LockBit threatened to release Fulton County’s data unless paid a ransom by Feb. 29. But when Feb. 29 rolled around, LockBit simply deleted the entry for Fulton County from its site, along with those of several financial organizations that had previously been extorted by the group.

Fulton County held a press conference to say that it had not paid a ransom to LockBit, nor had anyone done so on their behalf, and that they were just as mystified as everyone else as to why LockBit never followed through on its threat to publish the county’s data. Experts told KrebsOnSecurity LockBit likely balked because it was bluffing, and that the FBI likely relieved them of that data in their raid.

Smilyanets’ comments are driven home in revelations first published last month by Recorded Future, which quoted an NCA official as saying LockBit never deleted the data after being paid a ransom, even though that is the only reason many of its victims paid.

“If we do not give you decrypters, or we do not delete your data after payment, then nobody will pay us in the future,” LockBit’s extortion notes typically read.

Hopefully, more companies are starting to get the memo that paying cybercrooks to delete stolen data is a losing proposition all around.

Fulton County, Security Experts Call LockBit’s Bluff

The ransomware group LockBit told officials with Fulton County, Ga. they could expect to see their internal documents published online this morning unless the county paid a ransom demand. LockBit removed Fulton County’s listing from its victim shaming website this morning, claiming the county had paid. But county officials said they did not pay, nor did anyone make payment on their behalf. Security experts say LockBit was likely bluffing and probably lost most of the data when the gang’s servers were seized this month by U.S. and U.K. law enforcement.

LockBit listed Fulton County as a victim on Feb. 13, saying that unless it was paid a ransom the group would publish files stolen in a breach at the county last month. That attack disrupted county phones, Internet access and even their court system. LockBit leaked a small number of the county’s files as a teaser, which appeared to include sensitive and sealed court records in current and past criminal trials.

On Feb. 16, Fulton County’s entry — along with a countdown timer until the data would be published — was removed from the LockBit website without explanation. The leader of LockBit told KrebsOnSecurity this was because Fulton County officials had engaged in last-minute negotiations with the group.

But on Feb. 19, investigators with the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) took over LockBit’s online infrastructure, replacing the group’s homepage with a seizure notice and links to LockBit ransomware decryption tools.

In a press briefing on Feb. 20, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts told reporters the county did not pay a ransom demand, noting that the board “could not in good conscience use Fulton County taxpayer funds to make a payment.”

Three days later, LockBit reemerged with new domains on the dark web, and with Fulton County listed among a half-dozen other victims whose data was about to be leaked if they refused to pay. As it does with all victims, LockBit assigned Fulton County a countdown timer, saying officials had until late in the evening on March 1 until their data was published.

LockBit soon moved up the deadline to the morning of Feb. 29. As Fulton County’s LockBit timer was counting down to zero this morning, its listing disappeared from LockBit’s site. LockBit’s leader and spokesperson, who goes by the handle “LockBitSupp,” told KrebsOnSecurity today that Fulton County’s data disappeared from their site because county officials paid a ransom.

“Fulton paid,” LockBitSupp said. When asked for evidence of payment, LockBitSupp claimed. “The proof is that we deleted their data and did not publish it.”

But at a press conference today, Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said the county does not know why its data was removed from LockBit’s site.

“As I stand here at 4:08 p.m., we are not aware of any data being released today so far,” Pitts said. “That does not mean the threat is over. They could release whatever data they have at any time. We have no control over that. We have not paid any ransom. Nor has any ransom been paid on our behalf.”

Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the security firm Emsisoft, said LockBit likely lost all of the victim data it stole before the FBI/NCA seizure, and that it has been trying madly since then to save face within the cybercrime community.

“I think it was a case of them trying to convince their affiliates that they were still in good shape,” Callow said of LockBit’s recent activities. “I strongly suspect this will be the end of the LockBit brand.”

Others have come to a similar conclusion. The security firm RedSense posted an analysis to Twitter/X that after the takedown, LockBit published several “new” victim profiles for companies that it had listed weeks earlier on its victim shaming site. Those victim firms — a healthcare provider and major securities lending platform — also were unceremoniously removed from LockBit’s new shaming website, despite LockBit claiming their data would be leaked.

“We are 99% sure the rest of their ‘new victims’ are also fake claims (old data for new breaches),” RedSense posted. “So the best thing for them to do would be to delete all other entries from their blog and stop defrauding honest people.”

Callow said there certainly have been plenty of cases in the past where ransomware gangs exaggerated their plunder from a victim organization. But this time feels different, he said.

“It is a bit unusual,” Callow said. “This is about trying to still affiliates’ nerves, and saying, ‘All is well, we weren’t as badly compromised as law enforcement suggested.’ But I think you’d have to be a fool to work with an organization that has been so thoroughly hacked as LockBit has.”

FBI’s LockBit Takedown Postponed a Ticking Time Bomb in Fulton County, Ga.

The FBI’s takedown of the LockBit ransomware group last week came as LockBit was preparing to release sensitive data stolen from government computer systems in Fulton County, Ga. But LockBit is now regrouping, and the gang says it will publish the stolen Fulton County data on March 2 unless paid a ransom. LockBit claims the cache includes documents tied to the county’s ongoing criminal prosecution of former President Trump, but court watchers say teaser documents published by the crime gang suggest a total leak of the Fulton County data could put lives at risk and jeopardize a number of other criminal trials.

In early February, Fulton County leaders acknowledged they were responding to an intrusion that caused disruptions for its phone, email and billing systems, as well as a range of county services, including court systems.

On Feb. 13, the LockBit ransomware group posted on its victim shaming blog a new entry for Fulton County, featuring a countdown timer saying the group would publish the data on Feb. 16 unless county leaders agreed to negotiate a ransom.

“We will demonstrate how local structures negligently handled information protection,” LockBit warned. “We will reveal lists of individuals responsible for confidentiality. Documents marked as confidential will be made publicly available. We will show documents related to access to the state citizens’ personal data. We aim to give maximum publicity to this situation; the documents will be of interest to many. Conscientious residents will bring order.”

Yet on Feb. 16, the entry for Fulton County was removed from LockBit’s site without explanation. This usually only happens after the victim in question agrees to pay a ransom demand and/or enters into negotiations with their extortionists.

However, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said the board decided it “could not in good conscience use Fulton County taxpayer funds to make a payment.”

“We did not pay nor did anyone pay on our behalf,” Pitts said at an incident briefing on Feb. 20.

Just hours before that press conference, LockBit’s various websites were seized by the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA), which replaced the ransomware group’s homepage with a seizure notice and used the existing design of LockBit’s victim shaming blog to publish press releases about the law enforcement action.

Dubbed “Operation Cronos,” the effort involved the seizure of nearly three-dozen servers; the arrest of two alleged LockBit members; the release of a free LockBit decryption tool; and the freezing of more than 200 cryptocurrency accounts thought to be tied to the gang’s activities. The government says LockBit has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments.

UNFOLDING DISASTER

In a lengthy, rambling letter published on Feb. 24 and addressed to the FBI, the ransomware group’s leader LockBitSupp announced that their victim shaming websites were once again operational on the dark web, with fresh countdown timers for Fulton County and a half-dozen other recent victims.

“The FBI decided to hack now for one reason only, because they didn’t want to leak information fultoncountyga.gov,” LockBitSupp wrote. “The stolen documents contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.”

LockBit has already released roughly two dozen files allegedly stolen from Fulton County government systems, although none of them involve Mr. Trump’s criminal trial. But the documents do appear to include court records that are sealed and shielded from public viewing.

George Chidi writes The Atlanta Objective, a Substack publication on crime in Georgia’s capital city. Chidi says the leaked data so far includes a sealed record related to a child abuse case, and a sealed motion in the murder trial of Juwuan Gaston demanding the state turn over confidential informant identities.

Chidi cites reports from a Fulton County employee who said the confidential material includes the identities of jurors serving on the trial of the rapper Jeffery “Young Thug” Williams, who is charged along with five other defendants in a racketeering and gang conspiracy.

“The screenshots suggest that hackers will be able to give any attorney defending a criminal case in the county a starting place to argue that evidence has been tainted or witnesses intimidated, and that the release of confidential information has compromised cases,” Chidi wrote. “Judge Ural Glanville has, I am told by staff, been working feverishly behind the scenes over the last two weeks to manage the unfolding disaster.”

LockBitSupp also denied assertions made by the U.K.’s NCA that LockBit did not delete stolen data as promised when victims agreed to pay a ransom. The accusation is an explosive one because nobody will pay a ransom if they don’t believe the ransomware group will hold up its end of the bargain.

The ransomware group leader also confirmed information first reported here last week, that federal investigators managed to hack LockBit by exploiting a known vulnerability in PHP, a scripting language that is widely used in Web development.

“Due to my personal negligence and irresponsibility I relaxed and did not update PHP in time,” LockBitSupp wrote. “As a result of which access was gained to the two main servers where this version of PHP was installed.”

LockBitSupp’s FBI letter said the group kept copies of its stolen victim data on servers that did not use PHP, and that consequently it was able to retain copies of files stolen from victims. The letter also listed links to multiple new instances of LockBit dark net websites, including the leak page listing Fulton County’s new countdown timer.

“Even after the FBI hack, the stolen data will be published on the blog, there is no chance of destroying the stolen data without payment,” LockBitSupp wrote. “All FBI actions are aimed at destroying the reputation of my affiliate program, my demoralization, they want me to leave and quit my job, they want to scare me because they can not find and eliminate me, I can not be stopped, you can not even hope, as long as I am alive I will continue to do pentest with postpaid.”

DOX DODGING

In January 2024, LockBitSupp told XSS forum members he was disappointed the FBI hadn’t offered a reward for his doxing and/or arrest, and that in response he was placing a bounty on his own head — offering $10 million to anyone who could discover his real name.

After the NCA and FBI seized LockBit’s site, the group’s homepage was retrofitted with a blog entry titled, “Who is LockBitSupp? The $10M question.” The teaser made use of LockBit’s own countdown timer, and suggested the real identity of LockBitSupp would soon be revealed.

However, after the countdown timer expired the page was replaced with a taunting message from the feds, but it included no new information about LockBitSupp’s identity.

On Feb. 21, the U.S. Department of State announced rewards totaling up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of anyone participating in LockBit ransomware attacks. The State Department said $10 million of that is for information on LockBit’s leaders, and up to $5 million is offered for information on affiliates.

In an interview with the malware-focused Twitter/X account Vx-Underground, LockBit staff asserted that authorities had arrested a couple of small-time players in their operation, and that investigators still do not know the real-life identities of the core LockBit members, or that of their leader.

“They assert the FBI / NCA UK / EUROPOL do not know their information,” Vx-Underground wrote. “They state they are willing to double the bounty of $10,000,000. They state they will place a $20,000,000 bounty of their own head if anyone can dox them.”

TROUBLE ON THE HOMEFRONT?

In the weeks leading up to the FBI/NCA takedown, LockBitSupp became embroiled in a number of high-profile personal and business disputes on the Russian cybercrime forums.

Earlier this year, someone used LockBit ransomware to infect the networks of AN-Security, a venerated 30-year-old security and technology company based in St. Petersburg, Russia. This violated the golden rule for cybercriminals based in Russia and former soviet nations that make up the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is that attacking your own citizens in those countries is the surest way to get arrested and prosecuted by local authorities.

LockBitSupp later claimed the attacker had used a publicly leaked, older version of LockBit to compromise systems at AN-Security, and said the attack was an attempt to smear their reputation by a rival ransomware group known as “Clop.” But the incident no doubt prompted closer inspection of LockBitSupp’s activities by Russian authorities.

Then in early February, the administrator of the Russian-language cybercrime forum XSS said LockBitSupp had threatened to have him killed after the ransomware group leader was banned by the community. LockBitSupp was excommunicated from XSS after he refused to pay an arbitration amount ordered by the forum administrator. That dispute related to a complaint from another forum member who said LockBitSupp recently stiffed him on his promised share of an unusually large ransomware payout.

INTERVIEW WITH LOCKBITSUPP

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from LockBitSupp at the ToX instant messenger ID listed in his letter to the FBI. LockBitSupp declined to elaborate on the unreleased documents from Fulton County, saying the files will be available for everyone to see in a few days.

LockBitSupp said his team was still negotiating with Fulton County when the FBI seized their servers, which is why the county has been granted a time extension. He also denied threatening to kill the XSS administrator.

“I have not threatened to kill the XSS administrator, he is blatantly lying, this is to cause self-pity and damage my reputation,” LockBitSupp told KrebsOnSecurity. “It is not necessary to kill him to punish him, there are more humane methods and he knows what they are.”

Asked why he was so certain the FBI doesn’t know his real-life identity, LockBitSupp was more precise.

“I’m not sure the FBI doesn’t know who I am,” he said. “I just believe they will never find me.”

It seems unlikely that the FBI’s seizure of LockBit’s infrastructure was somehow an effort to stave off the disclosure of Fulton County’s data, as LockBitSupp maintains. For one thing, Europol said the takedown was the result of a months-long infiltration of the ransomware group.

Also, in reporting on the attack’s disruption to the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Feb. 14, CNN reported that by then the intrusion by LockBit had persisted for nearly two and a half weeks.

Finally, if the NCA and FBI really believed that LockBit never deleted victim data, they had to assume LockBit would still have at least one copy of all their stolen data hidden somewhere safe.

Fulton County is still trying to recover systems and restore services affected by the ransomware attack. “Fulton County continues to make substantial progress in restoring its systems following the recent ransomware incident resulting in service outages,” reads the latest statement from the county on Feb. 22. “Since the start of this incident, our team has been working tirelessly to bring services back up.”

Update, Feb. 29, 3:22 p.m. ET: Just hours after this story ran, LockBit changed its countdown timer for Fulton County saying they had until the morning of Feb. 29 (today) to pay a ransonm demand. When the official deadline neared today, Fulton County’s listing was removed from LockBit’s victim shaming website. Asked about the removal of the listing, LockBit’s leader “LockBitSupp” told KrebsOnSecurity that Fulton County paid a ransom demand. County officials have scheduled a press conference on the ransomware attack at 4:15 p.m. ET today.

Feds Seize LockBit Ransomware Websites, Offer Decryption Tools, Troll Affiliates

U.S. and U.K. authorities have seized the darknet websites run by LockBit, a prolific and destructive ransomware group that has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments. Instead of listing data stolen from ransomware victims who didn’t pay, LockBit’s victim shaming website now offers free recovery tools, as well as news about arrests and criminal charges involving LockBit affiliates.

Dubbed “Operation Cronos,” the law enforcement action involved the seizure of nearly three-dozen servers; the arrest of two alleged LockBit members; the unsealing of two indictments; the release of a free LockBit decryption tool; and the freezing of more than 200 cryptocurrency accounts thought to be tied to the gang’s activities.

LockBit members have executed attacks against thousands of victims in the United States and around the world, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). First surfacing in September 2019, the gang is estimated to have made hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in ransom demands, and extorted over $120 million in ransom payments.

LockBit operated as a ransomware-as-a-service group, wherein the ransomware gang takes care of everything from the bulletproof hosting and domains to the development and maintenance of the malware. Meanwhile, affiliates are solely responsible for finding new victims, and can reap 60 to 80 percent of any ransom amount ultimately paid to the group.

A statement on Operation Cronos from the European police agency Europol said the months-long infiltration resulted in the compromise of LockBit’s primary platform and other critical infrastructure, including the takedown of 34 servers in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, France, Switzerland, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Europol said two suspected LockBit actors were arrested in Poland and Ukraine, but no further information has been released about those detained.

The DOJ today unsealed indictments against two Russian men alleged to be active members of LockBit. The government says Russian national Artur Sungatov used LockBit ransomware against victims in manufacturing, logistics, insurance and other companies throughout the United States.

Ivan Gennadievich Kondratyev, a.k.a. “Bassterlord,” allegedly deployed LockBit against targets in the United States, Singapore, Taiwan, and Lebanon. Kondratyev is also charged (PDF) with three criminal counts arising from his alleged use of the Sodinokibi (aka “REvil“) ransomware variant to encrypt data, exfiltrate victim information, and extort a ransom payment from a corporate victim based in Alameda County, California.

With the indictments of Sungatov and Kondratyev, a total of five LockBit affiliates now have been officially charged. In May 2023, U.S. authorities unsealed indictments against two alleged LockBit affiliates, Mikhail “Wazawaka” Matveev and Mikhail Vasiliev.

Vasiliev, 35, of Bradford, Ontario, Canada, is in custody in Canada awaiting extradition to the United States (the complaint against Vasiliev is at this PDF). Matveev remains at large, presumably still in Russia. In January 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published Who is the Network Access Broker ‘Wazawaka,’ which followed clues from Wazawaka’s many pseudonyms and contact details on the Russian-language cybercrime forums back to a 31-year-old Mikhail Matveev from Abaza, RU.

In June 2023, Russian national Ruslan Magomedovich Astamirov was charged in New Jersey for his participation in the LockBit conspiracy, including the deployment of LockBit against victims in Florida, Japan, France, and Kenya. Astamirov is currently in custody in the United States awaiting trial.

LockBit was known to have recruited affiliates that worked with multiple ransomware groups simultaneously, and it’s unclear what impact this takedown may have on competing ransomware affiliate operations. The security firm ProDaft said on Twitter/X that the infiltration of LockBit by investigators provided “in-depth visibility into each affiliate’s structures, including ties with other notorious groups such as FIN7, Wizard Spider, and EvilCorp.”

In a lengthy thread about the LockBit takedown on the Russian-language cybercrime forum XSS, one of the gang’s leaders said the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) had infiltrated its servers using a known vulnerability in PHP, a scripting language that is widely used in Web development.

Several denizens of XSS wondered aloud why the PHP flaw was not flagged by LockBit’s vaunted “Bug Bounty” program, which promised a financial reward to affiliates who could find and quietly report any security vulnerabilities threatening to undermine LockBit’s online infrastructure.

This prompted several XSS members to start posting memes taunting the group about the security failure.

“Does it mean that the FBI provided a pentesting service to the affiliate program?,” one denizen quipped. “Or did they decide to take part in the bug bounty program? :):)”

Federal investigators also appear to be trolling LockBit members with their seizure notices. LockBit’s data leak site previously featured a countdown timer for each victim organization listed, indicating the time remaining for the victim to pay a ransom demand before their stolen files would be published online. Now, the top entry on the shaming site is a countdown timer until the public doxing of “LockBitSupp,” the unofficial spokesperson or figurehead for the LockBit gang.

“Who is LockbitSupp?” the teaser reads. “The $10m question.”

In January 2024, LockBitSupp told XSS forum members he was disappointed the FBI hadn’t offered a reward for his doxing and/or arrest, and that in response he was placing a bounty on his own head — offering $10 million to anyone who could discover his real name.

“My god, who needs me?,” LockBitSupp wrote on Jan. 22, 2024. “There is not even a reward out for me on the FBI website. By the way, I want to use this chance to increase the reward amount for a person who can tell me my full name from USD 1 million to USD 10 million. The person who will find out my name, tell it to me and explain how they were able to find it out will get USD 10 million. Please take note that when looking for criminals, the FBI uses unclear wording offering a reward of UP TO USD 10 million; this means that the FBI can pay you USD 100, because technically, it’s an amount UP TO 10 million. On the other hand, I am willing to pay USD 10 million, no more and no less.”

Mark Stockley, cybersecurity evangelist at the security firm Malwarebytes, said the NCA is obviously trolling the LockBit group and LockBitSupp.

“I don’t think this is an accident—this is how ransomware groups talk to each other,” Stockley said. “This is law enforcement taking the time to enjoy its moment, and humiliate LockBit in its own vernacular, presumably so it loses face.”

In a press conference today, the FBI said Operation Cronos included investigative assistance from the Gendarmerie-C3N in France; the State Criminal Police Office L-K-A and Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany; Fedpol and Zurich Cantonal Police in Switzerland; the National Police Agency in Japan; the Australian Federal Police; the Swedish Police Authority; the National Bureau of Investigation in Finland; the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and the National Police in the Netherlands.

The Justice Department said victims targeted by LockBit should contact the FBI at https://lockbitvictims.ic3.gov/ to determine whether affected systems can be successfully decrypted. In addition, the Japanese Police, supported by Europol, have released a recovery tool designed to recover files encrypted by the LockBit 3.0 Black Ransomware.

Arrests in $400M SIM-Swap Tied to Heist at FTX?

Three Americans were charged this week with stealing more than $400 million in a November 2022 SIM-swapping attack. The U.S. government did not name the victim organization, but there is every indication that the money was stolen from the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which had just filed for bankruptcy on that same day.

An indictment unsealed this week and first reported on by Ars Technica alleges that Chicago man Robert Powell, a.k.a. “R,” “R$” and “ElSwapo1,” was the ringleader of a SIM-swapping group called the “Powell SIM Swapping Crew.” Colorado resident Emily “Em” Hernandez allegedly helped the group gain access to victim devices in service of SIM-swapping attacks between March 2021 and April 2023. Indiana resident Carter Rohn, a.k.a. “Carti,” and “Punslayer,” allegedly assisted in compromising devices.

In a SIM-swapping attack, the crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control, allowing them to intercept any text messages or phone calls sent to the victim, including one-time passcodes for authentication or password reset links sent via SMS.

The indictment states that the perpetrators in this heist stole the $400 million in cryptocurrencies on Nov. 11, 2022 after they SIM-swapped an AT&T customer by impersonating them at a retail store using a fake ID. However, the document refers to the victim in this case only by the name “Victim 1.”

Wired’s Andy Greenberg recently wrote about FTX’s all-night race to stop a $1 billion crypto heist that occurred on the evening of November 11:

“FTX’s staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company’s short life. What had recently been one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after an extended struggle, persuaded the company’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, to hand over the reins to John Ray III, a new chief executive now tasked with shepherding the company through a nightmarish thicket of debts, many of which it seemed to have no means to pay.”

“FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someone—a thief or thieves who have yet to be identified—chose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company’s cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time.”

The indictment says the $400 million was stolen over several hours between November 11 and 12, 2022. Tom Robinson, co-founder of the blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, said the attackers in the FTX heist began to drain FTX wallets on the evening of Nov. 11, 2022 local time, and continuing until the 12th of November.

Robinson said Elliptic is not aware of any other crypto heists of that magnitude occurring on that date.

“We put the value of the cryptoassets stolen at $477 million,” Robinson said. “The FTX administrators have reported overall losses due to “unauthorized third-party transfers” of $413 million – the discrepancy is likely due to subsequent seizure and return of some of the stolen assets. Either way, it’s certainly over $400 million, and we are not aware of any other thefts from crypto exchanges on this scale, on this date.”

The SIM-swappers allegedly responsible for the $400 million crypto theft are all U.S. residents. But there are some indications they had help from organized cybercriminals based in Russia. In October 2023, Elliptic released a report that found the money stolen from FTX had been laundered through exchanges with ties to criminal groups based in Russia.

“A Russia-linked actor seems a stronger possibility,” Elliptic wrote. “Of the stolen assets that can be traced through ChipMixer, significant amounts are combined with funds from Russia-linked criminal groups, including ransomware gangs and darknet markets, before being sent to exchanges. This points to the involvement of a broker or other intermediary with a nexus in Russia.”

Nick Bax, director of analytics at the cryptocurrency wallet recovery firm Unciphered, said the flow of stolen FTX funds looks more like what his team has seen from groups based in Eastern Europe and Russian than anything they’ve witnessed from US-based SIM-swappers.

“I was a bit surprised by this development but it seems to be consistent with reports from CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and others that “Scattered Spider” has worked with [ransomware] groups like ALPHV/BlackCat,” Bax said.

CISA’s alert on Scattered Spider says they are a cybercriminal group that targets large companies and their contracted information technology (IT) help desks.

“Scattered Spider threat actors, per trusted third parties, have typically engaged in data theft for extortion and have also been known to utilize BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware alongside their usual TTPs,” CISA said, referring to the group’s signature “Tactics, Techniques an Procedures.”

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity published a story noting that a Florida man recently charged with being part of a SIM-swapping conspiracy is thought to be a key member of Scattered Spider, a hacking group also known as 0ktapus. That group has been blamed for a string of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies during the summer of 2022.

Financial claims involving FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings are being handled by the financial and risk consulting giant Kroll. In August 2023, Kroll suffered its own breach after a Kroll employee was SIM-swapped. According to Kroll, the thieves stole user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that rely on Kroll services to handle bankruptcy proceedings.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment for this story from Kroll, the FBI, the prosecuting attorneys, and Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm handling the FTX bankruptcy. This story will be updated in the event any of them respond.

Attorneys for Mr. Powell said they do not know who Victim 1 is in the indictment, as the government hasn’t shared that information yet. Powell’s next court date is a detention hearing on Feb. 2, 2024.

Update, Feb. 3, 12:19 p.m. ET: The FBI declined a request to comment.

BlackCat Ransomware Raises Ante After FBI Disruption

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disclosed today that it infiltrated the world’s second most prolific ransomware gang, a Russia-based criminal group known as ALPHV and BlackCat. The FBI said it seized the gang’s darknet website, and released a decryption tool that hundreds of victim companies can use to recover systems. Meanwhile, BlackCat responded by briefly “unseizing” its darknet site with a message promising 90 percent commissions for affiliates who continue to work with the crime group, and open season on everything from hospitals to nuclear power plants.

Whispers of a possible law enforcement action against BlackCat came in the first week of December, after the ransomware group’s darknet site went offline and remained unavailable for roughly five days. BlackCat eventually managed to bring its site back online, blaming the outage on equipment malfunctions.

But earlier today, the BlackCat website was replaced with an FBI seizure notice, while federal prosecutors in Florida released a search warrant explaining how FBI agents were able to gain access to and disrupt the group’s operations.

A statement on the operation from the U.S. Department of Justice says the FBI developed a decryption tool that allowed agency field offices and partners globally to offer more than 500 affected victims the ability to restore their systems.

“With a decryption tool provided by the FBI to hundreds of ransomware victims worldwide, businesses and schools were able to reopen, and health care and emergency services were able to come back online,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said. “We will continue to prioritize disruptions and place victims at the center of our strategy to dismantle the ecosystem fueling cybercrime.”

The DOJ reports that since BlackCat’s formation roughly 18 months ago, the crime group has targeted the computer networks of more than 1,000 victim organizations. BlackCat attacks usually involve encryption and theft of data; if victims refuse to pay a ransom, the attackers typically publish the stolen data on a BlackCat-linked darknet site.

BlackCat formed by recruiting operators from several competing or disbanded ransomware organizations — including REvil, BlackMatter and DarkSide. The latter group was responsible for the Colonial Pipeline attack in May 2021 that caused nationwide fuel shortages and price spikes.

Like many other ransomware operations, BlackCat operates under the “ransomware-as-a-service” model, where teams of developers maintain and update the ransomware code, as well as all of its supporting infrastructure. Affiliates are incentivized to attack high-value targets because they generally reap 60-80 percent of any payouts, with the remainder going to the crooks running the ransomware operation.

BlackCat was able to briefly regain control over their darknet server today. Not long after the FBI’s seizure notice went live the homepage was “unseized” and retrofitted with a statement about the incident from the ransomware group’s perspective.

BlackCat claimed that the FBI’s operation only touched a portion of its operations, and that as a result of the FBI’s actions an additional 3,000 victims will no longer have the option of receiving decryption keys. The group also said it was formally removing any restrictions or discouragement against targeting hospitals or other critical infrastructure.

“Because of their actions, we are introducing new rules, or rather, we are removing ALL rules except one, you cannot touch the CIS [a common restriction against attacking organizations in Russia or the Commonwealth of Independent States]. You can now block hospitals, nuclear power plants, anything, anywhere.”

The crime group also said it was setting affiliate commissions at 90 percent, presumably to attract interest from potential affiliates who might otherwise be spooked by the FBI’s recent infiltration. BlackCat also promised that all “advertisers” under this new scheme would manage their affiliate accounts from data centers that are completely isolated from each other.

BlackCat’s darknet site currently displays the FBI seizure notice. But as BleepingComputer founder Lawrence Abrams explained on Mastodon, both the FBI and BlackCat have the private keys associated with the Tor hidden service URL for BlackCat’s victim shaming and data leak site.

“Whoever is the latest to publish the hidden service on Tor (in this case the BlackCat data leak site), will resume control over the URL,” Abrams said. “Expect to see this type of back and forth over the next couple of days.”

The DOJ says anyone with information about BlackCat affiliates or their activities may be eligible for up to a $10 million reward through the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program, which accepts submissions through a Tor-based tip line (visiting the site is only possible using the Tor browser).

Further reading: CISA StopRansomware Alert on the tools, techniques and procedures used by ALPHV/BlackCat.

A Closer Look at the Snatch Data Ransom Group

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the darknet website for the Snatch ransomware group was leaking data about its users and the crime gang’s internal operations. Today, we’ll take a closer look at the history of Snatch, its alleged founder, and their claims that everyone has confused them with a different, older ransomware group by the same name.

According to a September 20, 2023 joint advisory from the FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA), Snatch was originally named Team Truniger, based on the nickname of the group’s founder and organizer — Truniger.

The FBI/CISA report says Truniger previously operated as an affiliate of GandCrab, an early ransomware-as-a-service offering that closed up shop after several years and claims to have extorted more than $2 billion from victims. GandCrab dissolved in July 2019, and is thought to have become “REvil,” one of the most ruthless and rapacious Russian ransomware groups of all time.

The government says Snatch used a customized ransomware variant notable for rebooting Microsoft Windows devices into Safe Mode — enabling the ransomware to circumvent detection by antivirus or endpoint protection — and then encrypting files when few services are running.

“Snatch threat actors have been observed purchasing previously stolen data from other ransomware variants in an attempt to further exploit victims into paying a ransom to avoid having their data released on Snatch’s extortion blog,” the FBI/CISA alert reads. It continues:

“Prior to deploying the ransomware, Snatch threat actors were observed spending up to three months on a victim’s system. Within this timeframe, Snatch threat actors exploited the victim’s network moving laterally across the victim’s network with RDP for the largest possible deployment of ransomware and searching for files and folders for data exfiltration followed by file encryption.”

New York City-based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint said the Snatch ransomware group was created in 2018, based on Truniger’s recruitment both on Russian language cybercrime forums and public Russian programming boards. Flashpoint said Truniger recruited “pen testers” for a new, then-unnamed cybercrime group, by posting their private Jabber instant messenger contact details on multiple Russian language coding forums, as well as on Facebook.

“The command requires Windows system administrators,” Truniger’s ads explained. “Experience in backup, increase privileges, mikicatz, network. Details after contacting on jabber: truniger@xmpp[.]jp.”

In at least some of those recruitment ads — like one in 2018 on the forum sysadmins[.]ru –the username promoting Truniger’s contact information was Semen7907. In April 2020, Truniger was banned from two of the top Russian cybercrime forums, where members from both forums confirmed that Semen7907 was one of Truniger’s known aliases.

[SIDE NOTE: Truniger was banned because he purchased credentials to a company from a network access broker on the dark web, and although he promised to share a certain percentage of whatever ransom amount Truniger’s group extracted from the victim, Truniger paid the access broker just a few hundred dollars off of a six-figure ransom].

According to Constella Intelligence, a data breach and threat actor research platform, a user named Semen7907 registered in 2017 on the Russian-language programming forum pawno[.]ru using the email address tretyakov-files@yandex.ru.

That same email address was assigned to the user “Semen-7907” on the now defunct gaming website tunngle.net, which suffered a data breach in 2020. Semen-7907 registered at Tunngle from the Internet address 31.192.175[.]63, which is in Yekaterinburg, RU.

Constella reports that tretyakov-files@yandex.ru was also used to register an account at the online game stalker[.]so with the nickname Trojan7907.

There is a Skype user by the handle semen7907, and which has the name Semyon Tretyakov from Yekaterinburg, RU. Constella also found a breached record from the Russian mobile telephony site tele2[.]ru, which shows that a user from Yekaterinburg registered in 2019 with the name Semyon Sergeyvich Tretyakov and email address tretyakov-files@ya.ru.

The above accounts, as well as the email address semen_7907@mail.ru, were all registered or accessed from the same Yekaterinburg Internet address mentioned previously: 31.192.175.63. The Russian mobile phone number associated with that tele2[.]ru account is connected to the Telegram account “Perchatka,” (“glove” in Russian).

BAD BEATS

Reached via Telegram, Perchatka (a.k.a. Mr. Tretyakov) said he was not a cybercriminal, and that he currently has a full-time job working in IT at a major company (he declined to specify which).

Presented with the information gathered for this report (and more that is not published here), Mr. Tretyakov acknowledged that Semen7907 was his account on sysadmins[.]ru, the very same account Truniger used to recruit hackers for the Snatch Ransomware group back in 2018.

However, he claims that he never made those posts, and that someone else must have assumed control over his sysadmins[.]ru account and posted as him. Mr. Tretyakov said that KrebsOnSecurity’s outreach this week was the first time he became aware that his sysadmins[.]ru account was used without his permission.

Mr. Tretyakov suggested someone may have framed him, pointing to an August 2023 story at a Russian news outlet about the reported hack and leak of the user database from sysadmins[.]ru, allegedly at the hands of a pro-Ukrainian hacker group called CyberSec.

“Recently, because of the war in Ukraine, a huge number of databases have been leaked and finding information about a person is not difficult,” Tretyakov said. “I’ve been using this login since about 2013 on all the forums where I register, and I don’t always set a strong password. If I had done something illegal, I would have hidden much better :D.”

[For the record, KrebsOnSecurity does not generally find this to be the case, as the ongoing Breadcrumbs series will attest.]

A Semyon Sergeyvich Tretyakov is listed as the composer of a Russian-language rap song called “Parallels,” which seems to be about the pursuit of a high-risk lifestyle online. A snippet of the song goes:

“Someone is on the screen, someone is on the blacklist
I turn on the timer and calculate the risks
I don’t want to stay broke And in the pursuit of money
I can’t take these zeros Life is like a zebra –
everyone wants to be first Either the stripes are white,
or we’re moving through the wilds I won’t waste time.”

Mr. Tretyakov said he was not the author of that particular rhyme, but that he has been known to record his own rhythms.

“Sometimes I make bad beats,” he said. “Soundcloud.”

NEVER MIND THE DOMAIN NAME

The FBI/CISA alert on Snatch Ransomware (PDF) includes an interesting caveat: It says Snatch actually deploys ransomware on victim systems, but it also acknowledges that the current occupants of Snatch’s dark and clear web domains call themselves Snatch Team, and maintain that they are not the same people as Snatch Ransomware from 2018.

Here’s the interesting bit from the FBI/CISA report:

“Since November 2021, an extortion site operating under the name Snatch served as a clearinghouse for data exfiltrated or stolen from victim companies on Clearnet and TOR hosted by a bulletproof hosting service. In August 2023, individuals claiming to be associated with the blog gave a media interview claiming the blog was not associated with Snatch ransomware and “none of our targets has been attacked by Ransomware Snatch…”, despite multiple confirmed Snatch victims’ data appearing on the blog alongside victims associated with other ransomware groups, notably Nokoyawa and Conti.”

Avid readers will recall a story here earlier this week about Snatch Team’s leaky darknet website based in Yekaterinburg, RU that exposed their internal operations and Internet addresses of their visitors. The leaked data suggest that Snatch is one of several ransomware groups using paid ads on Google.com to trick people into installing malware disguised as popular free software, such as Microsoft Teams, Adobe Reader, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Discord.

Snatch Team claims to deal only in stolen data — not in deploying ransomware malware to hold systems hostage.

Representatives of the Snatch Team recently answered questions from Databreaches.net about the claimed discrepancy in the FBI/CISA report.

“First of all, we repeat once again that we have nothing to do with Snatch Ransomware, we are Security Notification Attachment, and we have never violated the terms of the concluded transactions, because our honesty and openness is the guarantee of our income,” the Snatch Team wrote to Databreaches.net in response to questions.

But so far the Snatch Team has not been able to explain why it is using the very same domain names that the Snatch ransomware group used?

Their claim is even more unbelievable because the Snatch Team members told Databreaches.net they didn’t even know that a ransomware group with that name already existed when they initially formed just two years ago.

This is difficult to swallow because even if they were a separate group, they’d still need to somehow coordinate the transfer of the Ransomware group’s domains on the clear and dark webs. If they were hoping for a fresh start or separation, why not just pick a new name and new web destination?

“Snatchteam[.]cc is essentially a data market,” they continued. “The only thing to underline is that we are against selling leaked information, sticking to the idea of free access. Absolutely any team can come to us and offer information for publication. Even more, we have heard rumors that a number of ransomware teams scare their clients that they will post leaked information on our resource. We do not have our own ransomware, but we are open to cooperation on placement and monetization of dates (sic).”

Maybe Snatch Team does not wish to be associated with Snatch Ransomware because they currently believe stealing data and then extorting victim companies for money is somehow less evil than infecting all of the victim’s servers and backups with ransomware.

It is also likely that Snatch Team is well aware of how poorly some of their founders covered their tracks online, and are hoping for a do-over on that front.

‘Snatch’ Ransom Group Exposes Visitor IP Addresses

The victim shaming site operated by the Snatch ransomware group is leaking data about its true online location and internal operations, as well as the Internet addresses of its visitors, KrebsOnSecurity has found. The leaked data suggest that Snatch is one of several ransomware groups using paid ads on Google.com to trick people into installing malware disguised as popular free software, such as Microsoft Teams, Adobe Reader, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Discord.

First spotted in 2018, the Snatch ransomware group has published data stolen from hundreds of organizations that refused to pay a ransom demand. Snatch publishes its stolen data at a website on the open Internet, and that content is mirrored on the Snatch team’s darknet site, which is only reachable using the global anonymity network Tor.

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that Snatch’s darknet site exposes its “server status” page, which includes information about the true Internet addresses of users accessing the website.

Refreshing this page every few seconds shows that the Snatch darknet site generates a decent amount of traffic, often attracting thousands of visitors each day. But by far the most frequent repeat visitors are coming from Internet addresses in Russia that either currently host Snatch’s clear web domain names or recently did.

Probably the most active Internet address accessing Snatch’s darknet site is 193.108.114[.]41, which is a server in Yekaterinburg, Russia that hosts several Snatch domains, including snatchteam[.]top, sntech2ch[.]top, dwhyj2[.]top and sn76930193ch[.]top. It could well be that this Internet address is showing up frequently because Snatch’s clear-web site features a toggle button at the top that lets visitors switch over to accessing the site via Tor.

Another Internet address that showed up frequently in the Snatch server status page was 194.168.175[.]226, currently assigned to Matrix Telekom in Russia. According to DomainTools.com, this address also hosts or else recently hosted the usual coterie of Snatch domains, as well as quite a few domains phishing known brands such as Amazon and Cashapp.

The Moscow Internet address 80.66.64[.]15 accessed the Snatch darknet site all day long, and that address also housed the appropriate Snatch clear-web domains. More interestingly, that address is home to multiple recent domains that appear confusingly similar to known software companies, including libreoff1ce[.]com and www-discord[.]com.

This is interesting because the phishing domains associated with the Snatch ransomware gang were all registered to the same Russian name — Mihail Kolesnikov, a name that is somewhat synonymous with recent phishing domains tied to malicious Google ads.

Kolesnikov could be a nod to a Russian general made famous during Boris Yeltsin’s reign. Either way, it’s clearly a pseudonym, but there are some other commonalities among these domains that may provide insight into how Snatch and other ransomware groups are sourcing their victims.

DomainTools says there are more than 1,300 current and former domain names registered to Mihail Kolesnikov between 2013 and July 2023. About half of the domains appear to be older websites advertising female escort services in major cities around the United States (e.g. the now-defunct pittsburghcitygirls[.]com).

The other half of the Kolesnikov websites are far more recent phishing domains mostly ending in “.top” and “.app” that appear designed to mimic the domains of major software companies, including www-citrix[.]top, www-microsofteams[.]top, www-fortinet[.]top, ibreoffice[.]top, www-docker[.]top, www-basecamp[.]top, ccleaner-cdn[.]top, adobeusa[.]top, and www.real-vnc[.]top.

In August 2023, researchers with Trustwave Spiderlabs said they encountered domains registered to Mihail Kolesnikov being used to disseminate the Rilide information stealer trojan.

But it appears multiple crime groups may be using these domains to phish people and disseminate all kinds of information-stealing malware. In February 2023, Spamhaus warned of a huge surge in malicious ads that were hijacking search results in Google.com, and being used to distribute at least five different families of information stealing trojans, including AuroraStealer, IcedID/Bokbot, Meta Stealer, RedLine Stealer and Vidar.

For example, Spamhaus said victims of these malicious ads would search for Microsoft Teams in Google.com, and the search engine would often return a paid ad spoofing Microsoft or Microsoft Teams as the first result — above all other results. The malicious ad would include a logo for Microsoft and at first glance appear to be a safe and trusted place to download the Microsoft Teams client.

However, anyone who clicked on the result was whisked away instead to mlcrosofteams-us[.]top — yet another malicious domain registered to Mr. Kolesnikov. And while visitors to this website may believe they are only downloading the Microsoft Teams client, the installer file includes a copy of the IcedID malware, which is really good at stealing passwords and authentication tokens from the victim’s web browser.

The founder of the Swiss anti-abuse website abuse.ch told Spamhaus it is likely that some cybercriminals have started to sell “malvertising as a service” on the dark web, and that there is a great deal of demand for this service.

In other words, someone appears to have built a very profitable business churning out and promoting new software-themed phishing domains and selling that as a service to other cybercriminals. Or perhaps they are simply selling any stolen data (and any corporate access) to active and hungry ransomware group affiliates.

The tip about the exposed “server status” page on the Snatch darkweb site came from @htmalgae, the same security researcher who alerted KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that the darknet victim shaming site run by the 8Base ransomware gang was inadvertently left in development mode.

That oversight revealed not only the true Internet address of the hidden 8Base site (in Russia, naturally), but also the identity of a programmer in Moldova who apparently helped to develop the 8Base code.

@htmalgae said the idea of a ransomware group’s victim shaming site leaking data that they did not intend to expose is deliciously ironic.

“This is a criminal group that shames others for not protecting user data,” @htmalgae said. “And here they are leaking their user data.”

All of the malware mentioned in this story is designed to run on Microsoft Windows devices. But Malwarebytes recently covered the emergence of a Mac-based information stealer trojan called AtomicStealer that was being advertised through malicious Google ads and domains that were confusingly similar to software brands.

Please be extra careful when you are searching online for popular software titles. Cracked, pirated copies of major software titles are a frequent source of infostealer infections, as are these rogue ads masquerading as search results. Make sure to double-check you are actually at the domain you believe you’re visiting *before* you download and install anything.

Stay tuned for Part II of this post, which includes a closer look at the Snatch ransomware group and their founder.

Further reading:

@HTMalgae’s list of the top Internet addresses seen accessing Snatch’s darknet site

Ars Technica: Until Further Notice Think Twice Before Using Google to Download Software

Bleeping Computer: Hackers Abuse Google Ads to Spread Malware in Legit Software

Who’s Behind the 8Base Ransomware Website?

The victim shaming website operated by the cybercriminals behind 8Base — currently one of the more active ransomware groups — was until earlier today leaking quite a bit of information that the crime group probably did not intend to be made public. The leaked data suggests that at least some of website’s code was written by a 36-year-old programmer residing in the capital city of Moldova.

8Base maintains a darknet website that is only reachable via Tor, a freely available global anonymity network. The site lists hundreds of victim organizations and companies — all allegedly hacking victims that refused to pay a ransom to keep their stolen data from being published.

The 8Base darknet site also has a built-in chat feature, presumably so that 8Base victims can communicate and negotiate with their extortionists. This chat feature, which runs on the Laravel web application framework, works fine as long as you are *sending* information to the site (i.e., by making a “POST” request).

However, if one were to try to fetch data from the same chat service (i.e., by making a “GET” request), the website until quite recently generated an extremely verbose error message:

That error page revealed the true Internet address of the Tor hidden service that houses the 8Base website: 95.216.51[.]74, which according to DomainTools.com is a server in Finland that is tied to the Germany-based hosting giant Hetzner.

But that’s not the interesting part: Scrolling down the lengthy error message, we can see a link to a private Gitlab server called Jcube-group: gitlab[.]com/jcube-group/clients/apex/8base-v2. Digging further into this Gitlab account, we can find some curious data points available in the JCube Group’s public code repository.

For example, this “status.php” page, which was committed to JCube Group’s Gitlab repository roughly one month ago, includes code that makes several mentions of the term “KYC” (e.g. KYC_UNVERIFIED, KYC_VERIFIED, and KYC_PENDING).

This is curious because a FAQ on the 8Base darknet site includes a section on “special offers for journalists and reporters,” which says the crime group is open to interviews but that journalists will need to prove their identity before any interview can take place. The 8base FAQ refers to this vetting process as “KYC,” which typically stands for “Know Your Customer.”

“We highly respect the work of journalists and consider information to be our priority,” the 8Base FAQ reads. “We have a special program for journalists which includes sharing information a few hours or even days before it is officially published on our news website and Telegram channel: you would need to go through a KYC procedure to apply. Journalists and reporters can contact us via our PR Telegram channel with any questions.”

The 8Base darknet site also has a publicly accessible “admin” login page, which features an image of a commercial passenger plane parked at what appears to be an airport. Next to the airplane photo is a message that reads, “Welcome to 8Base. Admin Login to 8Base dashboard.”

Right-clicking on the 8Base admin page and selecting “View Source” produces the page’s HTML code. That code is virtually identical to a “login.blade.php” page that was authored and committed to JCube Group’s Gitlab repository roughly three weeks ago.

It appears the person responsible for the JCube Group’s code is a 36-year-old developer from Chisinau, Moldova named Andrei Kolev. Mr. Kolev’s LinkedIn page says he’s a full-stack developer at JCube Group, and that he’s currently looking for work. The homepage for Jcubegroup[.]com lists an address and phone number that Moldovan business records confirm is tied to Mr. Kolev.

The posts on the Twitter account for Mr. Kolev (@andrewkolev) are all written in Russian, and reference several now-defunct online businesses, including pluginspro[.]ru.

Reached for comment via LinkedIn, Mr. Kolev said he had no idea why the 8Base darknet site was pulling code from the “clients” directory of his private JCube Group Gitlab repository, or how the 8Base name was even included.

“I [don’t have] a clue, I don’t have that project in my repo,” Kolev explained. “They [aren’t] my clients. Actually we currently have just our own projects.”

Mr. Kolev shared a screenshot of his current projects, but very quickly after that deleted it. However, KrebsOnSecurity captured a copy of the image before it was removed:

Within minutes of explaining why I was reaching out to Mr. Kolev and walking him through the process of finding this connection, the 8Base website was changed, and the error message that linked to the JCube Group private Gitlab repository no longer appeared. Instead, trying the same “GET” method described above caused the 8Base website to return a “405 Method Not Allowed” error page:

Mr. Kolev claimed he didn’t know anything about the now-removed error page on 8Base’s site that referenced his private Gitlab repo, and said he deleted the screenshot from our LinkedIn chat because it contained private information.

Ransomware groups are known to remotely hire developers for specific projects without disclosing exactly who they are or how the new hire’s code is intended to be used, and it is possible that one of Mr. Kolev’s clients is merely a front for 8Base. But despite 8Base’s statement that they are happy to correspond with journalists, KrebsOnSecurity is still waiting for a reply from the group via their Telegram channel.

The tip about the leaky 8Base website was provided by a reader who asked to remain anonymous. That reader, a legitimate security professional and researcher who goes by the handle @htmalgae on Twitter, said it is likely that whoever developed the 8Base website inadvertently left it in “development mode,” which is what caused the site to be so verbose with its error messages.

“If 8Base was running the app in production mode instead of development mode, this Tor de-anonymization would have never been possible,” @htmalgae said.

A recent blog post from VMware/Carbon Black called the 8Base ransomware group “a heavy hitter” that has remained relatively unknown despite the massive spike in activity in Summer of 2023.

“8Base is a Ransomware group that has been active since March 2022 with a significant spike in activity in June of 2023,” Carbon Black researchers wrote. “Describing themselves as ‘simple pen testers,’ their leak site provided victim details through Frequently Asked Questions and Rules sections as well as multiple ways to contact them. ”

According to VMware, what’s particularly interesting about 8Base’s communication style is the use of verbiage that is strikingly familiar to another known cybercriminal group: RansomHouse.

“The group utilizes encryption paired with ‘name-and-shame’ techniques to compel their victims to pay their ransoms,” VMware researchers wrote. “8Base has an opportunistic pattern of compromise with recent victims spanning across varied industries. Despite the high amount of compromises, the information regarding identities, methodology, and underlying motivation behind these incidents still remains a mystery.”

Update, Sept. 21, 10:43 a.m. ET: The author of Databreaches.net was lurking in the 8Base Telegram channel when I popped in to ask the crime group a question, and reports that 8Base did eventually reply: ““hi at the moment we r not doing interviews. we have nothing to say. we r a little busy.”

U.S. Hacks QakBot, Quietly Removes Botnet Infections

The U.S. government today announced a coordinated crackdown against QakBot, a complex malware family used by multiple cybercrime groups to lay the groundwork for ransomware infections. The international law enforcement operation involved seizing control over the botnet’s online infrastructure, and quietly removing the Qakbot malware from tens of thousands of infected Microsoft Windows computers.

In an international operation announced today dubbed “Duck Hunt,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said they obtained court orders to remove Qakbot from infected devices, and to seize servers used to control the botnet.

“This is the most significant technological and financial operation ever led by the Department of Justice against a botnet,” said Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, at a press conference this morning in Los Angeles.

Estrada said Qakbot has been implicated in 40 different ransomware attacks over the past 18 months, intrusions that collectively cost victims more than $58 million in losses.

Emerging in 2007 as a banking trojan, QakBot (a.k.a. Qbot and Pinkslipbot) has morphed into an advanced malware strain now used by multiple cybercriminal groups to prepare newly compromised networks for ransomware infestations. QakBot is most commonly delivered via email phishing lures disguised as something legitimate and time-sensitive, such as invoices or work orders.

Don Alway, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said federal investigators gained access to an online panel that allowed cybercrooks to monitor and control the actions of the botnet. From there, investigators obtained court-ordered approval to instruct all infected systems to uninstall Qakbot and to disconnect themselves from the botnet, Alway said.

The DOJ says their access to the botnet’s control panel revealed that Qakbot had been used to infect more than 700,000 machines in the past year alone, including 200,000 systems in the United States.

Working with law enforcement partners in France, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Romania and the United Kingdom, the DOJ said it was able to seize more than 50 Internet servers tied to the malware network, and nearly $9 million in ill-gotten cryptocurrency from QakBot’s cybercriminal overlords. The DOJ declined to say whether any suspects were questioned or arrested in connection with Qakbot, citing an ongoing investigation.

According to recent figures from the managed security firm Reliaquest, QakBot is by far the most prevalent malware “loader” — malicious software used to secure access to a hacked network and help drop additional malware payloads. Reliaquest says QakBot infections accounted for nearly one-third of all loaders observed in the wild during the first six months of this year.

Researchers at AT&T Alien Labs say the crooks responsible for maintaining the QakBot botnet have rented their creation to various cybercrime groups over the years. More recently, however, QakBot has been closely associated with ransomware attacks from Black Basta, a prolific Russian-language criminal group that was thought to have spun off from the Conti ransomware gang in early 2022.

Today’s operation is not the first time the U.S. government has used court orders to remotely disinfect systems compromised with malware. In May 2023, the DOJ quietly removed malware from computers around the world infected by the “Snake” malware, an even older malware family that has been tied to Russian intelligence agencies.

Documents published by the DOJ in support of today’s takedown state that beginning on Aug. 25, 2023, law enforcement gained access to the Qakbot botnet, redirected botnet traffic to and through servers controlled by law enforcement, and instructed Qakbot-infected computers to download a Qakbot Uninstall file that uninstalled Qakbot malware from the infected computer.

“The Qakbot Uninstall file did not remediate other malware that was already installed on infected computers,” the government explained. “Instead, it was designed to prevent additional Qakbot malware from being installed on the infected computer by untethering the victim computer from the Qakbot botnet.”

The DOJ said it also recovered more than 6.5 million stolen passwords and other credentials, and that it has shared this information with two websites that let users check to see if their credentials were exposed: Have I Been Pwned, and a “Check Your Hack” website erected by the Dutch National Police.

Further reading:

–The DOJ’s application for a search warrant application tied to Qakbot uninstall file (PDF)
–The search warrant application connected to QakBot server infrastructure in the United States (PDF)
–The government’s application for a warrant to seize virtual currency from the QakBot operators (PDF)
–A technical breakdown from SecureWorks

Tourists Give Themselves Away by Looking Up. So Do Most Network Intruders.

In large metropolitan areas, tourists are often easy to spot because they’re far more inclined than locals to gaze upward at the surrounding skyscrapers. Security experts say this same tourist dynamic is a dead giveaway in virtually all computer intrusions that lead to devastating attacks like data theft and ransomware, and that more organizations should set simple virtual tripwires that sound the alarm when authorized users and devices are spotted exhibiting this behavior.

In a blog post published last month, Cisco Talos said it was seeing a worrisome “increase in the rate of high-sophistication attacks on network infrastructure.” Cisco’s warning comes amid a flurry of successful data ransom and state-sponsored cyber espionage attacks targeting some of the most well-defended networks on the planet.

But despite their increasing complexity, a great many initial intrusions that lead to data theft could be nipped in the bud if more organizations started looking for the telltale signs of newly-arrived cybercriminals behaving like network tourists, Cisco says.

“One of the most important things to talk about here is that in each of the cases we’ve seen, the threat actors are taking the type of ‘first steps’ that someone who wants to understand (and control) your environment would take,” Cisco’s Hazel Burton wrote. “Examples we have observed include threat actors performing a ‘show config,’ ‘show interface,’ ‘show route,’ ‘show arp table’ and a ‘show CDP neighbor.’ All these actions give the attackers a picture of a router’s perspective of the network, and an understanding of what foothold they have.”

Cisco’s alert concerned espionage attacks from China and Russia that abused vulnerabilities in aging, end-of-life network routers. But at a very important level, it doesn’t matter how or why the attackers got that initial foothold on your network.

It might be zero-day vulnerabilities in your network firewall or file-transfer appliance. Your more immediate and primary concern has to be: How quickly can you detect and detach that initial foothold?

The same tourist behavior that Cisco described attackers exhibiting vis-a-vis older routers is also incredibly common early on in ransomware and data ransom attacks — which often unfurl in secret over days or weeks as attackers methodically identify and compromise a victim’s key network assets.

These virtual hostage situations usually begin with the intruders purchasing access to the target’s network from dark web brokers who resell access to stolen credentials and compromised computers. As a result, when those stolen resources first get used by would-be data thieves, almost invariably the attackers will run a series of basic commands asking the local system to confirm exactly who and where they are on the victim’s network.

This fundamental reality about modern cyberattacks — that cybercriminals almost always orient themselves by “looking up” who and where they are upon entering a foreign network for the first time — forms the business model of an innovative security company called Thinkst, which gives away easy-to-use tripwires or “canaries” that can fire off an alert whenever all sorts of suspicious activity is witnessed.

“Many people have pointed out that there are a handful of commands that are overwhelmingly run by attackers on compromised hosts (and seldom ever by regular users/usage),” the Thinkst website explains. “Reliably alerting when a user on your code-sign server runs whoami.exe can mean the difference between catching a compromise in week-1 (before the attackers dig in) and learning about the attack on CNN.”

These canaries — or “canary tokens” — are meant to be embedded inside regular files, acting much like a web beacon or web bug that tracks when someone opens an email.

“Imagine doing that, but for file reads, database queries, process executions or patterns in log files,” the Canary Tokens documentation explains. “Canarytokens does all this and more, letting you implant traps in your production systems rather than setting up separate honeypots.”

Thinkst operates alongside a burgeoning industry offering so-called “deception” or “honeypot” services — those designed to confuse, disrupt and entangle network intruders. But in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Thinkst founder and CEO Haroon Meer said most deception techniques involve some degree of hubris.

“Meaning, you’ll have deception teams in your network playing spy versus spy with people trying to break in, and it becomes this whole counterintelligence thing,” Meer said. “Nobody really has time for that. Instead, we are saying literally the opposite: That you’ve probably got all these [security improvement] projects that are going to take forever. But while you’re doing all that, just drop these 10 canaries, because everything else is going to take a long time to do.”

The idea here is to lay traps in sensitive areas of your network or web applications where few authorized users should ever trod. Importantly, the canary tokens themselves are useless to an attacker. For example, that AWS canary token sure looks like the digital keys to your cloud, but the token itself offers no access. It’s just a lure for the bad guys, and you get an alert when and if it is ever touched.

One nice thing about canary tokens is that Thinkst gives them away for free. Head over to canarytokens.org, and choose from a drop-down menu of available tokens, including:

-a web bug / URL token, designed to alert when a particular URL is visited;
-a DNS token, which alerts when a hostname is requested;
-an AWS token, which alerts when a specific Amazon Web Services key is used;
-a “custom exe” token, to alert when a specific Windows executable file or DLL is run;
-a “sensitive command” token, to alert when a suspicious Windows command is run.
-a Microsoft Excel/Word token, which alerts when a specific Excel or Word file is accessed.

Much like a “wet paint” sign often encourages people to touch a freshly painted surface anyway, attackers often can’t help themselves when they enter a foreign network and stumble upon what appear to be key digital assets, Meer says.

“If an attacker lands on your server and finds a key to your cloud environment, it’s really hard for them not to try it once,” Meer said. “Also, when these sorts of actors do land in a network, they have to orient themselves, and while doing that they are going to trip canaries.”

Meer says canary tokens are as likely to trip up attackers as they are “red teams,” security experts hired or employed by companies seeking to continuously probe their own computer systems and networks for security weaknesses.

“The concept and use of canary tokens has made me very hesitant to use credentials gained during an engagement, versus finding alternative means to an end goal,” wrote Shubham Shah, a penetration tester and co-founder of the security firm Assetnote. “If the aim is to increase the time taken for attackers, canary tokens work well.”

Thinkst makes money by selling Canary Tools, which are honeypots that emulate full blown systems like Windows servers or IBM mainframes. They deploy in minutes and include a personalized, private Canarytoken server.

“If you’ve got a sophisticated defense team, you can start putting these things in really interesting places,” Meer said. “Everyone says their stuff is simple, but we obsess over it. It’s really got to be so simple that people can’t mess it up. And if it works, it’s the best bang for your security buck you’re going to get.”

Further reading:

Dark Reading: Credential Canaries Create Minefield for Attackers
NCC Group: Extending a Thinkst Canary to Become an Interactive Honeypot
Cruise Automation’s experience deploying canary tokens