Who is the DOGE and X Technician Branden Spikes?

At 49, Branden Spikes isn’t just one of the oldest technologists who has been involved in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the current director of information technology at X/Twitter and an early hire at PayPal, Zip2, Tesla and SpaceX, Spikes is also among Musk’s most loyal employees. Here’s a closer look at this trusted Musk lieutenant, whose Russian ex-wife was once married to Elon’s cousin.

When President Trump took office again in January, he put the world’s richest man — Elon Musk — in charge of the U.S. Digital Service, and renamed the organization as DOGE. The group is reportedly staffed by at least 50 technologists, many of whom have ties to Musk’s companies.

DOGE has been enabling the president’s ongoing mass layoffs and firings of federal workers, largely by seizing control over computer systems and government data for a multitude of federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department.

It is difficult to find another person connected to DOGE who has stronger ties to Musk than Branden Spikes. A native of California, Spikes initially teamed up with Musk in 1997 as a lead systems engineer for the software company Zip2, the first major venture for Musk. In 1999, Spikes was hired as director of IT at PayPal, and in 2002 he became just the fourth person hired at SpaceX.

In 2012, Spikes launched Spikes Security, a software product that sought to create a compartmentalized or “sandboxed” web browser that could insulate the user from malware attacks. A review of spikes.com in the Wayback Machine shows that as far back as 1998, Musk could be seen joining Spikes for team matches in the online games Quake and Quake II. In 2016, Spikes Security was merged with another security suite called Aurionpro, with the combined company renamed Cyberinc.

Spikes’s LinkedIn profile says he was appointed head of IT at X in February 2025. And although his name shows up on none of the lists of DOGE employees circulated by various media outlets, multiple sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Spikes was working with DOGE and operates within Musk’s inner circle of trust.

In a conversation with KrebsOnSecurity, Spikes said he is dedicated to his country and to saving it from what he sees as certain ruin.

“Myself, I was raised by a southern conservative family in California and I strongly believe in America and her future,” Spikes said. “This is why I volunteered for two months in DC recently to help DOGE save us from certain bankruptcy.”

Spikes told KrebsOnSecurity that he recently decided to head back home and focus on his job as director of IT at X.

“I loved it, but ultimately I did not want to leave my hometown and family back in California,” Spikes said of his tenure at DOGE. “After a couple of months it became clear that to continue helping I would need to move to DC and commit a lot more time, so I politely bowed out.”

Prior to founding Spikes Security, Branden Spikes was married to a native Russian woman named Natalia whom he’d met at a destination wedding in South America in 2003.

Branden and Natalia’s names are both on the registration records for the domain name orangetearoom[.]com. This domain, which DomainTools.com says was originally registered by Branden in 2009, is the home of a tax-exempt charity in Los Angeles called the California Russian Association.

Here is a photo from a 2011 event organized by the California Russian Association, showing Branden and Natalia at one of its “White Nights” charity fundraisers:

In 2011, the Spikes couple got divorced, and Natalia changed her last name to Haldeman. That is not her maiden name, which appears to be “Libina.” Rather, Natalia acquired the surname Haldeman in 1998, when she married Elon Musk’s cousin.

Reeve Haldeman is the son of Scott Haldeman, who is the brother of Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk. Divorce records show Reeve and Natalia officially terminated their marriage in 2007. Reeve Haldeman did not respond to a request for comment.

A review of other domain names connected to Natalia Haldeman’s email address show she has registered more than a dozen domains over the years that are tied to the California Russian Association, and an apparently related entity called the Russian Heritage Foundation, Inc.:

russianamericans.org
russianamericanstoday.com
russianamericanstoday.org
russiancalifornia.org
russianheritagefoundation.com
russianheritagefoundation.org
russianwhitenights.com
russianwhitenights.org
theforafoundation.org
thegoldentearoom.com
therussianheritagefoundation.org
tsarinahome.com

Ms. Haldeman did not respond to requests for comment. Her name and contact information appears in the registration records for these domains dating back to 2010, and a document published by ProPublica show that by 2016 Natalia Haldeman was appointed CEO of the California Russian Foundation.

The domain name that bears both Branden’s and Natalia’s names — orangetearoom.com — features photos of Ms. Haldeman at fundraising events for the Russian foundation through 2014. Additional photos of her and many of the same people can be seen through 2023 at another domain she registered in 2010 — russianheritagefoundation.com.

The photo of Branden and Natalia above is from one such event in 2011 (tied to russianwhitenights.org, another Haldeman domain). The person on the right in that image — Ivan Y. Podvalov — appears in many fundraising event photos published by the foundation over the past decade. Podvalov is a board member of the Congress of Russian Americans (CRA), a nonprofit group that is known for vehemently opposing U.S. financial and legal sanctions against Russia.

Writing for The Insider in 2022, journalist Diana Fishman described how the CRA has engaged in outright political lobbying, noting that the organization in June 2014 sent a letter to President Obama and the secretary of the United Nations, calling for an end to the “large-scale US intervention in Ukraine and the campaign to isolate Russia.”

“The US military contingents must be withdrawn immediately from the Eastern European region, and NATO’s enlargement efforts and provocative actions against Russia must cease,” the message read.

The Insider said the CRA director sent another two letters, this time to President Donald Trump, in 2017 and 2018.

“One was a request not to sign a law expanding sanctions against Russia,” Fishman wrote. “The other regretted the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats from the United States and urged not to jump to conclusions on Moscow’s involvement in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal.”

The nonprofit tracking website CauseIQ.com reports that The Russian Heritage Foundation, Inc. is now known as Constellation of Humanity.

The Russian Heritage Foundation and the California Russian Association both promote the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church. This page indexed by Archive.org from russiancalifornia.org shows The California Russian Foundation organized a community effort to establish an Orthodox church in Orange County, Calif.

A press release from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) shows that in 2021 the Russian Heritage Foundation donated money to organize a conference for the Russian Orthodox Church in Serbia.

A review of the “Partners” listed on the Spikes’ jointly registered domain — orangetearoom.com — shows the organization worked with a marketing company called Russian American Media. Reporting by KrebsOnSecurity last year showed that Russian American Media also partners with the problematic people-search service Radaris, which was formed by two native Russian brothers in Massachusetts who have built a fleet of consumer data brokers and Russian affiliate programs.

When asked about his ex-wife’s history, Spikes said she has a good heart and bears no ill-will toward anyone.

“I attended several of Natalia’s social events over the years we were together and can assure you that she’s got the best intentions with those,” Spikes told KrebsOnSecurity. “There’s no funny business going on. It is just a way for those friendly immigrants to find resources amongst each other to help get settled in and chase the American dream. I mean, they’re not unlike the immigrants from other countries who come to America and try to find each other and help each other find others who speak the language and share in the building of their businesses here in America.”

Spikes said his own family roots go back deeply into American history, sharing that his 6th great grandfather was Alexander Hamilton on his mom’s side, and Jessie James on his dad’s side.

“My family roots are about as American as you can get,” he said. “I’ve also been entrusted with building and safeguarding Elon’s companies since 1999 and have a keen eye (as you do) for bad actors, so have enough perspective to tell you that Natalia has no bad blood and that she loves America.”

Of course, this perspective comes from someone who has the utmost regard for the interests of the “special government employee” Mr. Musk, who has been bragging about tossing entire federal agencies into the “wood chipper,” and who recently wielded an actual chainsaw on stage while referring to it as the “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”

“Elon’s intentions are good and you can trust him,” Spikes assured.

A special note of thanks for research assistance goes to Jacqueline Sweet, an independent investigative journalist whose work has been published in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, POLITICO and The Intercept.

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.

Trump 2.0 Brings Cuts to Cyber, Consumer Protections

One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and data.

The Trump administration has fired at least 130 employees at the federal government’s foremost cybersecurity body — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Those dismissals reportedly included CISA staff dedicated to securing U.S. elections, and fighting misinformation and foreign influence operations.

Earlier this week, technologists with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at CISA and gained access to the agency’s email and networked files. Those DOGE staffers include Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former denizen of the “Com,” an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.

The investigative journalist Jacob Silverman writes that Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a KGB double agent who spied for the United States. Silverman recounted how Martynov’s wife Natalya Martynova moved to the United States with her two children after her husband’s death.

“Her son became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father,” Silverman wrote. “Her daughter became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”

Another member of DOGE is Christopher Stanley, formerly senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at Musk’s SpaceX. Stanley, 33, had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.

My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.

“A NATIONAL CYBERATTACK”

DOGE has been steadily gaining sensitive network access to federal agencies that hold a staggering amount of personal and financial information on Americans, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury Department.

Most recently, DOGE has sought broad access to systems at the Internal Revenue Service that contain the personal tax information on millions of Americans, including how much individuals earn and owe, property information, and even details related to child custody agreements. The New York Times reported Friday that the IRS had reached an agreement whereby a single DOGE employee — 25-year-old Gavin Kliger — will be allowed to see only anonymized taxpayer information.

The rapidity with which DOGE has rifled through one federal database after another in the name of unearthing “massive fraud” by government agencies has alarmed many security experts, who warned that DOGE’s actions bypassed essential safeguards and security measures.

“The most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, referring to DOGE as a national cyberattack. “It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.”

Jacob Williams is a former hacker with the U.S. National Security Agency who now works as managing director of the cybersecurity firm Hunter Labs. Williams kicked a virtual hornet’s nest last week when he posted on LinkedIn that the network incursions by DOGE were “a bigger threat to U.S. federal government information systems than China.”

Williams said while he doesn’t believe anyone at DOGE would intentionally harm the integrity and availability of these systems, it’s widely reported (and not denied) that DOGE introduced code changes into multiple federal IT systems. These code changes, he maintained, are not following the normal process for vetting and review given to federal government IT systems.

“For those thinking ‘I’m glad they aren’t following the normal federal government IT processes, those are too burdensome’ I get where you’re coming from,” Williams wrote. “But another name for ‘red tape’ are ‘controls.’ If you’re comfortable bypassing controls for the advancement of your agenda, I have questions – mostly about whether you do this in your day job too. Please tag your employer letting them know your position when you comment that controls aren’t important (doubly so if you work in cybersecurity). All satire aside, if you’re comfortable abandoning controls for expediency, I implore you to decide where the line is that you won’t cross in that regard.”

The DOGE website’s “wall of receipts” boasts that Musk and his team have saved the federal government more than $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts. But a team of reporters at The New York Times found the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.

For example, DOGE claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract, when the total amount was actually $8 million, The Times found.

“Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted,” reads a Times story with six bylines. “Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”

So far, the DOGE website does not inspire confidence: We learned last week that the doge.gov administrators somehow left their database wide open, allowing someone to publish messages that ridiculed the site’s insecurity.

APPOINTMENTS

Trump’s efforts to grab federal agencies by their data has seen him replace career civil servants who refused to allow DOGE access to agency networks. CNN reports that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, was shown the door after she denied DOGE access to sensitive information.

King was replaced by Leland Dudek, formerly a senior advisor in the SSA’s Office of Program Integrity. This week, Dudek posted a now-deleted message on LinkedIn acknowledging he had been placed on administrative leave for cooperating with DOGE.

“I confess,” Dudek wrote. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

According to Wired, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was also bracing this week for roughly 500 staffers to be fired, which could have serious impacts on NIST’s cybersecurity standards and software vulnerability tracking work.

“And cuts last week at the US Digital Service included the cybersecurity lead for the central Veterans Affairs portal, VA.gov, potentially leaving VA systems and data more vulnerable without someone in his role,” Wired’s Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman wrote.

NextGov reports that Trump named the Department of Defense’s new chief information security officer: Katie Arrington, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who helped steer Pentagon cybersecurity contracting policy before being put on leave amid accusations that she disclosed classified data from a military intelligence agency.

NextGov notes that the National Security Agency suspended her clearance in 2021, although the exact reasons that led to the suspension and her subsequent leave were classified. Arrington argued that the suspension was a politically motivated effort to silence her.

Trump also appointed the former chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee as the new head of the Office of National Cyber Director. Sean Cairncross, who has no formal experience in technology or security, will be responsible for coordinating national cybersecurity policy, advising the president on cyber threats, and ensuring a unified federal response to emerging cyber-risks, Politico writes.

DarkReading reports that Cairncross would share responsibility for advising the president on cyber matters, along with the director of cyber at the White House National Security Council (NSC) — a group that advises the president on all matters security related, and not just cyber.

CONSUMER PROTECTION?

The president also ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws.

The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The CFPB’s homepage has featured a “404: Page not found” error for weeks now.

Trump has appointed Russell Vought, the architect of the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, to be the CFPB’s acting director. Vought has publicly favored abolishing the agency, as has Elon Musk, whose efforts to remake X into a payments platform would otherwise be regulated by the CFPB.

The New York Times recently published a useful graphic showing all of the government staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, affecting agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk’s companies. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also have released a comprehensive account (PDF) of Musk’s various conflicts of interest.

As the Times notes, Musk and his companies have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, and these failures have prompted at least three federal reviews. Those include an inquiry launched last year by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. Four days after taking office, Trump fired the DoD inspector general along with 17 other inspectors general.

The Trump administration also shifted the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from prosecuting misconduct in the cryptocurrency sector, reassigning lawyers and renaming the unit to focus more on “cyber and emerging technologies.”

Reuters reports that the former SEC chair Gary Gensler made fighting misconduct in a sector he termed the “wild west” a priority for the agency, targeting not only cryptocurrency fraudsters but also the large firms that facilitate trading such as Coinbase.

On Friday, Coinbase said the SEC planned to withdraw its lawsuit against the crypto exchange. Also on Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced on X that a cybersecurity breach led to the theft of more than $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — making it the largest crypto heist ever.

ORGANIZED CRIME AND CORRUPTION

On Feb. 10, Trump ordered executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.”

Trump’s action also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and KleptoCapture Task Force — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime.

That’s according to the independent Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an investigative journalism outlet that until very recently was funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The OCCRP lost nearly a third of its funding and was forced to lay off 43 reporters and staff after Trump moved to shutter USAID and freeze its spending. NBC News reports the Trump administration plans to gut the agency and leave fewer than 300 staffers on the job out of the current 8,000 direct hires and contractors.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote this week that the sudden hold on USAID foreign assistance funding has frozen an estimated $268 million in agreed grants for independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries — including several under repressive regimes.

Elon Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization” without evidence, and promoted fringe theories on his social media platform X that the agency operated without oversight and was rife with fraud. Just months before the election, USAID’s Office of Inspector General announced an investigation into USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the government of Ukraine.

KrebsOnSecurity this week heard from a trusted source that all outgoing email from USAID now carries a notation of “sensitive but unclassified,” a designation that experts say could make it more difficult for journalists and others to obtain USAID email records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Feb. 20, Fedscoop reported also hearing the same thing from multiple sources, noting that the added message cannot be seen by senders until after the email is sent.

FIVE BULLETS

On Feb. 18, Trump issued an executive order declaring that only the U.S. attorney general and the president can provide authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, and that this authority extends to independent agencies operating under the executive branch.

Trump is arguing that Article II, Clause 1 of the Constitution vests this power with the president. However, jurist.org writes that Article II does not expressly state the president or any other person in the executive branch has the power to interpret laws.

“The article states that the president is required to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'” Juris noted. “Jurisdiction to interpret laws and determine constitutionality belongs to the judicial branch under Article III. The framers of the Constitution designed the separation of duties to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful.”

The executive order requires all agencies to submit to “performance standards and management objectives” to be established by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and to report periodically to the president.

Those performance metrics are already being requested: Employees at multiple federal agencies on Saturday reported receiving an email from the Office of Personnel Management ordering them to reply with a set of bullet points justifying their work for the past week.

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the notice read. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.”

In a social media post Saturday, Musk said the directive came at the behest of President Trump, and that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. Meanwhile, Bloomberg writes the Department of Justice has been urging employees to hold off replying out of concern doing so could trigger ethics violations. The National Treasury Employees Union also is advising its employees not to respond.

A legal battle over Trump’s latest executive order is bound to join more than 70 other lawsuits currently underway to halt the administration’s efforts to massively reduce the size of the federal workforce through layoffs, firings and attrition.

KING TRUMP?

On Feb. 15, the president posted on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” citing a quote often attributed to the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Four days later, Trump referred to himself as “the king” on social media, while the White House nonchalantly posted an illustration of him wearing a crown.

Trump has been publicly musing about running for an unconstitutional third-term in office, a statement that some of his supporters dismiss as Trump just trying to rile his liberal critics. However, just days after Trump began his second term, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to amend the Constitution so that Trump — and any other future president — can be elected to serve a third term.

This week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rep. Ogles reportedly led a group of Trump supporters calling itself the “Third Term Project,” which is trying to gain support for the bill from GOP lawmakers. The event featured images of Trump depicted as Caesar.

Russia continues to be among the world’s top exporters of cybercrime, narcotics, money laundering, human trafficking, disinformation, war and death, and yet the Trump administration has suddenly broken with the Western world in normalizing relations with Moscow.

This week President Trump stunned U.S. allies by repeating Kremlin talking points that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator.” The president repeated these lies even as his administration is demanding that Zelensky give the United States half of his country’s mineral wealth in exchange for a promise that Russia will cease its territorial aggression there.

President Trump’s servility toward an actual dictator — Russian President Vladimir Putin — does not bode well for efforts to improve the cybersecurity of U.S. federal IT networks, or the private sector systems on which the government is largely reliant. In addition, this administration’s baffling moves to alienate, antagonize and sideline our closest allies could make it more difficult for the United States to secure their ongoing cooperation in cybercrime investigations.

It’s also startling how closely DOGE’s approach so far hews to tactics typically employed by ransomware gangs: A group of 20-somethings with names like “Big Balls” shows up on a weekend and gains access to your servers, deletes data, locks out key staff, takes your website down, and prevents you from serving customers.

When the federal executive starts imitating ransomware playbooks against its own agencies while Congress largely gazes on in either bewilderment or amusement, we’re in four-alarm fire territory. At least in theory, one can negotiate with ransomware purveyors.

Canadian Man Arrested in Snowflake Data Extortions

A 25-year-old man in Ontario, Canada has been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting more than 160 companies that used the cloud data service Snowflake.

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. Bloomberg first reported Moucka’s alleged ties to the Snowflake hacks on Monday.

At the end of 2023, malicious hackers learned that many large companies had uploaded huge volumes of sensitive customer data to Snowflake accounts that were protected with little 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 used by some of the world’s largest corporations.

Among those was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information and phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all of its customers. Wired.com reported in July that AT&T paid a hacker $370,000 to delete stolen phone records.

A report on the extortion attacks from the incident response firm Mandiant notes that Snowflake victim companies were privately approached by the hackers, who demanded a ransom in exchange for a promise not to sell or leak the stolen data. All told, more than 160 Snowflake customers were relieved of data, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.

Moucka is alleged to have used the hacker handles Judische and Waifu, among many others. These monikers correspond to a prolific cybercriminal whose exploits were the subject of a recent story published here about the overlap between Western, English-speaking cybercriminals and extremist groups that harass and extort minors into harming themselves or others.

On May 2, 2024, Judische claimed on the fraud-focused Telegram channel Star Chat that they had hacked Santander Bank, one of the first known Snowflake victims. Judische would repeat that claim in Star Chat on May 13 — the day before Santander publicly disclosed a data breach — and would periodically blurt out the names of other Snowflake victims before their data even went up for sale on the cybercrime forums.

404 Media reports that at a court hearing in Ontario this morning, Moucka called in from a prison phone and said he was seeking legal aid to hire an attorney.

TELECOM DOMINOES

Mandiant has attributed the Snowflake compromises to a group it calls “UNC5537,” with members based in North America and Turkey. Sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity the UNC5537 member in Turkey is John Erin Binns, an elusive American man indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76.6 million customers.

Update: The Justice Department has unsealed an indictment (PDF) against Moucka and Binns, charging them with one count of conspiracy; 10 counts of wire fraud; four counts of computer fraud and abuse; two counts of extortion in relation to computer fraud; and two counts aggravated identity theft.

In a statement on Moucka’s arrest, Mandiant said UNC5537 aka Alexander ‘Connor’ Moucka has proven to be one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024.

“In April 2024, UNC5537 launched a campaign, systematically compromising misconfigured SaaS instances across over a hundred organizations,” wrote Austin Larsen, Mandiant’s senior threat analyst. “The operation, which left organizations reeling from significant data loss and extortion attempts, highlighted the alarming scale of harm an individual can cause using off-the-shelf tools.”

Sources involved in the investigation said UNC5537 has focused on hacking into telecommunications companies around the world. Those sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Binns and Judische are suspected of stealing data from India’s largest state-run telecommunications firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BNSL), and that the duo even bragged about being able to intercept or divert phone calls and text messages for a large portion of the population of India.

Judische appears to have outsourced the sale of databases from victim companies who refuse to pay, delegating some of that work to a cybercriminal who uses the nickname Kiberphant0m on multiple forums. In late May 2024, Kiberphant0m began advertising the sale of hundreds of gigabytes of data stolen from BSNL.

“Information is worth several million dollars but I’m selling for pretty cheap,” Kiberphant0m wrote of the BSNL data in a post on the English-language cybercrime community Breach Forums. “Negotiate a deal in Telegram.”

Also in May 2024, Kiberphant0m took to the Russian-language hacking forum XSS to sell more than 250 gigabytes of data stolen from an unnamed mobile telecom provider in Asia, including a database of all active customers and software allowing the sending of text messages to all customers.

On September 3, 2024, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on XSS titled “Selling American Telecom Access (100B+ Revenue).” Kiberphant0m’s asking price of $200,000 was apparently too high because they reposted the sales thread on Breach Forums a month later, with a headline that more clearly explained the data was stolen from Verizon‘s “push-to-talk” (PTT) customers — primarily U.S. government agencies and first responders.

404Media reported recently that the breach does not appear to impact the main consumer Verizon network. Rather, the hackers broke into a third party provider and stole data on Verizon’s PTT systems, which are a separate product marketed towards public sector agencies, enterprises, and small businesses to communicate internally.

INTERVIEW WITH JUDISCHE

Investigators say Moucka shared a home in Kitchener with other tenants, but not his family. His mother was born in Chechnya, and he speaks Russian in addition to French and English. Moucka’s father died of a drug overdose at age 26, when the defendant was roughly five years old.

A person claiming to be Judische began communicating with this author more than three months ago on Signal after KrebsOnSecurity started asking around about hacker nicknames previously used by Judische over the years.

Judische admitted to stealing and ransoming data from Snowflake customers, but he said he’s not interested in selling the information, and that others have done this with some of the data sets he stole.

“I’m not really someone that sells data unless it’s crypto [databases] or credit cards because they’re the only thing I can find buyers for that actually have money for the data,” Judische told KrebsOnSecurity. “The rest is just ransom.”

Judische has sent this reporter dozens of unsolicited and often profane messages from several different Signal accounts, all of which claimed to be an anonymous tipster sharing different identifying details for Judische. This appears to have been an elaborate effort by Judische to “detrace” his movements online and muddy the waters about his identity.

Judische frequently claimed he had unparalleled “opsec” or operational security, a term that refers to the ability to compartmentalize and obfuscate one’s tracks online. In an effort to show he was one step ahead of investigators, Judische shared information indicating someone had given him a Mandiant researcher’s assessment of who and where they thought he was. Mandiant says those were discussion points shared with select reporters in advance of the researcher’s recent talk at the LabsCon security conference.

But in a conversation with KrebsOnSecurity on October 26, Judische acknowledged it was likely that the authorities were closing in on him, and said he would seriously answer certain questions about his personal life.

“They’re coming after me for sure,” he said.

In several previous conversations, Judische referenced suffering from an unspecified personality disorder, and when pressed said he has a condition called “schizotypal personality disorder” (STPD).

According to the Cleveland Clinic, schizotypal personality disorder is marked by a consistent pattern of intense discomfort with relationships and social interactions: “People with STPD have unusual thoughts, speech and behaviors, which usually hinder their ability to form and maintain relationships.”

Judische said he was prescribed medication for his psychological issues, but that he doesn’t take his meds. Which might explain why he never leaves his home.

“I never go outside,” Judische allowed. “I’ve never had a friend or true relationship not online nor in person. I see people as vehicles to achieve my ends no matter how friendly I may seem on the surface, which you can see by how fast I discard people who are loyal or [that] I’ve known a long time.”

Judische later admitted he doesn’t have an official STPD diagnosis from a physician, but said he knows that he exhibits all the signs of someone with this condition.

“I can’t actually get diagnosed with that either,” Judische shared. “Most countries put you on lists and restrict you from certain things if you have it.”

Asked whether he has always lived at his current residence, Judische replied that he had to leave his hometown for his own safety.

“I can’t live safely where I’m from without getting robbed or arrested,” he said, without offering more details.

A source familiar with the investigation said Moucka previously lived in Quebec, which he allegedly fled after being charged with harassing others on the social network Discord.

Judische claims to have made at least $4 million in his Snowflake extortions. Judische said he and others frequently targeted business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, staffing firms that handle customer service for a wide range of organizations. They also went after managed service providers (MSPs) that oversee IT support and security for multiple companies, he claimed.

“Snowflake isn’t even the biggest BPO/MSP multi-company dataset on our networks, but what’s been exfiltrated from them is well over 100TB,” Judische bragged. “Only ones that don’t pay get disclosed (unless they disclose it themselves). A lot of them don’t even do their SEC filing and just pay us to fuck off.”

INTEL SECRETS

The other half of UNC5537 — 24-year-old John Erin Binns — was arrested in Turkey in late May 2024, and currently resides in a Turkish prison. However, it is unclear if Binns faces any immediate threat of extradition to the United States, where he is currently wanted on criminal hacking charges tied to the 2021 breach at T-Mobile.

A person familiar with the investigation said Binns’s application for Turkish citizenship was inexplicably approved after his incarceration, leading to speculation that Binns may have bought his way out of a sticky legal situation.

Under the Turkish constitution, a Turkish citizen cannot be extradited to a foreign state. Turkey has been criticized for its “golden passport” program, which provides citizenship and sanctuary for anyone willing to pay several hundred thousand dollars.

Binns’s alleged hacker alter egos — “IRDev” and “IntelSecrets” — were at once feared and revered on several cybercrime-focused Telegram communities, because he was known to possess a powerful weapon: A massive botnet. From reviewing the Telegram channels Binns frequented, we can see that others in those communities — including Judische — heavily relied on Binns and his botnet for a variety of cybercriminal purposes.

The IntelSecrets nickname corresponds to an individual who has claimed responsibility for modifying the source code for the Mirai “Internet of Things” botnet to create a variant known as “Satori,” and supplying it to others who used it for criminal gain and were later caught and prosecuted.

Since 2020, Binns has filed a flood of lawsuits naming various federal law enforcement officers and agencies — including the FBI, the CIA, and the U.S. Special Operations Command (PDF), demanding that the government turn over information collected about him and seeking restitution for his alleged kidnapping at the hands of the CIA.

Binns claims he was kidnapped in Turkey and subjected to various forms of psychological and physical torture. According to Binns, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) falsely told their counterparts in Turkey that he was a supporter or member of the Islamic State (ISIS), a claim he says led to his detention and torture by the Turkish authorities.

However, in a 2020 lawsuit he filed against the CIA, Binns himself acknowledged having visited a previously ISIS-controlled area of Syria prior to moving to Turkey in 2017.

Sources familiar with the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Binns was so paranoid about possible surveillance on him by American and Turkish intelligence agencies that his erratic behavior and online communications actually brought about the very government snooping that he feared.

In several online chats in late 2023 on Discord, IRDev lamented being lured into a law enforcement sting operation after trying to buy a rocket launcher online. A person close to the investigation confirmed that at the beginning of 2023, IRDev began making earnest inquiries about how to purchase a Stinger, an American-made portable weapon that operates as an infrared surface-to-air missile.

Sources told KrebsOnSecurity Binns’ repeated efforts to purchase the projectile earned him multiple visits from the Turkish authorities, who were justifiably curious why he kept seeking to acquire such a powerful weapon.

WAIFU

A careful study of Judische’s postings on Telegram and Discord since 2019 shows this user is more widely known under the nickname “Waifu,” a moniker that corresponds to one of the more accomplished “SIM swappers” in the English-language cybercrime community over the years.

SIM swapping involves phishing, tricking or bribing mobile phone company employees for credentials needed to redirect a target’s mobile phone number to a device the attackers control — allowing thieves to intercept incoming text messages and phone calls.

Several SIM-swapping channels on Telegram maintain a frequently updated leaderboard of the 100 richest SIM-swappers, as well as the hacker handles associated with specific cybercrime groups (Waifu is ranked #24). That list has long included Waifu on a roster of hackers for a group that called itself “Beige.”

The term “Beige Group” came up in reporting on two stories published here in 2020. The first was in an August 2020 piece called Voice Phishers Targeting Corporate VPNs, which warned that the COVID-19 epidemic had brought a wave of targeted voice phishing attacks that tried to trick work-at-home employees into providing access to their employers’ networks. Frequent targets of the Beige group included employees at numerous top U.S. banks, ISPs, and mobile phone providers.

The second time Beige Group was mentioned by sources was in reporting on a breach at the domain registrar GoDaddy. In November 2020, intruders thought to be associated with the Beige Group tricked a GoDaddy employee into installing malicious software, and with that access they were able to redirect the web and email traffic for multiple cryptocurrency trading platforms. Other frequent targets of the Beige group included employees at numerous top U.S. banks, ISPs, and mobile phone providers.

Judische’s various Telegram identities have long claimed involvement in the 2020 GoDaddy breach, and he didn’t deny his alleged role when asked directly. Judische said he prefers voice phishing or “vishing” attacks that result in the target installing data-stealing malware, as opposed to tricking the user into entering their username, password and one-time code.

“Most of my ops involve malware [because] credential access burns too fast,” Judische explained.

CRACKDOWN ON HARM GROUPS?

The Telegram channels that the Judische/Waifu accounts frequented over the years show this user divided their time between posting in channels dedicated to financial cybercrime, and harassing and stalking others in harm communities like Leak Society and Court.

Both of these Telegram communities are known for victimizing children through coordinated online campaigns of extortion, doxing, swatting and harassment. People affiliated with harm groups like Court and Leak Society will often recruit new members by lurking on gaming platforms, social media sites and mobile applications that are popular with young people, including Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, Steam, Telegram, and Twitch.

“This type of offence usually starts with a direct message through gaming platforms and can move to more private chatrooms on other virtual platforms, typically one with video enabled features, where the conversation quickly becomes sexualized or violent,” warns a recent alert from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about the rise of sextortion groups on social media channels.

“One of the tactics being used by these actors is sextortion, however, they are not using it to extract money or for sexual gratification,” the RCMP continued. “Instead they use it to further manipulate and control victims to produce more harmful and violent content as part of their ideological objectives and radicalization pathway.”

Some of the largest such known groups include those that go by the names 764, CVLT, Kaskar, 7997, 8884, 2992, 6996, 555, Slit Town, 545, 404, NMK, 303, and H3ll.

On the various cybercrime-oriented channels Judische frequented, he often lied about his or others’ involvement in various breaches. But Judische also at times shared nuggets of truth about his past, particularly when discussing the early history and membership of specific Telegram- and Discord-based cybercrime and harm groups.

Judische claimed in multiple chats, including on Leak Society and Court, that they were an early member of the Atomwaffen Division (AWD), a white supremacy group whose members are suspected of having committed multiple murders in the U.S. since 2017.

In 2019, KrebsOnSecurity exposed how a loose-knit group of neo-Nazis, some of whom were affiliated with AWD, had doxed and/or swatted nearly three dozen journalists at a range of media publications. Swatting involves communicating a false police report of a bomb threat or hostage situation and tricking authorities into sending a heavily armed police response to a targeted address.

Judsiche also told a fellow denizen of Court that years ago he was active in an older harm community called “RapeLash,” a truly vile Discord server known for attracting Atomwaffen members. A 2018 retrospective on RapeLash posted to the now defunct neo-Nazi forum Fascist Forge explains that RapeLash was awash in gory, violent images and child pornography.

A Fascist Forge member named “Huddy” recalled that RapeLash was the third incarnation of an extremist community also known as “FashWave,” short for Fascist Wave.

“I have no real knowledge of what happened with the intermediary phase known as ‘FashWave 2.0,’ but FashWave 3.0 houses multiple known Satanists and other degenerates connected with AWD, one of which got arrested on possession of child pornography charges, last I heard,” Huddy shared.

In June 2024, a Mandiant employee told Bloomberg that UNC5537 members have made death threats against cybersecurity experts investigating the hackers, and that in one case the group used artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of a researcher to harass them.

Allison Nixon is chief research officer with the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon is among several researchers who have faced harassment and specific threats of physical violence from Judische.

Nixon said Judische is likely to argue in court that his self-described psychological disorder(s) should somehow excuse his long career in cybercrime and in harming others.

“They ran a misinformation campaign in a sloppy attempt to cover up the hacking campaign,” Nixon said of Judische. “Coverups are an acknowledgment of guilt, which will undermine a mental illness defense in court. We expect that violent hackers from the [cybercrime community] will experience increasingly harsh sentences as the crackdown continues.”

5:34 p.m. ET: Updated story to include a clarification from Mandiant. Corrected Moucka’s age.

Nov. 21, 2024: Included link to a criminal indictment against Moucka and Binns.

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.

Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. helps its users remove their personal information from the clutches of consumer data brokers, and from people-search services online. Backed by millions of dollars in litigation financing, Atlas so far this year has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes more than 20,000 New Jersey law enforcement officers who are signed up for Atlas services.

Atlas alleges all of these data brokers have ignored repeated warnings that they are violating Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey statute allowing law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers. Daniel’s Law was passed in 2020 after the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge — his mother.

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slightly dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.

Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Google Android and Apple mobile devices.

Babel Street can offer this tracking capability by consuming location data and other identifying information that is collected by many websites and broadcast to dozens and sometimes hundreds of ad networks that may wish to bid on showing their ad to a particular user.

In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have already faced significant harassment and death threats.

Atlas said the investigator encountered Babel Street while testing hundreds of data broker tools and services to see if personal information on its users was being sold. They soon discovered Babel Street also bundles people-search services with its platform, to make it easier for customers to zero in on a specific device.

The investigator contacted Babel Street about possibly buying home addresses in certain areas of New Jersey. After listening to a sales pitch for Babel Street and expressing interest, the investigator was told Babel Street only offers their service to the government or to “contractors of the government.”

“The investigator (truthfully) mentioned that he was contemplating some government contract work in the future and was told by the Babel Street salesperson that ‘that’s good enough’ and that ‘they don’t actually check,’” Atlas shared in an email with reporters.

KrebsOnSecurity was one of five media outlets invited to review screen recordings that Atlas made while its investigator used a two-week trial version of Babel Street’s LocateX service. References and links to reporting by other publications, including 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times, will appear throughout this story.

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

The findings outlined in Atlas’s lawsuit against Babel Street also illustrate how mobile location data is set to massively complicate several hot-button issues, from the tracking of suspected illegal immigrants or women seeking abortions, to harassing public servants who are already in the crosshairs over baseless conspiracy theories and increasingly hostile political rhetoric against government employees.

WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

While the Atlas investigator had access to its trial account at Babel Street, they were able to successfully track devices belonging to several plaintiffs named or referenced in the lawsuit. They did so by drawing a digital polygon around the home address or workplace of each person in Babel Street’s platform, which focused exclusively on the devices that passed through those addresses each day.

One unique feature of Babel Street is the ability to toggle a “night” mode, which makes it relatively easy to determine within a few meters where a target typically lays their head each night (because their phone is usually not far away).

Atlas plaintiffs Scott and Justyna Maloney are both veteran officers with the Rahway, NJ police department who live together with their two young children. In April 2023, Scott and Justyna became the target of intense harassment and death threats after Officer Justyna responded to a routine call about a man filming people outside of the Motor Vehicle Commission in Rahway.

The man filming the Motor Vehicle Commission that day is a social media personality who often solicits police contact and then records himself arguing about constitutional rights with the responding officers.

Officer Justyna’s interaction with the man was entirely peaceful, and the episode appeared to end without incident. But after a selectively edited video of that encounter went viral, their home address and unpublished phone numbers were posted online. When their tormentors figured out that Scott was also a cop (a sergeant), the couple began receiving dozens of threatening text messages, including specific death threats.

According to the Atlas lawsuit, one of the messages to Mr. Maloney demanded money, and warned that his family would “pay in blood” if he didn’t comply. Sgt. Maloney said he then received a video in which a masked individual pointed a rifle at the camera and told him that his family was “going to get [their] heads cut off.”

Maloney said a few weeks later, one of their neighbors saw two suspicious individuals in ski masks parked one block away from the home and alerted police. Atlas’s complaint says video surveillance from neighboring homes shows the masked individuals circling the Maloney’s home. The responding officers arrested two men, who were armed, for unlawful possession of a firearm.

Atlas said their investigator was not able to conclusively find Scott Maloney’s iPhone in the Babel Street platform, but they did find Justyna’s. Babel Street had nearly 100,000 hits for her phone over several months, allowing Atlas to piece together an intimate picture of Justyna’s daily movements and meetings with others.

An Atlas investigator visited the Maloneys and inspected Justyna’s iPhone, and determined the only app that used her device’s location data was from the department store Macy’s.

In a written response to questions, Macy’s said its app includes an opt-in feature for geo-location, “which allows customers to receive an enhanced shopping experience based on their location.”

“We do not store any customer location information,” Macy’s wrote. “We share geo-location data with a limited number of partners who help us deliver this enhanced app experience. Furthermore, we have no connection with Babel Street” [link added for context].

Justyna’s experience highlights a stark reality about the broad availability of mobile location data: Even if the person you’re looking for isn’t directly identifiable in platforms like Babel Street, it is likely that at least some of that person’s family members are. In other words, it’s often trivial to infer the location of one device by successfully locating another.

The terms of service for Babel Street’s Locate X service state that the product “may not be used as the basis for any legal process in any country, including as the basis for a warrant, subpoena, or any other legal or administrative action.” But Scott Maloney said he’s convinced by their experience that not even law enforcement agencies should have access to this capability without a warrant.

“As a law enforcement officer, in order for me to track someone I need a judge to sign a warrant – and that’s for a criminal investigation after we’ve developed probable cause,” Mr. Maloney said in an interview. “Data brokers tracking me and my family just to sell that information for profit, without our consent, and even after we’ve explicitly asked them not to is deeply disturbing.”

Mr. Maloney’s law enforcement colleagues in other states may see things differently. In August, The Texas Observer reported that state police plan to spend more than $5 million on a contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from the tech firm PenLink. Tangles is an AI-based web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep and dark web, and it has a premier feature called WebLoc that can be used to geofence mobile devices.

The Associated Press reported last month that law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cell phone tracking tool called Fog Reveal — at times without warrants — that gives them the ability to follow people’s movements going back many months.

It remains unclear precisely how Babel Street is obtaining the abundance of mobile location data made available to users of its platform. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But according to a document (PDF) obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology directorate, Babel Street re-hosts data from the commercial phone tracking firm Venntel.

On Monday, the Substack newsletter All-Source Intelligence unearthed documents indicating that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics.

“Venntel has also been a data partner of the police surveillance contractor Fog Data Science, whose product has been described as ‘mass surveillance on a budget,'” All-Source’s Jack Poulson wrote. “Venntel was also reported to have been a primary data source of the controversial ‘Locate X’ phone tracking product of the American data fusion company Babel Street.”

MAID IN HELL

The Mobile Advertising ID or MAID — the unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to each mobile device — was originally envisioned as a way to distinguish individual mobile customers without relying on personally identifiable information such as phone numbers or email addresses.

However, there is now a robust industry of marketing and advertising companies that specialize in assembling enormous lists of MAIDs that are “enriched” with historical and personal information about the individual behind each MAID.

Atlas said its investigator wanted to know whether they could find enriched MAID records on their New Jersey law enforcement customers, and soon found plenty of ad data brokers willing to sell it.

Some vendors offered only a handful of data fields, such as first and last name, MAID and email address. Other brokers sold far more detailed histories along with their MAID, including each subject’s social media profiles, precise GPS coordinates, and even likely consumer category.

How are advertisers and data brokers gaining access to so much information? Some sources of MAID data can be apps on your phone such as AccuWeather, GasBuddy, Grindr, and MyFitnessPal that collect your MAID and location and sell that to brokers.

A user’s MAID profile and location data also is commonly shared as a consequence of simply using a smartphone to visit a web page that features ads. In the few milliseconds before those ads load, the website will send a “bid request” to various ad exchanges, where advertisers can bid on the chance to place their ad in front of users who match the consumer profiles they’re seeking. A great deal of data can be included in a bid request, including the user’s precise location (the current open standard for bid requests is detailed here).

The trouble is that virtually anyone can access the “bidstream” data flowing through these so-called “realtime bidding” networks, because the information is simultaneously broadcast in the clear to hundreds of entities around the world.

The result is that there are a number of marketing companies that now enrich and broker access to this mobile location information. Earlier this year, the German news outlet netzpolitik.org purchased a bidstream data set containing more than 3.6 billion data points, and shared the information with the German daily BR24. They concluded that the data they obtained (through a free trial, no less) made it possible to establish movement profiles — some of them quite precise — of several million people across Germany.

Politico recently covered startling research from universities in New Hampshire, Kentucky and St. Louis that showed how the mobile advertising data they acquired allowed them to link visits from investigators with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to insiders selling stock before the investigations became public knowledge.

The researchers in that study said they didn’t attempt to use the same methods to track regulators from other agencies, but that virtually anyone could do it.

Justin Sherman, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology, called the research a “shocking demonstration of what happens when companies can freely harvest Americans’ geolocation data and sell it for their chosen price.”

“Politicians should understand how they, their staff, and public servants are threatened by the sale of personal data—and constituent groups should realize that talk of data broker ‘controls’ or ‘best practices” is designed by companies to distract from the underlying problems and the comprehensive privacy and security solutions,” Sherman wrote for Lawfare this week.

A BIDSTREAM DRAGNET?

The Orwellian nature of modern mobile advertising networks may soon have far-reaching implications for women’s reproductive rights, as more states move to outlaw abortion within their borders. The 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court discarded the federal right to abortion, and 14 states have since enacted strict abortion bans.

Anti-abortion groups are already using mobile advertising data to advance their cause. In May 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin used precise geolocation data to direct ads to women it suspected of seeking abortions.

As it stands, there is little to stop anti-abortion groups from purchasing bidstream data (or renting access to a platform like Babel Street) and using it to geofence abortion clinics, potentially revealing all mobile devices transiting through these locations.

Atlas said its investigator geofenced an abortion clinic and was able to identify a likely employee at that clinic, following their daily route to and from that individual’s home address.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which the Idaho Capital Sun reports is defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission.” Tennessee now has a similar law, and GOP lawmakers in five other states introduced abortion trafficking bills that failed to advance this year, the Sun reports.

Atlas said its investigator used Babel Street to identify and track a person traveling from their home in Alabama — where abortion is now illegal — to an abortion clinic just over the border in Tallahassee, Fla. — and back home again within a few hours. Abortion rights advocates and providers are currently suing Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, seeking to block him from prosecuting people who help patients travel out-of-state to end pregnancies.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group, said she’s extremely concerned about dragnet surveillance of people crossing state lines in order to get abortions.

“Specifically, Republican officials from states that have outlawed abortion have made it clear that they are interested in targeting people who have gone to neighboring states in order to get abortions, and to make it more difficult for people who are seeking abortions to go to neighboring states,” Galperin said. “It’s not a great leap to imagine that states will do this.”

APPLES AND GOOGLES

Atlas found that for the right price (typically $10-50k a year), brokers can provide access to tens of billions of data points covering large swaths of the US population and the rest of the world.

Based on the data sets Atlas acquired — many of which included older MAID records — they estimate they could locate roughly 80 percent of Android-based devices, and about 25 percent of Apple phones. Google refers to its MAID as the “Android Advertising ID,” (AAID) while Apple calls it the “Identifier for Advertisers” (IDFA).

What accounts for the disparity between the number of Android and Apple devices that can be found in mobile advertising data? In April 2021, Apple shipped version 14.5 of its iOS operating system, which introduced a technology called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that requires apps to get affirmative consent before they can track users by their IDFA or any other identifier.

Apple’s introduction of ATT had a swift and profound impact on the advertising market: Less than a year later Facebook disclosed that the iPhone privacy feature would decrease the company’s 2022 revenues by about $10 billion.

Google runs by far the world’s largest ad exchange, known as AdX. The U.S. Department of Justice, which has accused Google of building a monopoly over the technology that places ads on websites, estimates that Google’s ad exchange controls 47 percent of the U.S. market and 56 percent globally.

Google’s Android is also the dominant mobile operating system worldwide, with more than 72 percent of the market. In the U.S., however, iPhone users claim approximately 55 percent of the market, according to TechRepublic.

In response to requests for comment, Google said it does not send real time bidding requests to Babel Street, nor does it share precise location data in bid requests. The company added that its policies explicitly prohibit the sale of data from real-time bidding, or its use for any purpose other than advertising.

Google said its MAIDs are randomly generated and do not contain IP addresses, GPS coordinates, or any other location data, and that its ad systems do not share anyone’s precise location data.

“Android has clear controls for users to manage app access to device location, and reset or delete their advertising ID,” Google’s written statement reads. “If we learn that someone, whether an app developer, ad tech company or anyone else, is violating our policies, we take appropriate action. Beyond that, we support legislation and industry collaboration to address these types of data practices that negatively affect the entire mobile ecosystem, including all operating systems.”

In a written statement shared with reporters, Apple said Location Services is not on by default in its devices. Rather, users must enable Location Services and must give permission to each app or website to use location data. Users can turn Location Services off at any time, and can change whether apps have access to location at any time. The user’s choices include precise vs. approximate location, as well as a one-time grant of location access by the app.

“We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, and build privacy protections into each of our products and services to put the user in control of their data,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We minimize personal data collection, and where possible, process data only on users’ devices.”

Zach Edwards is a senior threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm SilentPush who has studied the location data industry closely. Edwards said Google and Apple can’t keep pretending like the MAIDs being broadcast into the bidstream from hundreds of millions of American devices aren’t making most people trivially trackable.

“The privacy risks here will remain until Apple and Google permanently turn off their mobile advertising ID schemes and admit to the American public that this is the technology that has been supporting the global data broker ecosystem,” he said.

STATES ACT, WHILE CONGRESS DITHERS

According to Bloomberg Law, between 2019 and 2023, threats against federal judges have more than doubled. Amid increasingly hostile political rhetoric and conspiracy theories against government officials, a growing number of states are seeking to pass their own versions of Daniel’s Law.

Last month, a retired West Virginia police officer filed a class action lawsuit against the people-search service Whitepages for listing their personal information in violation of a statute the state passed in 2021 that largely mirrors Daniel’s Law.

In May 2024, Maryland passed the Judge Andrew F. Wilkinson Judicial Security Act — named after a county circuit court judge who was murdered by an individual involved in a divorce proceeding over which he was presiding. The law allows current and former members of the Maryland judiciary to request their personal information not be made available to the public.

Under the Maryland law, personal information can include a home address; telephone number, email address; Social Security number or federal tax ID number; bank account or payment card number; a license plate or other unique vehicle identifier; a birth or marital record; a child’s name, school, or daycare; place of worship; place of employment for a spouse, child, or dependent.

The law firm Troutman Pepper writes that “so far in 2024, 37 states have begun considering or have adopted similar privacy-based legislation designed to protect members of the judiciary and, in some states, other government officials involved in law enforcement.”

Atlas alleges that in response to requests to have data on its New Jersey law enforcement clients scrubbed from consumer records sold by LexisNexis, the data broker retaliated by freezing the credit of approximately 18,500 people, and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

In addition, Atlas said LexisNexis started returning failure codes indicating they had no record of these individuals, resulting in denials when officers attempted to refinance loans or open new bank accounts.

The data broker industry has responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, and challenging the constitutionality of the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment.

Attorneys for the data broker industry argued in their motion to dismiss that there is “no First Amendment doctrine that exempts a content-based restriction from strict scrutiny just because it has some nexus with a privacy interest.”

Atlas’s lawyers responded that data covered under Daniel’s Law — personal information of New Jersey law enforcement officers — is not free speech. Atlas notes that while defending against comparable lawsuits, the data broker industry has argued that home address and phone number data are not “communications.”

“Data brokers should not be allowed to argue that information like addresses are not ‘communications’ in one context, only to turn around and claim that addresses are protectable communications,” Atlas argued (PDF). “Nor can their change of course alter the reality that the data at issue is not speech.”

The judge overseeing the challenge is expected to rule on the motion to dismiss within the next few weeks. Regardless of the outcome, the decision is likely to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states could limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminal charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and government records that fuel the people-search industry.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Congress’ failure to regulate data brokers, and the administration’s continued opposition to bipartisan legislation that would limit data sales to law enforcement, have created this current privacy crisis.

“Whether location data is being used to identify and expose closeted gay Americans, or to track people as they cross state lines to seek reproductive health care, data brokers are selling Americans’ deepest secrets and exposing them to serious harm, all for a few bucks,” Wyden said in a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times.

Sen. Wyden said Google also deserves blame for refusing to follow Apple’s lead by removing companies’ ability to track phones.

“Google’s insistence on uniquely tracking Android users – and allowing ad companies to do so as well – has created the technical foundations for the surveillance economy and the abuses stemming from it,” Wyden said.

Georgetown Law’s Justin Sherman said the data broker and mobile ad industries claim there are protections in place to anonymize mobile location data and restrict access to it, and that there are limits to the kinds of invasive inferences one can make from location data. The data broker industry also likes to tout the usefulness of mobile location data in fighting retail fraud, he said.

“All kinds of things can be inferred from this data, including people being targeted by abusers, or people with a particular health condition or religious belief,” Sherman said. “You can track jurors, law enforcement officers visiting the homes of suspects, or military intelligence people meeting with their contacts. The notion that the sale of all this data is preventing harm and fraud is hilarious in light of all the harm it causes enabling people to better target their cyber operations, or learning about people’s extramarital affairs and extorting public officials.”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Privacy experts say disabling or deleting your device’s MAID will have no effect on how your phone operates, except that you may begin to see far less targeted ads on that device.

Any Android apps with permission to use your location should appear when you navigate to the Settings app, Location, and then App Permissions. “Allowed all the time” is the most permissive setting, followed by “Allowed only while in use,” “Ask every time,” and “Not allowed.”

Android users can delete their ad ID permanently, by opening the Settings app and navigating to Privacy > Ads. Tap “Delete advertising ID,” then tap it again on the next page to confirm. According to the EFF, this will prevent any app on your phone from accessing the ad ID in the future. Google’s documentation on this is here.

By default, Apple’s iOS requires apps to ask permission before they can access your device’s IDFA. When you install a new app, it may ask for permission to track you. When prompted to do so by an app, select the “Ask App Not to Track” option. Apple users also can set the “Allow apps to request to track” switch to the “off” position, which will block apps from asking to track you.

Apple also has its own targeted advertising system which is separate from third-party tracking enabled by the IDFA. To disable it, go to Settings, Privacy, and Apple Advertising, and ensure that the “Personalized Ads” setting is set to “off.”

Finally, if you’re the type of reader who’s the default IT support person for a small group of family or friends (bless your heart), it would be a good idea to set their devices not to track them, and to disable any apps that may have location data sharing turned on 24/7.

There is a dual benefit to this altruism, which is clearly in the device owner’s best interests. Because while your device may not be directly trackable via advertising data, making sure they’re opted out of said tracking also can reduce the likelihood that you are trackable simply by being physically close to those who are.

The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and ‘The Com’

A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that made-for-Hollywood narrative has eclipsed a far more hideous trend: Many of these young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others.

In September 2023, a Russian ransomware group known as ALPHV/Black Cat claimed credit for an intrusion at the MGM Resorts hotel chain that quickly brought MGM’s casinos in Las Vegas to a standstill. While MGM was still trying to evict the intruders from its systems, an individual who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the hack contacted multiple media outlets to offer interviews about how it all went down.

One account of the hack came from a 17-year-old in the United Kingdom, who told reporters the intrusion began when one of the English-speaking hackers phoned a tech support person at MGM and tricked them into resetting the password for an employee account.

The security firm CrowdStrike dubbed the group “Scattered Spider,” a recognition that the MGM hackers came from different cliques scattered across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers dedicated to financially-oriented cybercrime.

Collectively, this archipelago of crime-focused chat communities is known as “The Com,” and it functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.

But mostly, The Com is a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Top Com members are constantly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.

And as often as they extort victim companies for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world.

CrowdStrike would go on to produce and sell Scattered Spider action figures, and it featured a life-sized Scattered Spider sculpture at this year’s RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

But marketing security products and services based on specific cybercriminal groups can be tricky, particularly if it turns out that robbing and extorting victims is by no means the most abhorrent activity those groups engage in on a daily basis.

KrebsOnSecurity examined the Telegram user ID number of the account that offered media interviews about the MGM hack — which corresponds to the screen name “@Holy” — and found the same account was used across a number of cybercrime channels that are entirely focused on extorting young people into harming themselves or others, and recording the harm on video.

HOLY NAZI

Holy was known to possess multiple prized Telegram usernames, including @bomb, @halo, and @cute, as well as one of the highest-priced Telegram usernames ever put up for sale: @nazi.

In one post on a Telegram channel dedicated to youth extortion, this same user can be seen asking if anyone knows the current Telegram handles for several core members of 764, an extremist group known for victimizing children through coordinated online campaigns of extortion, doxing, swatting and harassment.

People affiliated with harm groups like 764 will often recruit new members by lurking on gaming platforms, social media sites and mobile applications that are popular with young people, including Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, Steam, Telegram, and Twitch.

“This type of offence usually starts with a direct message through gaming platforms and can move to more private chatrooms on other virtual platforms, typically one with video enabled features, where the conversation quickly becomes sexualized or violent,” warns a recent alert from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about the rise of sextortion groups on social media channels.

“One of the tactics being used by these actors is sextortion, however, they are not using it to extract money or for sexual gratification,” the RCMP continued. “Instead they use it to further manipulate and control victims to produce more harmful and violent content as part of their ideological objectives and radicalization pathway.”

The 764 network is among the most populated harm communities, but there are plenty more. Some of the largest such known groups include CVLT, Court, Kaskar, Leak Society, 7997, 8884, 2992, 6996, 555, Slit Town, 545, 404, NMK, 303, and H3ll.

In March, a consortium of reporters from Wired, Der Spiegel, Recorder and The Washington Post examined millions of messages across more than 50 Discord and Telegram chat groups.

“The abuse perpetrated by members of com groups is extreme,” Wired’s Ali Winston wrote. “They have coerced children into sexual abuse or self-harm, causing them to deeply lacerate their bodies to carve ‘cutsigns’ of an abuser’s online alias into their skin.” The story continues:

“Victims have flushed their heads in toilets, attacked their siblings, killed their pets, and in some extreme instances, attempted or died by suicide. Court records from the United States and European nations reveal participants in this network have also been accused of robberies, in-person sexual abuse of minors, kidnapping, weapons violations, swatting, and murder.”

“Some members of the network extort children for sexual pleasure, some for power and control. Some do it merely for the kick that comes from manipulation. Others sell the explicit CSAM content produced by extortion on the dark web.”

KrebsOnSecurity has learned Holy is the 17-year-old who was arrested in July 2024 by the U.K.’s West Midlands Police as part of a joint investigation with the FBI into the MGM hack.

Early in their cybercriminal career (as a 15-year-old), @Holy went by the handle “Vsphere,” and was a proud member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group. Throughout 2022, LAPSUS$ would hack and social engineer their way into some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including EA Games, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta, Samsung, and T-Mobile.

JUDISCHE/WAIFU

Another timely example of the overlap between harm communities and top members of The Com can be found in a group of criminals who recently stole obscene amounts of customer records from users of the cloud data provider Snowflake.

At the end of 2023, malicious hackers figured out that many major companies have uploaded massive amounts of valuable and sensitive customer data to Snowflake servers, all the while protecting those Snowflake accounts with little more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication required). The group then searched darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, and began raiding the data storage repositories used by some of the world’s largest corporations.

Among those that had data exposed in Snowflake was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information and phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all its customers.

A report on the extortion group from the incident response firm Mandiant notes that Snowflake victim companies were privately approached by the hackers, who demanded a ransom in exchange for a promise not to sell or leak the stolen data. All told, more than 160 organizations were extorted, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.

On May 2, 2024, a user by the name “Judische” claimed on the fraud-focused Telegram channel Star Chat that they had hacked Santander Bank, one of the first known Snowflake victims. Judische would repeat that claim in Star Chat on May 13 — the day before Santander publicly disclosed a data breach — and would periodically blurt out the names of other Snowflake victims before their data even went up for sale on the cybercrime forums.

A careful review of Judische’s account history and postings on Telegram shows this user is more widely known under the nickname “Waifu,” an early moniker that corresponds to one of the more accomplished SIM-swappers in The Com over the years.

In a SIM-swapping attack, the fraudsters will phish or purchase credentials for mobile phone company employees, and use those credentials to redirect a target’s mobile calls and text messages to a device the attackers control.

Several channels on Telegram maintain a frequently updated leaderboard of the 100 richest SIM-swappers, as well as the hacker handles associated with specific cybercrime groups (Waifu is ranked #24). That leaderboard has long included Waifu on a roster of hackers for a group that called itself “Beige.”

Beige members were implicated in two stories published here in 2020. The first was an August 2020 piece called Voice Phishers Targeting Corporate VPNs, which warned that the COVID-19 epidemic had brought a wave of voice phishing or “vishing” attacks that targeted work-from-home employees via their mobile devices, and tricked many of those people into giving up credentials needed to access their employer’s network remotely.

Beige group members also have claimed credit for a breach at the domain registrar GoDaddy. In November 2020, intruders thought to be associated with the Beige Group tricked a GoDaddy employee into installing malicious software, and with that access they were able to redirect the web and email traffic for multiple cryptocurrency trading platforms.

The Telegram channels that Judische and his related accounts frequented over the years show this user divides their time between posting in SIM-swapping and cybercrime cashout channels, and harassing and stalking others in harm communities like Leak Society and Court.

Mandiant has attributed the Snowflake compromises to a group it calls “UNC5537,” with members based in North America and Turkey. KrebsOnSecurity has learned Judische is a 26-year-old software engineer in Ontario, Canada.

Sources close to the investigation into the Snowflake incident tell KrebsOnSecurity the UNC5537 member in Turkey is John Erin Binns, an elusive American man indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76.6 million customers.

Binns is currently in custody in a Turkish prison and fighting his extradition. Meanwhile, he has been suing almost every federal agency and agent that contributed investigative resources to his case.

In June 2024, a Mandiant employee told Bloomberg that UNC5537 members have made death threats against cybersecurity experts investigating the hackers, and that in one case the group used artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of a researcher to harass them.

ViLE

In June 2024, two American men pleaded guilty to hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that tapped into 16 different federal law enforcement databases.  Sagar “Weep” Singh, a 20-year-old from Rhode Island, and Nicholas “Convict” Ceraolo, 25, of Queens, NY, were both active in SIM-swapping communities.

Singh and Ceraolo hacked into a number of foreign police department email accounts, and used them to make phony “emergency data requests” to social media platforms seeking account information about specific users they were stalking. According to the government, in each case the men impersonating the foreign police departments told those platforms the request was urgent because the account holders had been trading in child pornography or engaging in child extortion.

Eventually, the two men formed part of a group of cybercriminals known to its members as “ViLE,” who specialize in obtaining personal information about third-party victims, which they then used to harass, threaten or extort the victims, a practice known as “doxing.”

The U.S. government says Singh and Ceraolo worked closely with a third man — referenced in the indictment as co-conspirator #1 or “CC-1” — to administer a doxing forum where victims could pay to have their personal information removed.

The government doesn’t name CC-1 or the doxing forum, but CC-1’s hacker handle is “Kayte” (a.k.a. “KT“) which corresponds to the nickname of a 23-year-old man who lives with his parents in Coffs Harbor, Australia. For several years (with a brief interruption), KT has been the administrator of a truly vile doxing community known as the Doxbin.

People whose names and personal information appear on the Doxbin can quickly find themselves the target of extended harassment campaigns, account hacking, SIM-swapping and even swatting — which involves falsely reporting a violent incident at a target’s address to trick local police into responding with potentially deadly force.

A handful of Com members targeted by federal authorities have gone so far as to perpetrate swatting, doxing, and other harassment against the same federal agents who are trying to unravel their alleged crimes. This has led some investigators working cases involving the Com to begin redacting their names from affidavits and indictments filed in federal court.

In January 2024, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that prosecutors in Florida had charged a 19-year-old alleged Scattered Spider member named Noah Michael Urban with wire fraud and identity theft. That story recounted how Urban’s alleged hacker identities “King Bob” and “Sosa” inhabited a world in which rival cryptocurrency theft rings frequently settled disputes through so-called “violence-as-a-service” offerings — hiring strangers online to perpetrate firebombings, beatings and kidnappings against their rivals.

Urban’s indictment shows the name of the federal agent who testified to it has been blacked out:

HACKING RINGS, STALKING VICTIMS

In June 2022, this blog told the story of two men charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then methodically swatting each of them. Adding insult to injury, the men used the compromised security cameras to record live footage of local police swarming those homes.

James Thomas Andrew McCarty, Charlotte, N.C., and Kya “Chumlul” Nelson, of Racine, Wisc., conspired to hack into Yahoo email accounts belonging to victims in the United States. The two would check how many of those Yahoo accounts were associated with Ring accounts, and then target people who used the same password for both accounts.

The Telegram and Discord aliases allegedly used by McCarty — “Aspertaine” and “Couch,” among others — correspond to an identity that was active in certain channels dedicated to SIM-swapping.

What KrebsOnSecurity didn’t report at the time is that both ChumLul and Aspertaine were active members of CVLT, wherein those identities clearly participated in harassing and exploiting young teens online.

In June 2024, McCarty was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to making hoax calls that elicited police SWAT responses. Nelson also pleaded guilty and received a seven-year prison sentence.

POMPOMPURIN

In March 2023, U.S. federal agents in New York announced they’d arrested “Pompompurin,” the alleged administrator of Breachforums, an English-language cybercrime forum where hacked corporate databases frequently appear for sale. In cases where the victim organization isn’t extorted in advance by hackers, being listed on Breachforums has often been the way many victims first learned of an intrusion.

Pompompurin had been a nemesis to the FBI for several years. In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation were blasted out from the FBI’s email systems and Internet addresses.

Pompompurin took credit for that stunt, and said he was able to send the FBI email blast by exploiting a flaw in an FBI portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities. The FBI later acknowledged that a software misconfiguration allowed someone to send the fake emails.

In December, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how hackers active on BreachForums had infiltrated the FBI’s InfraGard program, a vetted network designed to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with experts in the private sector. The hackers impersonated the CEO of a major financial company, applied for InfraGard membership in the CEO’s name, and were granted admission to the community.

The feds named Pompompurin as 21-year-old Peekskill resident Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, who was originally charged with one count of conspiracy to solicit individuals to sell unauthorized access devices (stolen usernames and passwords). But after FBI agents raided and searched the home where Fitzpatrick lived with his parents, prosecutors tacked on charges for possession of child pornography.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM?

Recent actions by the DOJ indicate the government is well aware of the significant overlap between leading members of The Com and harm communities. But the government also is growing more sensitive to the criticism that it can often take months or years to gather enough evidence to criminally charge some of these suspects, during which time the perpetrators can abuse and recruit countless new victims.

Late last year, however, the DOJ signaled a new tactic in pursuing leaders of harm communities like 764: Charging them with domestic terrorism.

In December 2023, the government charged (PDF) a Hawaiian man with possessing and sharing sexually explicit videos and images of prepubescent children being abused. Prosecutors allege Kalana Limkin, 18, of Hilo, Hawaii, admitted he was an associate of CVLT and 764, and that he was the founder of a splinter harm group called Cultist. Limkin’s Telegram profile shows he also was active on the harm community Slit Town.

The relevant citation from Limkin’s complaint reads:

“Members of the group ‘764’ have conspired and continue to conspire in both online and in-person venues to engage in violent actions in furtherance of a Racially Motivated Violent Extremist ideology, wholly or in part through activities that violate federal criminal law meeting the statutory definition of Domestic Terrorism, defined in Title 18, United States Code, § 2331.”

Experts say charging harm groups under anti-terrorism statutes potentially gives the government access to more expedient investigative powers than it would normally have in a run-of-the-mill criminal hacking case.

“What it ultimately gets you is additional tools you can use in the investigation, possibly warrants and things like that,” said Mark Rasch, a former U.S. federal cybercrime prosecutor and now general counsel for the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. “It can also get you additional remedies at the end of the case, like greater sanctions, more jail time, fines and forfeiture.”

But Rasch said this tactic can backfire on prosecutors who overplay their hand and go after someone who ends up challenging the charges in court.

“If you’re going to charge a hacker or pedophile with a crime like terrorism, that’s going to make it harder to get a conviction,” Rasch said. “It adds to the prosecutorial burden and increases the likelihood of getting an acquittal.”

Rasch said it’s unclear where it is appropriate to draw the line in the use of terrorism statutes to disrupt harm groups online, noting that there certainly are circumstances where individuals can commit violations of domestic anti-terrorism statutes through their Internet activity alone.

“The Internet is a platform like any other, where virtually any kind of crime that can be committed in the real world can also be committed online,” he said. “That doesn’t mean all misuse of computers fits within the statutory definition of terrorism.”

The RCMP’s advisory on sexual extortion of minors over the Internet lists a number of potential warning signs that teens may exhibit if they become entangled in these harm groups. The FBI urges anyone who believes their child or someone they know is being exploited to contact their local FBI field office, call 1-800-CALL-FBI, or report it online at tips.fbi.gov.

Who Stole 3.6M Tax Records from South Carolina?

For nearly a dozen years, residents of South Carolina have been kept in the dark by state and federal investigators over who was responsible for hacking into the state’s revenue department in 2012 and stealing tax and bank account information for 3.6 million people. The answer may no longer be a mystery: KrebsOnSecurity found compelling clues suggesting the intrusion was carried out by the same Russian hacking crew that stole of millions of payment card records from big box retailers like Home Depot and Target in the years that followed.

Questions about who stole tax and financial data on roughly three quarters of all South Carolina residents came to the fore last week at the confirmation hearing of Mark Keel, who was appointed in 2011 by Gov. Nikki Haley to head the state’s law enforcement division. If approved, this would be Keel’s third six-year term in that role.

The Associated Press reports that Keel was careful not to release many details about the breach at his hearing, telling lawmakers he knows who did it but that he wasn’t ready to name anyone.

“I think the fact that we didn’t come up with a whole lot of people’s information that got breached is a testament to the work that people have done on this case,” Keel asserted.

A ten-year retrospective published in 2022 by The Post and Courier in Columbia, S.C. said investigators determined the breach began on Aug. 13, 2012, after a state IT contractor clicked a malicious link in an email. State officials said they found out about the hack from federal law enforcement on October 10, 2012.

KrebsOnSecurity examined posts across dozens of cybercrime forums around that time, and found only one instance of someone selling large volumes of tax data in the year surrounding the breach date.

On Oct. 7, 2012 — three days before South Carolina officials say they first learned of the intrusion — a notorious cybercriminal who goes by the handle “Rescator” advertised the sale of “a database of the tax department of one of the states.”

“Bank account information, SSN and all other information,” Rescator’s sales thread on the Russian-language crime forum Embargo read. “If you purchase the entire database, I will give you access to it.”

A week later, Rescator posted a similar offer on the exclusive Russian forum Mazafaka, saying he was selling information from a U.S. state tax database, without naming the state. Rescator said the data exposed included Social Security Number (SSN), employer, name, address, phone, taxable income, tax refund amount, and bank account number.

“There is a lot of information, I am ready to sell the entire database, with access to the database, and in parts,” Rescator told Mazafaka members. “There is also information on corporate taxpayers.”

On Oct. 26, 2012, the state announced the breach publicly. State officials said they were working with investigators from the U.S. Secret Service and digital forensics experts from Mandiant, which produced an incident report (PDF) that was later published by South Carolina Dept. of Revenue. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Secret Service, South Carolina prosecutors, and Mr. Keel’s office. This story will be updated if any of them respond. Update: The Secret Service declined to comment.

On Nov. 18, 2012, Rescator told fellow denizens of the forum Verified he was selling a database of 65,000 records with bank account information from several smaller, regional financial institutions. Rescator’s sales thread on Verified listed more than a dozen database fields, including account number, name, address, phone, tax ID, date of birth, employer and occupation.

Asked to provide more context about the database for sale, Rescator told forum members the database included financial records related to tax filings of a U.S. state. Rescator added that there was a second database of around 80,000 corporations that included social security numbers, names and addresses, but no financial information.

The AP says South Carolina paid $12 million to Experian for identity theft protection and credit monitoring for its residents after the breach.

“At the time, it was one of the largest breaches in U.S. history but has since been surpassed greatly by hacks to Equifax, Yahoo, Home Depot, Target and PlayStation,” the AP’s Jeffrey Collins wrote.

As it happens, Rescator’s criminal hacking crew was directly responsible for the 2013 breach at Target and the 2014 hack of Home Depot. The Target intrusion saw Rescator’s cybercrime shops selling roughly 40 million stolen payment cards, and 56 million cards from Home Depot customers.

Who is Rescator? On Dec. 14, 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published the results of a 10-year investigation into the identity of Rescator, a.k.a. Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, a 36-year-old who lives in Moscow and who recently changed his last name to Lenin.

Mr. Keel’s assertion that somehow the efforts of South Carolina officials following the breach may have lessened its impact on citizens seems unlikely. The stolen tax and financial data appears to have been sold openly on cybercrime forums by one of the Russian underground’s most aggressive and successful hacking crews.

While there are no indications from reviewing forum posts that Rescator ever sold the data, his sales threads came at a time when the incidence of tax refund fraud was skyrocketing.

Tax-related identity theft occurs when someone uses a stolen identity and SSN to file a tax return in that person’s name claiming a fraudulent refund. Victims usually first learn of the crime after having their returns rejected because scammers beat them to it. Even those who are not required to file a return can be victims of refund fraud, as can those who are not actually owed a refund from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

According to a 2013 report from the Treasury Inspector General’s office, the IRS issued nearly $4 billion in bogus tax refunds in 2012, and more than $5.8 billion in 2013. The money largely was sent to people who stole SSNs and other information on U.S. citizens, and then filed fraudulent tax returns on those individuals claiming a large refund but at a different address.

It remains unclear why Shefel has never been officially implicated in the breaches at Target, Home Depot, or in South Carolina. It may be that Shefel has been indicted, and that those indictments remain sealed for some reason. Perhaps prosecutors were hoping Shefel would decide to leave Russia, at which point it would be easier to apprehend him if he believed no one was looking for him.

But all signs are that Shefel is deeply rooted in Russia, and has no plans to leave. In January 2024, authorities in Australia, the United States and the U.K. levied financial sanctions against 33-year-old Russian man Aleksandr Ermakov for allegedly stealing data on 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank.

A week after those sanctions were put in place, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Ermakov, which found that he co-ran a Moscow-based IT security consulting business along with Mikhail Shefel called Shtazi-IT.

CEO of Data Privacy Company Onerep.com Founded Dozens of People-Search Firms

The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.

Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals and $15/mo for families, and promises to remove your personal information from nearly 200 people-search sites. Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites.

Customer case studies published on onerep.com state that it struck a deal to offer the service to employees of Permanente Medicine, which represents the doctors within the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente. Onerep also says it has made inroads among police departments in the United States.

But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

A search in the data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence for the name Dimitri Shelest brings up the email address dimitri.shelest@onerep.com. Constella also finds that Dimitri Shelest from Belarus used the email address d.sh@nuwber.com, and the Belarus phone number +375-292-702786.

Nuwber.com is a people search service whose employees all appear to be from Belarus, and it is one of dozens of people-search companies that Onerep claims to target with its data-removal service. Onerep.com’s website disavows any relationship to Nuwber.com, stating quite clearly, “Please note that OneRep is not associated with Nuwber.com.”

However, there is an abundance of evidence suggesting Mr. Shelest is in fact the founder of Nuwber. Constella found that Minsk telephone number (375-292-702786) has been used multiple times in connection with the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com. Recall that Onerep.com’s domain registration records in 2018 list the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

It appears Mr. Shelest sought to reinvent his online identity in 2015 by adding a “2” to his email address. The Belarus phone number tied to Nuwber.com shows up in the domain records for comversus.com, and DomainTools says this domain is tied to both dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com. Other domains that mention both email addresses in their WHOIS records include careon.me, docvsdoc.com, dotcomsvdot.com, namevname.com, okanyway.com and tapanyapp.com.

A search in DomainTools for the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com shows it is associated with the registration of at least 179 domain names, including dozens of mostly now-defunct people-search companies targeting citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia and Mexico, among others.

Those include nuwber.fr, a site registered in 2016 which was identical to the homepage of Nuwber.com at the time. DomainTools shows the same email and Belarus phone number are in historic registration records for nuwber.at, nuwber.ch, and nuwber.dk (all domains linked here are to their cached copies at archive.org, where available).

Update, March 21, 11:15 a.m. ET: Mr. Shelest has provided a lengthy response to the findings in this story. In summary, Shelest acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, but said there was “zero cross-over or information-sharing with OneRep.” Mr. Shelest said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.” The full statement is available here (PDF).

Original story:

Historic WHOIS records for onerep.com show it was registered for many years to a resident of Sioux Falls, SD for a completely unrelated site. But around Sept. 2015 the domain switched from the registrar GoDaddy.com to eNom, and the registration records were hidden behind privacy protection services. DomainTools indicates around this time onerep.com started using domain name servers from DNS provider constellix.com. Likewise, Nuwber.com first appeared in late 2015, was also registered through eNom, and also started using constellix.com for DNS at nearly the same time.

Listed on LinkedIn as a former product manager at OneRep.com between 2015 and 2018 is Dimitri Bukuyazau, who says their hometown is Warsaw, Poland. While this LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/dzmitrybukuyazau) does not mention Nuwber, a search on this name in Google turns up a 2017 blog post from privacyduck.com, which laid out a number of reasons to support a conclusion that OneRep and Nuwber.com were the same company.

“Any people search profiles containing your Personally Identifiable Information that were on Nuwber.com were also mirrored identically on OneRep.com, down to the relatives’ names and address histories,” Privacyduck.com wrote. The post continued:

“Both sites offered the same immediate opt-out process. Both sites had the same generic contact and support structure. They were – and remain – the same company (even PissedConsumer.com advocates this fact: https://nuwber.pissedconsumer.com/nuwber-and-onerep-20160707878520.html).”

“Things changed in early 2016 when OneRep.com began offering privacy removal services right alongside their own open displays of your personal information. At this point when you found yourself on Nuwber.com OR OneRep.com, you would be provided with the option of opting-out your data on their site for free – but also be highly encouraged to pay them to remove it from a slew of other sites (and part of that payment was removing you from their own site, Nuwber.com, as a benefit of their service).”

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Bukuyazau declined to answer questions, such as whether he ever worked at Nuwber.com. However, Constella Intelligence finds two interesting email addresses for employees at nuwber.com: d.bu@nuwber.com, and d.bu+figure-eight.com@nuwber.com, which was registered under the name “Dzmitry.”

PrivacyDuck’s claims about how onerep.com appeared and behaved in the early days are not readily verifiable because the domain onerep.com has been completely excluded from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The Wayback Machine will honor such requests if they come directly from the owner of the domain in question.

Still, Mr. Shelest’s name, phone number and email also appear in the domain registration records for a truly dizzying number of country-specific people-search services, including pplcrwlr.in, pplcrwlr.fr, pplcrwlr.dk, pplcrwlr.jp, peeepl.br.com, peeepl.in, peeepl.it and peeepl.co.uk.

The same details appear in the WHOIS registration records for the now-defunct people-search sites waatpp.de, waatp1.fr, azersab.com, and ahavoila.com, a people-search service for French citizens.

A search on the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com suggests Mr. Shelest was previously involved in rather aggressive email marketing campaigns. In 2010, an anonymous source leaked to KrebsOnSecurity the financial and organizational records of Spamit, which at the time was easily the largest Russian-language pharmacy spam affiliate program in the world.

Spamit paid spammers a hefty commission every time someone bought male enhancement drugs from any of their spam-advertised websites. Mr. Shelest’s email address stood out because immediately after the Spamit database was leaked, KrebsOnSecurity searched all of the Spamit affiliate email addresses to determine if any of them corresponded to social media accounts at Facebook.com (at the time, Facebook allowed users to search profiles by email address).

That mapping, which was done mainly by generous graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University, revealed that dmitrcox@gmail.com was used by a Spamit affiliate, albeit not a very profitable one. That same Facebook profile for Mr. Shelest is still active, and it says he is married and living in Minsk [Update, Mar. 16: Mr. Shelest’s Facebook account is no longer active].

Scrolling down Mr. Shelest’s Facebook page to posts made more than ten years ago show him liking the Facebook profile pages for a large number of other people-search sites, including findita.com, findmedo.com, folkscan.com, huntize.com, ifindy.com, jupery.com, look2man.com, lookerun.com, manyp.com, peepull.com, perserch.com, persuer.com, pervent.com, piplenter.com, piplfind.com, piplscan.com, popopke.com, pplsorce.com, qimeo.com, scoutu2.com, search64.com, searchay.com, seekmi.com, selfabc.com, socsee.com, srching.com, toolooks.com, upearch.com, webmeek.com, and many country-code variations of viadin.ca (e.g. viadin.hk, viadin.com and viadin.de).

Domaintools.com finds that all of the domains mentioned in the last paragraph were registered to the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com.

Mr. Shelest has not responded to multiple requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from onerep.com, which likewise has not responded to inquiries about its founder’s many apparent conflicts of interest. In any event, these practices would seem to contradict the goal Onerep has stated on its site: “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

Max Anderson is chief growth officer at 360 Privacy, a legitimate privacy company that works to keep its clients’ data off of more than 400 data broker and people-search sites. Anderson said it is concerning to see a direct link between between a data removal service and data broker websites.

“I would consider it unethical to run a company that sells people’s information, and then charge those same people to have their information removed,” Anderson said.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity published an analysis of the people-search data broker giant Radaris, whose consumer profiles are deep enough to rival those of far more guarded data broker resources available to U.S. police departments and other law enforcement personnel.

That story revealed that the co-founders of Radaris are two native Russian brothers who operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of the Radaris founders’ businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

KrebsOnSecurity will continue investigating the history of various consumer data brokers and people-search providers. If any readers have inside knowledge of this industry or key players within it, please consider reaching out to krebsonsecurity at gmail.com.

Update, March 15, 11:35 a.m. ET: Many readers have pointed out something that was somehow overlooked amid all this research: The Mozilla Foundation, the company that runs the Firefox Web browser, has launched a data removal service called Mozilla Monitor that bundles OneRep. That notice says Mozilla Monitor is offered as a free or paid subscription service.

“The free data breach notification service is a partnership with Have I Been Pwned (“HIBP”),” the Mozilla Foundation explains. “The automated data deletion service is a partnership with OneRep to remove personal information published on publicly available online directories and other aggregators of information about individuals (“Data Broker Sites”).”

In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Mozilla said they did assess OneRep’s data removal service to confirm it acts according to privacy principles advocated at Mozilla.

“We were aware of the past affiliations with the entities named in the article and were assured they had ended prior to our work together,” the statement reads. “We’re now looking into this further. We will always put the privacy and security of our customers first and will provide updates as needed.”

Who and What is Behind the Malware Proxy Service SocksEscort?

Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online.

In a report released July 12, researchers at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs called the AVrecon botnet “one of the largest botnets targeting small-office/home-office (SOHO) routers seen in recent history,” and a crime machine that has largely evaded public attention since first being spotted in mid-2021.

“The malware has been used to create residential proxy services to shroud malicious activity such as password spraying, web-traffic proxying and ad fraud,” the Lumen researchers wrote.

Malware-based anonymity networks are a major source of unwanted and malicious web traffic directed at online retailers, Internet service providers (ISPs), social networks, email providers and financial institutions. And a great many of these “proxy” networks are marketed primarily to cybercriminals seeking to anonymize their traffic by routing it through an infected PC, router or mobile device.

Proxy services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source. Proxy services also let users appear to be getting online from nearly anywhere in the world, which is useful if you’re a cybercriminal who is trying to impersonate someone from a specific place.

Spur.us, a startup that tracks proxy services, told KrebsOnSecurity that the Internet addresses Lumen tagged as the AVrecon botnet’s “Command and Control” (C2) servers all tie back to a long-running proxy service called SocksEscort.

SocksEscort[.]com, is what’s known as a “SOCKS Proxy” service. The SOCKS (or SOCKS5) protocol allows Internet users to channel their Web traffic through a proxy server, which then passes the information on to the intended destination. From a website’s perspective, the traffic of the proxy network customer appears to originate from a rented/malware-infected PC tied to a residential ISP customer, not from the proxy service customer.

Spur tracks SocksEscort as a malware-based proxy offering, which means the machines doing the proxying of traffic for SocksEscort customers have been infected with malicious software that turns them into a traffic relay. Usually, these users have no idea their systems are compromised.

Spur says the SocksEscort proxy service requires customers to install a Windows based application in order to access a pool of more than 10,000 hacked devices worldwide.

“We created a fingerprint to identify the call-back infrastructure for SocksEscort proxies,” Spur co-founder Riley Kilmer said. “Looking at network telemetry, we were able to confirm that we saw victims talking back to it on various ports.”

According to Kilmer, AVrecon is the malware that gives SocksEscort its proxies.

“When Lumen released their report and IOCs [indicators of compromise], we queried our system for which proxy service call-back infrastructure overlapped with their IOCs,” Kilmer continued. “The second stage C2s they identified were the same as the IPs we labeled for SocksEscort.”

Lumen’s research team said the purpose of AVrecon appears to be stealing bandwidth – without impacting end-users – in order to create a residential proxy service to help launder malicious activity and avoid attracting the same level of attention from Tor-hidden services or commercially available VPN services.

“This class of cybercrime activity threat may evade detection because it is less likely than a crypto-miner to be noticed by the owner, and it is unlikely to warrant the volume of abuse complaints that internet-wide brute-forcing and DDoS-based botnets typically draw,” Lumen’s Black Lotus researchers wrote.

Preserving bandwidth for both customers and victims was a primary concern for SocksEscort in July 2022, when 911S5 — at the time the world’s largest known malware proxy network — got hacked and imploded just days after being exposed in a story here. Kilmer said after 911’s demise, SocksEscort closed its registration for several months to prevent an influx of new users from swamping the service.

Danny Adamitis, principal information security researcher at Lumen and co-author of the report on AVrecon, confirmed Kilmer’s findings, saying the C2 data matched up with what Spur was seeing for SocksEscort dating back to September 2022.

Adamitis said that on July 13 — the day after Lumen published research on AVrecon and started blocking any traffic to the malware’s control servers — the people responsible for maintaining the botnet reacted quickly to transition infected systems over to a new command and control infrastructure.

“They were clearly reacting and trying to maintain control over components of the botnet,” Adamitis said. “Probably, they wanted to keep that revenue stream going.”

Frustratingly, Lumen was not able to determine how the SOHO devices were being infected with AVrecon. Some possible avenues of infection include exploiting weak or default administrative credentials on routers, and outdated, insecure firmware that has known, exploitable security vulnerabilities.

WHO’S BEHIND SOCKSESCORT?

KrebsOnSecurity briefly visited SocksEscort last year and promised a follow-up on the history and possible identity of its proprietors. A review of the earliest posts about this service on Russian cybercrime forums suggests the 12-year-old malware proxy network is tied to a Moldovan company that also offers VPN software on the Apple Store and elsewhere.

SocksEscort began in 2009 as “super-socks[.]com,” a Russian-language service that sold access to thousands of compromised PCs that could be used to proxy traffic. Someone who picked the nicknames “SSC” and “super-socks” and email address “michvatt@gmail.com” registered on multiple cybercrime forums and began promoting the proxy service.

According to DomainTools.com, the apparently related email address “michdomain@gmail.com” was used to register SocksEscort[.]com, super-socks[.]com, and a few other proxy-related domains, including ip-score[.]com, segate[.]org seproxysoft[.]com, and vipssc[.]us. Cached versions of both super-socks[.]com and vipssc[.]us show these sites sold the same proxy service, and both displayed the letters “SSC” prominently at the top of their homepages.

According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the very first “SSC” identity registered on the cybercrime forums happened in 2009 at the Russian language hacker community Antichat, where SSC asked fellow forum members for help in testing the security of a website they claimed was theirs: myiptest[.]com, which promised to tell visitors whether their proxy address was included on any security or anti-spam block lists.

Myiptest[.]com is no longer responding, but a cached copy of it from Archive.org shows that for about four years it included in its HTML source a Google Analytics code of US-2665744, which was also present on more than a dozen other websites.

Most of the sites that once bore that Google tracking code are no longer online, but nearly all of them centered around services that were similar to myiptest[.]com, such as abuseipdb[.]com, bestiptest[.]com, checkdnslbl[.]com, dnsbltools[.]com and dnsblmonitor[.]com.

Each of these services were designed to help visitors quickly determine whether the Internet address they were visiting the site from was listed by any security firms as spammy, malicious or phishous. In other words, these services were designed so that proxy service users could easily tell if their rented Internet address was still safe to use for online fraud.

Another domain with the Google Analytics code US-2665744 was sscompany[.]net. An archived copy of the site says SSC stands for “Server Support Company,” which advertised outsourced solutions for technical support and server administration.

Leaked copies of the hacked Antichat forum indicate the SSC identity registered on the forum using the IP address 71.229.207.214. That same IP was used to register the nickname “Deem3n®,” a prolific poster on Antichat between 2005 and 2009 who served as a moderator on the forum.

There was a Deem3n® user on the webmaster forum Searchengines.guru whose signature in their posts says they run a popular community catering to programmers in Moldova called sysadmin[.]md, and that they were a systems administrator for sscompany[.]net.

That same Google Analytics code is also now present on the homepages of wiremo[.]co and a VPN provider called HideIPVPN[.]com.

Wiremo sells software and services to help website owners better manage their customer reviews. Wiremo’s Contact Us page lists a “Server Management LLC” in Wilmington, DE as the parent company. Server Management LLC is currently listed in Apple’s App Store as the owner of a “free” VPN app called HideIPVPN.

“The best way to secure the transmissions of your mobile device is VPN,” reads HideIPVPN’s description on the Apple Store. “Now, we provide you with an even easier way to connect to our VPN servers. We will hide your IP address, encrypt all your traffic, secure all your sensitive information (passwords, mail credit card details, etc.) form [sic] hackers on public networks.”

When asked about the company’s apparent connection to SocksEscort, Wiremo responded, “We do not control this domain and no one from our team is connected to this domain.” Wiremo did not respond when presented with the findings in this report.