Feds Tie ‘Scattered Spider’ Duo to $115M in Ransoms

U.S. prosecutors last week levied criminal hacking charges against 19-year-old U.K. national Thalha Jubair for allegedly being a core member of Scattered Spider, a prolific cybercrime group blamed for extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from victims. The charges came as Jubair and an alleged co-conspirator appeared in a London court to face accusations of hacking into and extorting several large U.K. retailers, the London transit system, and healthcare providers in the United States.

At a court hearing last week, U.K. prosecutors laid out a litany of charges against Jubair and 18-year-old Owen Flowers, accusing the teens of involvement in an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area.

On July 10, 2025, KrebsOnSecurity reported that Flowers and Jubair had been arrested in the United Kingdom in connection with recent Scattered Spider ransom attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group.

That story cited sources close to the investigation saying Flowers was the Scattered Spider member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the group’s September 2023 ransomware attacks disrupted operations at Las Vegas casinos operated by MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment.

The story also noted that Jubair’s alleged handles on cybercrime-focused Telegram channels had far lengthier rap sheets involving some of the more consequential and headline-grabbing data breaches over the past four years. What follows is an account of cybercrime activities that prosecutors have attributed to Jubair’s alleged hacker handles, as told by those accounts in posts to public Telegram channels that are closely monitored by multiple cyber intelligence firms.

EARLY DAYS (2021-2022)

Jubair is alleged to have been a core member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group that broke into dozens of technology companies beginning in late 2021, stealing source code and other internal data from tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, Rockstar Games, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Uber.

That is, according to the former leader of the now-defunct LAPSUS$. In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published internal chat records taken from a server that LAPSUS$ used, and those chats indicate Jubair was working with the group using the nicknames Amtrak and Asyntax. In the middle of the gang’s cybercrime spree, Asyntax told the LAPSUS$ leader not to share T-Mobile’s logo in images sent to the group because he’d been previously busted for SIM-swapping and his parents would suspect he was back at it again.

The leader of LAPSUS$ responded by gleefully posting Asyntax’s real name, phone number, and other hacker handles into a public chat room on Telegram:

That story about the leaked LAPSUS$ chats also connected Amtrak/Asyntax to several previous hacker identities, including “Everlynn,” who in April 2021 began offering a cybercriminal service that sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” targeting the major social media and email providers.

In these so-called “fake EDR” schemes, the hackers compromise email accounts tied to police departments and government agencies, and then send unauthorized demands for subscriber data (e.g. username, IP/email address), while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

EARTHTOSTAR

Prosecutors in New Jersey last week alleged Jubair was part of a threat group variously known as Scattered Spider, 0ktapus, and UNC3944, and that he used the nicknames EarthtoStar, Brad, Austin, and Austistic.

Beginning in 2022, EarthtoStar co-ran a bustling Telegram channel called Star Chat, which was home to a prolific SIM-swapping group that relentlessly used voice- and SMS-based phishing attacks to steal credentials from employees at the major wireless providers in the U.S. and U.K.

The group would then use that access to sell a SIM-swapping service that could redirect a target’s phone number to a device the attackers controlled, allowing them to intercept the victim’s phone calls and text messages (including one-time codes). Members of Star Chat targeted multiple wireless carriers with SIM-swapping attacks, but they focused mainly on phishing T-Mobile employees.

In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity scrutinized more than seven months of these SIM-swapping solicitations on Star Chat, which almost daily peppered the public channel with “Tmo up!” and “Tmo down!” notices indicating periods wherein the group claimed to have active access to T-Mobile’s network.

The data showed that Star Chat — along with two other SIM-swapping groups operating at the same time — collectively broke into T-Mobile over a hundred times in the last seven months of 2022. However, Star Chat was by far the most prolific of the three, responsible for at least 70 of those incidents.

A review of EarthtoStar’s messages on Star Chat as indexed by the threat intelligence firm Flashpoint shows this person also sold “AT&T email resets” and AT&T call forwarding services for up to $1,200 per line. EarthtoStar explained the purpose of this service in post on Telegram:

“Ok people are confused, so you know when u login to chase and it says ‘2fa required’ or whatever the fuck, well it gives you two options, SMS or Call. If you press call, and I forward the line to you then who do you think will get said call?”

New Jersey prosecutors allege Jubair also was involved in a mass SMS phishing campaign during the summer of 2022 that stole single sign-on credentials from employees at hundreds of companies. The text messages asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page, saying recipients needed to review pending changes to their upcoming work schedules.

The phishing websites used a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website.

That weeks-long SMS phishing campaign led to intrusions and data thefts at more than 130 organizations, including LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Plex and Signal.

DA, COMRADE

EarthtoStar’s group Star Chat specialized in phishing their way into business process outsourcing (BPO) companies that provide customer support for a range of multinational companies, including a number of the world’s largest telecommunications providers. In May 2022, EarthtoStar posted to the Telegram channel “Frauwudchat”:

“Hi, I am looking for partners in order to exfiltrate data from large telecommunications companies/call centers/alike, I have major experience in this field, [including] a massive call center which houses 200,000+ employees where I have dumped all user credentials and gained access to the [domain controller] + obtained global administrator I also have experience with REST API’s and programming. I have extensive experience with VPN, Citrix, cisco anyconnect, social engineering + privilege escalation. If you have any Citrix/Cisco VPN or any other useful things please message me and lets work.”

At around the same time in the Summer of 2022, at least two different accounts tied to Star Chat — “RocketAce” and “Lopiu” — introduced the group’s services to denizens of the Russian-language cybercrime forum Exploit, including:

-SIM-swapping services targeting Verizon and T-Mobile customers;
-Dynamic phishing pages targeting customers of single sign-on providers like Okta;
-Malware development services;
-The sale of extended validation (EV) code signing certificates.

These two accounts on Exploit created multiple sales threads in which they claimed administrative access to U.S. telecommunications providers and asked other Exploit members for help in monetizing that access. In June 2022, RocketAce, which appears to have been just one of EarthtoStar’s many aliases, posted to Exploit:

Hello. I have access to a telecommunications company’s citrix and vpn. I would like someone to help me break out of the system and potentially attack the domain controller so all logins can be extracted we can discuss payment and things leave your telegram in the comments or private message me ! Looking for someone with knowledge in citrix/privilege escalation

On Nov. 15, 2022, EarthtoStar posted to their Star Sanctuary Telegram channel that they were hiring malware developers with a minimum of three years of experience and the ability to develop rootkits, backdoors and malware loaders.

“Optional: Endorsed by advanced APT Groups (e.g. Conti, Ryuk),” the ad concluded, referencing two of Russia’s most rapacious and destructive ransomware affiliate operations. “Part of a nation-state / ex-3l (3 letter-agency).”

2023-PRESENT DAY

The Telegram and Discord chat channels wherein Flowers and Jubair allegedly planned and executed their extortion attacks are part of a loose-knit network known as the Com, an English-speaking cybercrime community consisting mostly of individuals living in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Many of these Com chat servers have hundreds to thousands of members each, and some of the more interesting solicitations on these communities are job offers for in-person assignments and tasks that can be found if one searches for posts titled, “If you live near,” or “IRL job” — short for “in real life” job.

These “violence-as-a-service” solicitations typically involve “brickings,” where someone is hired to toss a brick through the window at a specified address. Other IRL jobs for hire include tire-stabbings, molotov cocktail hurlings, drive-by shootings, and even home invasions. The people targeted by these services are typically other criminals within the community, but it’s not unusual to see Com members asking others for help in harassing or intimidating security researchers and even the very law enforcement officers who are investigating their alleged crimes.

It remains unclear what precipitated this incident or what followed directly after, but on January 13, 2023, a Star Sanctuary account used by EarthtoStar solicited the home invasion of a sitting U.S. federal prosecutor from New York. That post included a photo of the prosecutor taken from the Justice Department’s website, along with the message:

“Need irl niggas, in home hostage shit no fucking pussies no skinny glock holding 100 pound niggas either”

Throughout late 2022 and early 2023, EarthtoStar’s alias “Brad” (a.k.a. “Brad_banned”) frequently advertised Star Chat’s malware development services, including custom malicious software designed to hide the attacker’s presence on a victim machine:

We can develop KERNEL malware which will achieve persistence for a long time,
bypass firewalls and have reverse shell access.

This shit is literally like STAGE 4 CANCER FOR COMPUTERS!!!

Kernel meaning the highest level of authority on a machine.
This can range to simple shells to Bootkits.

Bypass all major EDR’s (SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, etc)
Patch EDR’s scanning functionality so it’s rendered useless!

Once implanted, extremely difficult to remove (basically impossible to even find)
Development Experience of several years and in multiple APT Groups.

Be one step ahead of the game. Prices start from $5,000+. Message @brad_banned to get a quote

In September 2023 , both MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment suffered ransomware attacks at the hands of a Russian ransomware affiliate program known as ALPHV and BlackCat. Caesars reportedly paid a $15 million ransom in that incident.

Within hours of MGM publicly acknowledging the 2023 breach, members of Scattered Spider were claiming credit and telling reporters they’d broken in by social engineering a third-party IT vendor. At a hearing in London last week, U.K. prosecutors told the court Jubair was found in possession of more than $50 million in ill-gotten cryptocurrency, including funds that were linked to the Las Vegas casino hacks.

The Star Chat channel was finally banned by Telegram on March 9, 2025. But U.S. prosecutors say Jubair and fellow Scattered Spider members continued their hacking, phishing and extortion activities up until September 2025.

In April 2025, the Com was buzzing about the publication of “The Com Cast,” a lengthy screed detailing Jubair’s alleged cybercriminal activities and nicknames over the years. This account included photos and voice recordings allegedly of Jubair, and asserted that in his early days on the Com Jubair used the nicknames Clark and Miku (these are both aliases used by Everlynn in connection with their fake EDR services).

More recently, the anonymous Com Cast author(s) claimed, Jubair had used the nickname “Operator,” which corresponds to a Com member who ran an automated Telegram-based doxing service that pulled consumer records from hacked data broker accounts. That public outing came after Operator allegedly seized control over the Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people.

“Operator/Clark/Miku: A key member of the ransomware group Scattered Spider, which consists of a diverse mix of individuals involved in SIM swapping and phishing,” the Com Cast account stated. “The group is an amalgamation of several key organizations, including Infinity Recursion (owned by Operator), True Alcorians (owned by earth2star), and Lapsus, which have come together to form a single collective.”

The New Jersey complaint (PDF) alleges Jubair and other Scattered Spider members committed computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in relation to at least 120 computer network intrusions involving 47 U.S. entities between May 2022 and September 2025. The complaint alleges the group’s victims paid at least $115 million in ransom payments.

U.S. authorities say they traced some of those payments to Scattered Spider to an Internet server controlled by Jubair. The complaint states that a cryptocurrency wallet discovered on that server was used to purchase several gift cards, one of which was used at a food delivery company to send food to his apartment. Another gift card purchased with cryptocurrency from the same server was allegedly used to fund online gaming accounts under Jubair’s name. U.S. prosecutors said that when they seized that server they also seized $36 million in cryptocurrency.

The complaint also charges Jubair with involvement in a hacking incident in January 2025 against the U.S. courts system that targeted a U.S. magistrate judge overseeing a related Scattered Spider investigation. That other investigation appears to have been the prosecution of Noah Michael Urban, a 20-year-old Florida man charged in November 2024 by prosecutors in Los Angeles as one of five alleged Scattered Spider members.

Urban pleaded guilty in April 2025 to wire fraud and conspiracy charges, and in August he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Speaking with KrebsOnSecurity from jail after his sentencing, Urban asserted that the judge gave him more time than prosecutors requested because he was mad that Scattered Spider hacked his email account.

A court transcript (PDF) from a status hearing in February 2025 shows Urban was telling the truth about the hacking incident that happened while he was in federal custody. The judge told attorneys for both sides that a co-defendant in the California case was trying to find out about Mr. Urban’s activity in the Florida case, and that the hacker accessed the account by impersonating a judge over the phone and requesting a password reset.

Allison Nixon is chief research officer at the New York based security firm Unit 221B, and easily one of the world’s leading experts on Com-based cybercrime activity. Nixon said the core problem with legally prosecuting well-known cybercriminals from the Com has traditionally been that the top offenders tend to be under the age of 18, and thus difficult to charge under federal hacking statutes.

In the United States, prosecutors typically wait until an underage cybercrime suspect becomes an adult to charge them. But until that day comes, she said, Com actors often feel emboldened to continue committing — and very often bragging about — serious cybercrime offenses.

“Here we have a special category of Com offenders that effectively enjoy legal immunity,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “Most get recruited to Com groups when they are older, but of those that join very young, such as 12 or 13, they seem to be the most dangerous because at that age they have no grounding in reality and so much longevity before they exit their legal immunity.”

Nixon said U.K. authorities face the same challenge when they briefly detain and search the homes of underage Com suspects: Namely, the teen suspects simply go right back to their respective cliques in the Com and start robbing and hurting people again the minute they’re released.

Indeed, the U.K. court heard from prosecutors last week that both Scattered Spider suspects were detained and/or searched by local law enforcement on multiple occasions, only to return to the Com less than 24 hours after being released each time.

“What we see is these young Com members become vectors for perpetrators to commit enormously harmful acts and even child abuse,” Nixon said. “The members of this special category of people who enjoy legal immunity are meeting up with foreign nationals and conducting these sometimes heinous acts at their behest.”

Nixon said many of these individuals have few friends in real life because they spend virtually all of their waking hours on Com channels, and so their entire sense of identity, community and self-worth gets wrapped up in their involvement with these online gangs. She said if the law was such that prosecutors could treat these people commensurate with the amount of harm they cause society, that would probably clear up a lot of this problem.

“If law enforcement was allowed to keep them in jail, they would quit reoffending,” she said.

The Times of London reports that Flowers is facing three charges under the Computer Misuse Act: two of conspiracy to commit an unauthorized act in relation to a computer causing/creating risk of serious damage to human welfare/national security and one of attempting to commit the same act. Maximum sentences for these offenses can range from 14 years to life in prison, depending on the impact of the crime.

Jubair is reportedly facing two charges in the U.K.: One of conspiracy to commit an unauthorized act in relation to a computer causing/creating risk of serious damage to human welfare/national security and one of failing to comply with a section 49 notice to disclose the key to protected information.

In the United States, Jubair is charged with computer fraud conspiracy, two counts of computer fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy. If extradited to the U.S., tried and convicted on all charges, he faces a maximum penalty of 95 years in prison.

In July 2025, the United Kingdom barred victims of hacking from paying ransoms to cybercriminal groups unless approved by officials. U.K. organizations that are considered part of critical infrastructure reportedly will face a complete ban, as will the entire public sector. U.K. victims of a hack are now required to notify officials to better inform policymakers on the scale of Britain’s ransomware problem.

For further reading (bless you), check out Bloomberg’s poignant story last week based on a year’s worth of jailhouse interviews with convicted Scattered Spider member Noah Urban.

Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.

Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.

The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”

According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.

“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and steal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand jury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff, correspondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s interactions with the United States.”

The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”

A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and ZScaler.

It’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the ZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and Europe between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.

As detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve purely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and documents that would likely only be found in classified documents.

The public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies in disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise offered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.

Further reading:

Danabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire

ZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense

Flashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware

Team CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II

March 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin

September 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants

The Not-So-Secret Network Access Broker x999xx

Most accomplished cybercriminals go out of their way to separate their real names from their hacker handles. But among certain old-school Russian hackers it is not uncommon to find major players who have done little to prevent people from figuring out who they are in real life. A case study in this phenomenon is “x999xx,” the nickname chosen by a venerated Russian hacker who specializes in providing the initial network access to various ransomware groups.

x999xx is a well-known “access broker” who frequently sells access to hacked corporate networks — usually in the form of remote access credentials — as well as compromised databases containing large amounts of personal and financial data.

In an analysis published in February 2019, cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint called x999xx one of the most senior and prolific members of the top-tier Russian-language cybercrime forum Exploit, where x999xx could be seen frequently advertising the sale of stolen databases and network credentials.

In August 2023, x999xx sold access to a company that develops software for the real estate industry. In July 2023, x999xx advertised the sale of Social Security numbers, names, and birthdays for the citizenry of an entire U.S. state (unnamed in the auction).

A month earlier, x999xx posted a sales thread for 80 databases taken from Australia’s largest retail company. “You may use this data to demand a ransom or do something different with it,” x999xx wrote on Exploit. “Unfortunately, the flaw was patched fast. [+] no one has used the data yet [+] the data hasn’t been used to send spam [+] the data is waiting for its time.”

In October 2022, x999xx sold administrative access to a U.S. healthcare provider.

ALIAS: MAXNM

The oldest account by the name x999xx appeared in 2009 on the Russian language cybercrime forum Verified, under the email address maxnm@ozersk.com. Ozersk is a city in the Chelyabinsk region of west-central Russia.

According to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence, the address maxnm@ozersk.com was used more than a decade ago to create an account at Vktontakte (the Russian answer to Facebook) under the name Maxim Kirtsov from Ozersk. Mr. Kirtsov’s profile — “maxnm” — says his birthday is September 5, 1991.

The user x999xx registered on the Russian language cybercrime community Zloy in 2014 using the email address maxnmalias-1@yahoo.com. Constella says this email address was used in 2022 at the Russian shipping service cdek.ru by a Maksim Georgievich Kirtsov from Ozersk.

Additional searches on these contact details reveal that prior to 2009, x999xx favored the handle Maxnm on Russian cybercrime forums. Cyber intelligence company Intel 471 finds the user Maxnm registered on Zloy in 2006 from an Internet address in Chelyabinsk, using the email address kirtsov@telecom.ozersk.ru.

That same email address was used to create Maxnm accounts on several other crime forums, including Spamdot and Exploit in 2005 (also from Chelyabinsk), and Damagelab in 2006.

A search in Constella for the Russian version of Kirtsov’s full name — Кирцов Максим Георгиевич — brings up multiple accounts registered to maksya@icloud.com.

A review of the digital footprint for maksya@icloud.com at osint.industries reveals this address was used a decade ago to register a still-active account at imageshack.com under the name x999xx. That account features numerous screenshots of financial statements from various banks, chat logs with other hackers, and even hacked websites.

Some of the photos in that Imageshack account also appear on Kirtsov’s Vkontakte page, including images of vehicles he owns, as well as pictures of potted marijuana plants. Kirtsov’s Vkontakte profile says that in 2012 he was a faculty member of the Ozersk Technological Institute National Research Nuclear University.

The Vkontakte page lists Kirtsov’s occupation as a website called ozersk[.]today, which on the surface appears to be a blog about life in Ozersk. However, in 2019 the security firm Recorded Future published a blog post which found this domain was being used to host a malicious Cobalt Strike server.

Cobalt Strike is a commercial network penetration testing and reconnaissance tool that is sold only to vetted partners. But stolen or ill-gotten Cobalt Strike licenses are frequently abused by cybercriminal gangs to help lay the groundwork for the installation of ransomware on a victim network.

In August 2023, x999xx posted a message on Exploit saying he was interested in buying a licensed version of Cobalt Strike. A month earlier, x999xx filed a complaint on Exploit against another forum member named Cobaltforce, an apparent onetime partner whose sudden and prolonged disappearance from the community left x999xx and others in the lurch. Cobaltforce recruited people experienced in using Cobalt Strike for ransomware operations, and offered to monetize access to hacked networks for a share of the profits.

DomainTools.com finds ozersk[.]today was registered to the email address dashin2008@yahoo.com, which also was used to register roughly two dozen other domains, including x999xx[.]biz. Virtually all of those domains were registered to Maxim Kirtsov from Ozersk. Below is a mind map used to track the identities mentioned in this story.

x999xx is a prolific member of the Russian webmaster forum “Gofuckbiz,” with more than 2,000 posts over nearly a decade, according to Intel 471. In one post from 2016, x999xx asked whether anyone knew where he could buy a heat lamp that simulates sunlight, explaining that one his pet rabbits had recently perished for lack of adequate light and heat. Mr. Kirtsov’s Vkontakte page includes several pictures of caged rabbits from 2015 and earlier.

CONFIRMATION

Reached via email, Mr. Kirtsov acknowledged that he is x999xx. Kirtsov said he and his team are also regular readers of KrebsOnSecurity.

“We’re glad to hear and read you,” Kirtsov replied.

Asked whether he was concerned about the legal and moral implications of his work, Kirtsov downplayed his role in ransomware intrusions, saying he was more focused on harvesting data.

“I consider myself as committed to ethical practices as you are,” Kirtsov wrote. “I have also embarked on research and am currently mentoring students. You may have noticed my activities on a forum, which I assume you know of through information gathered from public sources, possibly using the new tool you reviewed.”

“Regarding my posts about selling access, I must honestly admit, upon reviewing my own actions, I recall such mentions but believe they were never actualized,” he continued. “Many use the forum for self-serving purposes, which explains why listings of targets for sale have dwindled — they simply ceased being viable.”

Kirtsov asserted that he is not interested in harming healthcare institutions, just in stealing their data.

“As for health-related matters, I was once acquainted with affluent webmasters who would pay up to $50 for every 1000 health-themed emails,” Kirtsov said. “Therefore, I had no interest in the more sensitive data from medical institutions like X-rays, insurance numbers, or even names; I focused solely on emails. I am proficient in SQL, hence my ease with handling data like IDs and emails. And i never doing spam or something like this.”

On the Russian crime forums, x999xx said he never targets anything or anyone in Russia, and that he has little to fear from domestic law enforcement agencies provided he remains focused on foreign adversaries.

x999xx’s lackadaisical approach to personal security mirrors that of Wazawaka, another top Russian access broker who sold access to countless organizations and even operated his own ransomware affiliate programs.

“Don’t shit where you live, travel local, and don’t go abroad,” Wazawaka said of his own personal mantra. “Mother Russia will help you. Love your country, and you will always get away with everything.”

In January 2022, KrebsOnSecurity followed clues left behind by Wazawaka to identify him as 32-year-old Mikhail Matveev from Khakassia, Russia. In May 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Matveev as a key figure in several ransomware groups that collectively extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from victim organizations. The U.S. State Department is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to the capture and/or prosecution of Matveev.

Perhaps in recognition that many top ransomware criminals are largely untouchable so long as they remain in Russia, western law enforcement agencies have begun focusing more on getting inside the heads of those individuals. These so-called “psyops” are aimed at infiltrating ransomware-as-a-service operations, disrupting major cybercrime services, and decreasing trust within cybercriminal communities.

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

In May 2024, law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe announced Operation Endgame, a coordinated action against some of the most popular cybercrime platforms for delivering ransomware and data-stealing malware. The Operation Endgame website also included a countdown timer, which served to tease the release of several animated videos that mimic the same sort of flashy, short advertisements that established cybercriminals often produce to promote their services online.