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The U.S. government on Wednesday announced the arrest and charging of two Sudanese brothers accused of running Anonymous Sudan (a.k.a. AnonSudan), a cybercrime business known for launching powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a range of targets, including dozens of hospitals, news websites and cloud providers. The younger brother is facing charges that could land him life in prison for allegedly seeking to kill people with his attacks.
Image: FBI
Active since at least January 2023, AnonSudan has been described in media reports as a “hacktivist” group motivated by ideological causes. But in a criminal complaint, the FBI said those high-profile cyberattacks were effectively commercials for the hackers’ DDoS-for-hire service, which they sold to paying customers for as little as $150 a day — with up to 100 attacks allowed per day — or $700 for an entire week.
The complaint says despite reports suggesting Anonymous Sudan might be state-sponsored Russian actors pretending to be Sudanese hackers with Islamist motivations, AnonSudan was led by two brothers in Sudan — Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27.
AnonSudan claimed credit for successful DDoS attacks on numerous U.S. companies, causing a multi-day outage for Microsoft’s cloud services in June 2023. The group hit PayPal the following month, followed by Twitter/X (Aug. 2023), and OpenAI (Nov. 2023). An indictment in the Central District of California notes the duo even swamped the websites of the FBI and the Department of State.
Prosecutors say Anonymous Sudan offered a “Limited Internet Shutdown Package,” which would enable customers to shut down internet service providers in specified countries for $500 (USD) an hour. The two men also allegedly extorted some of their victims for money in exchange for calling off DDoS attacks.
The government isn’t saying where the Omer brothers are being held, only that they were arrested in March 2024 and have been in custody since. A statement by the U.S. Department of Justice says the government also seized control of AnonSudan’s DDoS infrastructure and servers after the two were arrested in March.
AnonSudan accepted orders over the instant messaging service Telegram, and marketed its DDoS service by several names, including “Skynet,” “InfraShutdown,” and the “Godzilla botnet.” However, the DDoS machine the Omer brothers allegedly built was not made up of hacked devices — as is typical with DDoS botnets.
Instead, the government alleges Skynet was more like a “distributed cloud attack tool,” with a command and control (C2) server, and an entire fleet of cloud-based servers that forwards C2 instructions to an array of open proxy resolvers run by unaffiliated third parties, which then transmit the DDoS attack data to the victims.
Amazon was among many companies credited with helping the government in the investigation, and said AnonSudan launched its attacks by finding hosting companies that would rent them small armies of servers.
“Where their potential impact becomes really significant is when they then acquire access to thousands of other machines — typically misconfigured web servers — through which almost anyone can funnel attack traffic,” Amazon explained in a blog post. “This extra layer of machines usually hides the true source of an attack from the targets.”
The security firm CrowdStrike said the success of AnonSudan’s DDoS attacks stemmed from a combination of factors, including sophisticated techniques for bypassing DDoS mitigation services. Also, AnonSudan typically launched so-called “Layer 7” attacks that sought to overwhelm targeted “API endpoints” — the back end systems responsible for handling website requests — with bogus requests for data, leaving the target unable to serve legitimate visitors.
The Omer brothers were both charged with one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers. The younger brother — Ahmed Salah — was also charged with three counts of damaging protected computers.
A passport for Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer. Image: FBI.
If extradited to the United States, tried and convicted in a court of law, the older brother Alaa Salah would be facing a maximum of five years in prison. But prosecutors say Ahmed Salah could face life in prison for allegedly launching attacks that sought to kill people.
As Hamas fighters broke through the border fence and attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a wave of rockets was launched into Israel. At the same time, AnonSudan announced it was attacking the APIs that power Israel’s widely-used “red alert” mobile apps that warn residents about any incoming rocket attacks in their area.
In February 2024, AnonSudan launched a digital assault on the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in the Los Angeles area, an attack that caused emergency services and patients to be temporarily redirected to different hospitals.
The complaint alleges that in September 2023, AnonSudan began a week-long DDoS attack against the Internet infrastructure of Kenya, knocking offline government services, banks, universities and at least seven hospitals.
The United States today unveiled sanctions and indictments against the alleged proprietor of Joker’s Stash, a now-defunct cybercrime store that peddled tens of millions of payment cards stolen in some of the largest data breaches of the past decade. The government also indicted and sanctioned a top Russian cybercriminal known as Taleon, whose cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex has evolved into one of Russia’s most active money laundering networks.
A 2016 screen shot of the Joker’s Stash homepage. The links have been redacted.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today unsealed an indictment against a 38-year-old man from Novosibirsk, Russia for allegedly operating Joker’s Stash, an extremely successful carding shop that came online in late 2014. Joker’s sold cards stolen in a steady drip of breaches at U.S. retailers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Bebe Stores, Hilton Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Wawa, Sonic Drive-In, the Hy-Vee supermarket chain, Buca Di Beppo, and Dickey’s BBQ.
The government believes the brains behind Joker’s Stash is Timur Kamilevich Shakhmametov, an individual who is listed in Russian incorporation documents as the owner of Arpa Plus, a Novosibirsk company that makes mobile games.
Early in his career (circa 2000) Shakhmametov was known as “v1pee” and was the founder of the Russian hacker group nerf[.]ru, which periodically published hacking tools and exploits for software vulnerabilities.
The Russian hacker group Nerf as described in a March 2006 article in the Russian hacker magazine xakep.ru.
By 2004, v1pee had adopted the moniker “Vega” on the exclusive Russian language hacking forum Mazafaka, where this user became one of the more reliable vendors of stolen payment cards.
In the years that followed, Vega would cement his reputation as a top carder on other forums, including Verified, DirectConnection, and Carder[.]pro.
Vega also became known as someone who had the inside track on “unlimited cashouts,” a globally coordinated cybercrime scheme in which crooks hack a bank or payment card processor and use cloned cards at cash machines to rapidly withdraw millions of dollars in just a few hours.
“Hi, there is work on d+p, unlimited,” Vega wrote in a private message to another user on Verified in Dec. 2012, referring to “dumps and PINs,” the slang term for stolen debit cards with the corresponding PINs that would allow ATM withdrawals.
This batch of some five million cards put up for sale Sept. 26, 2017 on the now-defunct carding site Joker’s Stash has been tied to a breach at Sonic Drive-In.
Joker’s Stash came online in the wake of several enormous card breaches at retailers like Target and Home Depot, and the resulting glut of inventory had depressed prices for stolen cards. But Joker’s would distinguish itself by catering to high-roller customers — essentially street gangs in the United States that would purchase thousands of stolen payment cards in one go.
Faced with a buyer’s market, Joker’s Stash set themselves apart by focusing on loyalty programs, frequent buyer discounts, money-back guarantees, and just plain good customer service. Big spenders were given access to the most freshly hacked payment cards, and were offered the ability to get free replacement cards if any turned out to be duds.
Joker’s Stash also was unique because it claimed to sell only payment cards that its own hackers had stolen directly from merchants. At the time, card shops typically resold payment cards that were stolen and supplied by many third-party hackers of unknown reliability or reputation.
In January 2021, Joker’s Stash announced it was closing up shop, after European authorities seized a number of servers for the fraud store, and its proprietor came down with the Coronavirus.
A DOJ statement credits the U.S. Secret Service for leading the years-long investigations (the Service’s original mandate was not protecting the president; it was pursuing counterfeiters, and modern-day carders definitely qualify as that). Prosecutors allege Joker’s Stash earned revenues of at least $280 million, but possibly more than $1 billion (the broad range is a consequence of several variables, including the rapid fluctuation in the price of bitcoin and the stolen goods they were peddling).
The proprietors of Joker’s Stash may have sold tens of millions of stolen payment cards, but Taleon is by far the bigger fish in this law enforcement action because his various cryptocurrency and cash exchanges have allegedly helped to move billions of dollars into and out of Russia over the past 20 years.
An indictment unsealed today names Taleon as Sergey Sergeevich Ivanov, 44, of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The government says Ivanov, who likely changed his surname from Omelnitskii at some point, laundered money for Joker’s Stash, among many other cybercrime stores.
In a statement today, the Treasury Department said Ivanov has laundered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of virtual currency for ransomware actors, initial access brokers, darknet marketplace vendors, and other criminal actors for approximately the last 20 years.
First appearing on Mazafaka in the early 2000s, Taleon was known on the forums as someone who could reliably move large amounts of physical cash. Sources familiar with the investigation said Taleon’s service emerged as one of the few remaining domestic cash delivery services still operating after Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022.
Taleon set up his service to facilitate transfers between Moscow, St. Petersburg and financial institutions in the West. Taleon’s private messages on some hacker forums have been leaked over the years and indexed by the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471. Those messages indicate Taleon worked on many of the same ATM cashouts as Vegas, so it’s clear the two had an established business relationship well before Joker’s Stash came into being.
Sometime around 2013, Taleon launched a partnership with a money transfer business called pm2btc[.]me. PM2BTC allowed customers to convert funds from the virtual currency Perfect Money (PM) into bitcoin, and then have the balance (minus a processing fee) available on a physical debit card that could be used at ATMs, for shopping online, or at retail stores.
A screenshot of a website reviewing PM2BTC.
The U.S. government itself set things in motion for Taleon’s nascent cryptocurrency exchange business in 2013 after the DOJ levied money laundering charges against the proprietors of Liberty Reserve, one of the largest virtual currencies in operation at the time. Liberty Reserve was heavily used by cybercriminals of all stripes. The government said the service had more than a million users worldwide, and laundered in excess of $6 billion in suspected criminal proceeds.
In the days following the takedown of Liberty Reserve, KrebsOnSecurity ran a story that examined discussions across multiple top Russian cybercrime forums about where crooks could feel safe parking their stolen funds. The answer involved Bitcoin, but also Taleon’s new service.
Part of the appeal of Taleon’s exchange was that it gave its vetted customers an “application programming interface” or API that made it simple for dodgy online shops selling stolen goods and cybercrime services to accept cryptocurrency deposits from their customers, and to manage payouts to any suppliers and affiliates.
This API is synonymous with a service Taleon and friends operate in the background called UAPS, short for “Universal Anonymous Payment System.” UAPS has gone by several other names including “Pinpays,” and in October 2014 it landed Joker’s Stash as its first big client.
A source with knowledge of the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Taleon is a pilot who owns and flies around in his own helicopter.
Ivanov appears to have little to no social media presence, but the 40-year-old woman he lives with in St. Petersburg does, and she has a photo on her Vktontake page that shows the two of them in 2019 flying over Lake Ladoga, a large body of water directly north of St. Petersburg.
Sergey “Taleon” Ivanov (right) in 2019 in his helicopter with the woman he lives with, flying over a lake north of St. Petersburg, Russia.
In late 2015, a major competitor to Joker’s Stash emerged using UAPS for its back-end payments: BriansClub. BriansClub sullies this author’s name, photos and reputation to peddle millions of credit and debit cards stolen from merchants in the United States and around the world.
An ad for BriansClub has been using my name and likeness for years to peddle millions of stolen credit cards.
In 2019, someone hacked BriansClub and relieved the fraud shop of more than 26 million stolen payment cards — an estimated one-third of the 87 million payment card accounts that were on sale across all underground shops at that time. An anonymous source shared that card data with KrebsOnSecurity, which ultimately shared it with a consortium of financial institutions that issued most of the cards.
After that incident, the administrator of BriansClub changed the site’s login page so that it featured a copy of my phone bill, Social Security card, and a link to my full credit report [to this day, random cybercriminals confuse Yours Truly with the proprietor of BriansClub].
Alex Holden is founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm Hold Security. Holden has long maintained visibility into cryptocurrency transactions made by BriansClub.
Holden said those records show BriansClub sells tens of thousands of dollars worth of stolen credit cards every day, and that in the last two years alone the BriansClub administrator has removed more than $242 million worth of cryptocurrency revenue from the UAPS platform.
The BriansClub login page, as it looked from late 2019 until recently.
Passive domain name system (DNS) records show that in its early days BriansClub shared a server in Lithuania along with just a handful of other domains, including secure.pinpays[.]com, the crime forum Verified, and a slew of carding shops operating under the banner Rescator.
As KrebsOnSecurity detailed in December 2023, the Rescator shops were directly involved in some of the largest payment card breaches of the past decade. Those include the 2013 breach at Target and the 2014 breach at Home Depot, intrusions that exposed more than 100 million payment card records.
In early 2018, Taleon and the proprietors of UAPS launched a cryptocurrency exchange called Cryptex[.]net that has emerged as a major mover of ill-gotten crypto coins.
Taleon reminds UAPS customers they will enjoy 0% commission and no “know your customer” (KYC) requirements “on our exchange Cryptex.”
Cryptex has been associated with quite a few ransomware transactions, including the largest known ransomware payment to date. In February 2024, a Fortune 50 ransomware victim paid a record $75 million ransom to a Russian cybercrime group that calls themselves the Dark Angels. A source with knowledge of the investigation said an analysis of that payment shows roughly half of it was processed through Cryptex.
That source provided a screen shot of Cryptex’s sending and receiving exposure as viewed by Chainalysis, a company the U.S. government and many cryptocurrency exchanges rely on to flag transactions associated with suspected money laundering, ransomware payouts, or facilitating payments for darknet websites.
Chainalysis finds that Cryptex has received more than $1.6 billion since its inception, and that this amount is roughly equal to its sending exposure (although the total number of outflows is nearly half of the inflows).
The graphic indicates a great deal of money flowing into Cryptex — roughly a quarter of it — is coming from bitcoin ATMs around the world. Experts say most of those ATM inflows to Cryptex are bitcoin ATM cash deposits from customers of carding websites like BriansClub and Jokers Stash.
A screenshot of Chainalysis’s summary of illicit activity on Cryptex since the exchange’s inception in 2018.
The indictments released today do not definitively connect Taleon to Cryptex. However, PM2BTC (which teamed up with Taleon to launch UAPS and Pinpays) and Cryptex have now been sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) levied sanctions today against PM2BTC under a powerful new “Section 9714” authority included in the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act, changes enacted in 2022 to make it easier to target financial entities involved in laundering money for Russia.
Treasury first used this authority last year against Bitzlato, a cryptocurrency exchange operating in Russia that became a money laundering conduit for ransomware attackers and dark market dealers.
An investigation into the corporate entities behind UAPS and Cryptex reveals an organization incorporated in 2012 in Scotland called Orbest Investments LP. Records from the United Kingdom’s business registry show the owners of Orbest Investments are two entities: CS Proxy Solutions CY, and RM Everton Ltd.
Public business records further reveal that CS Proxy Solutions and RM Everton are co-owners of Progate Solutions, a holding company that featured prominently in a June 2017 report from Bellingcat and Transparency International (PDF) on money laundering networks tied to the Kremlin.
“Law enforcement agencies believe that the total amount laundered through this process could be as high as US$80 billion,” the joint report reads. “Although it is not clear where all of this money came from, investigators claim it includes significant amounts of money that were diverted from the Russian treasury and state contracts.”
Their story built on reporting published earlier that year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) and Novaya Gazeta, which found that at least US$20.8 billion was secretly moved out of Russia between 2010 and 2014 through a vast money laundering machine comprising over 5,000 legal entities known as “The Laundromat.”
Image: occrp.org
“Using company records, reporters tracked the names of some clients after executives refused to give them out,” the OCCRP report explains. “They found the heavy users of the scheme were rich and powerful Russians who had made their fortunes from dealing with the Russian state.”
Rich Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who advises the law enforcement and intelligence community. Sanders just returned from a three-week sojourn through Ukraine, traveling with Ukrainian soldiers while mapping out dodgy Russian crypto exchanges that are laundering money for narcotics networks operating in the region. Sanders said today’s sanctions by the Treasury Department will likely have an immediate impact on Cryptex and its customers.
“Whenever an entity is sanctioned, the implications on-chain are immense,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Regardless of whether an exchange is actually compliant or just virtue signals it, it is the case across the board that exchanges will pay attention to these sanctions.”
“This action shows these payment processors for illicit platforms will get attention eventually,” Sanders continued. “Even if it took way too long in this case, Cryptex knew the majority of their volume was problematic, knew why it was problematic, and did it anyway. And this should be a wake up call for other exchanges that know full well that most of their volume is problematic.”
The U.S. Department of State is offering a reward of up to $10 million each for information leading to the arrests and/or convictions of Shakhmametov and Ivanov. The State announcement says separate rewards of up to $1 million each are being offered for information leading to the identification of other leaders of the Joker’s Stash criminal marketplace (other than Shakhmametov), as well as the identification of other key leaders of the UAPS, PM2BTC, and PinPays transnational criminal groups (other than Ivanov).
Image: U.S. Secret Service.
New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end database in a file that was freely available from its homepage until today.
In April, a cybercriminal named USDoD began selling data stolen from NPD. In July, someone leaked what was taken, including the names, addresses, phone numbers and in some cases email addresses for more than 272 million people (including many who are now deceased).
NPD acknowledged the intrusion on Aug. 12, saying it dates back to a security incident in December 2023. In an interview last week, USDoD blamed the July data leak on another malicious hacker who also had access to the company’s database, which they claimed has been floating around the underground since December 2023.
Following last week’s story on the breadth of the NPD breach, a reader alerted KrebsOnSecurity that a sister NPD property — the background search service recordscheck.net — was hosting an archive that included the usernames and password for the site’s administrator.
A review of that archive, which was available from the Records Check website until just before publication this morning (August 19), shows it includes the source code and plain text usernames and passwords for different components of recordscheck.net, which is visually similar to nationalpublicdata.com and features identical login pages.
The exposed archive, which was named “members.zip,” indicates RecordsCheck users were all initially assigned the same six-character password and instructed to change it, but many did not.
According to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence, the passwords included in the source code archive are identical to credentials exposed in previous data breaches that involved email accounts belonging to NPD’s founder, an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy from Florida named Salvatore “Sal” Verini.
Reached via email, Mr. Verini said the exposed archive (a .zip file) containing recordscheck.net credentials has been removed from the company’s website, and that the site is slated to cease operations “in the next week or so.”
“Regarding the zip, it has been removed but was an old version of the site with non-working code and passwords,” Verini told KrebsOnSecurity. “Regarding your question, it is an active investigation, in which we cannot comment on at this point. But once we can, we will [be] with you, as we follow your blog. Very informative.”
The leaked recordscheck.net source code indicates the website was created by a web development firm based in Lahore, Pakistan called creationnext.com, which did not return messages seeking comment. CreationNext.com’s homepage features a positive testimonial from Sal Verini.
A testimonial from Sal Verini on the homepage of CreationNext, the Lahore, Pakistan-based web development firm that apparently designed NPD and RecordsCheck.
There are now several websites that have been stood up to help people learn if their SSN and other data was exposed in this breach. One is npdbreach.com, a lookup page erected by Atlas Data Privacy Corp. Another lookup service is available at npd.pentester.com. Both sites show NPD had old and largely inaccurate data on Yours Truly.
The best advice for those concerned about this breach 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.
A freeze is a good idea because all of the information that 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.
Screenshots of a Telegram-based ID theft service that was selling background reports using hacked law enforcement accounts at USInfoSearch.
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.
In November 2023, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about one such service, which was being powered by hacked accounts at the U.S. consumer data broker USInfoSearch.com. This is notable because the leaked source code indicates Records Check pulled background reports on people by querying NPD’s database and records at USInfoSearch. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from USInfoSearch and will update this story if they respond.
The point is, 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’ll 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. If you spot errors, such as random addresses and phone numbers you don’t recognize, do not ignore them. Dispute any inaccuracies you may find.
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.
It’s not unusual for the data brokers behind people-search websites to use pseudonyms in their day-to-day lives (you would, too). Some of these personal data purveyors even try to reinvent their online identities in a bid to hide their conflicts of interest. But it’s not every day you run across a US-focused people-search network based in China whose principal owners all appear to be completely fabricated identities.
Responding to a reader inquiry concerning the trustworthiness of a site called TruePeopleSearch[.]net, KrebsOnSecurity began poking around. The site offers to sell reports containing photos, police records, background checks, civil judgments, contact information “and much more!” According to LinkedIn and numerous profiles on websites that accept paid article submissions, the founder of TruePeopleSearch is Marilyn Gaskell from Phoenix, Ariz.
The saucy yet studious LinkedIn profile for Marilyn Gaskell.
Ms. Gaskell has been quoted in multiple “articles” about random subjects, such as this article at HRDailyAdvisor about the pros and cons of joining a company-led fantasy football team.
“Marilyn Gaskell, founder of TruePeopleSearch, agrees that not everyone in the office is likely to be a football fan and might feel intimidated by joining a company league or left out if they don’t join; however, her company looked for ways to make the activity more inclusive,” this paid story notes.
Also quoted in this article is Sally Stevens, who is cited as HR Manager at FastPeopleSearch[.]io.
Sally Stevens, the phantom HR Manager for FastPeopleSearch.
“Fantasy football provides one way for employees to set aside work matters for some time and have fun,” Stevens contributed. “Employees can set a special league for themselves and regularly check and compare their scores against one another.”
Imagine that: Two different people-search companies mentioned in the same story about fantasy football. What are the odds?
Both TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch allow users to search for reports by first and last name, but proceeding to order a report prompts the visitor to purchase the file from one of several established people-finder services, including BeenVerified, Intelius, and Spokeo.
DomainTools.com shows that both TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch appeared around 2020 and were registered through Alibaba Cloud, in Beijing, China. No other information is available about these domains in their registration records, although both domains appear to use email servers based in China.
Sally Stevens’ LinkedIn profile photo is identical to a stock image titled “beautiful girl” from Adobe.com. Ms. Stevens is also quoted in a paid blog post at ecogreenequipment.com, as is Alina Clark, co-founder and marketing director of CocoDoc, an online service for editing and managing PDF documents.
The profile photo for Alina Clark is a stock photo appearing on more than 100 websites.
Scouring multiple image search sites reveals Ms. Clark’s profile photo on LinkedIn is another stock image that is currently on more than 100 different websites, including Adobe.com. Cocodoc[.]com was registered in June 2020 via Alibaba Cloud Beijing in China.
The same Alina Clark and photo materialized in a paid article at the website Ceoblognation, which in 2021 included her at #11 in a piece called “30 Entrepreneurs Describe The Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) for Their Business.” It’s also worth noting that Ms. Clark is currently listed as a “former Forbes Council member” at the media outlet Forbes.com.
Entrepreneur #6 is Stephen Curry, who is quoted as CEO of CocoSign[.]com, a website that claims to offer an “easier, quicker, safer eSignature solution for small and medium-sized businesses.” Incidentally, the same photo for Stephen Curry #6 is also used in this “article” for #22 Jake Smith, who is named as the owner of a different company.
Stephen Curry, aka Jake Smith, aka no such person.
Mr. Curry’s LinkedIn profile shows a young man seated at a table in front of a laptop, but an online image search shows this is another stock photo. Cocosign[.]com was registered in June 2020 via Alibaba Cloud Beijing. No ownership details are available in the domain registration records.
Listed at #13 in that 30 Entrepreneurs article is Eden Cheng, who is cited as co-founder of PeopleFinderFree[.]com. KrebsOnSecurity could not find a LinkedIn profile for Ms. Cheng, but a search on her profile image from that Entrepreneurs article shows the same photo for sale at Shutterstock and other stock photo sites.
DomainTools says PeopleFinderFree was registered through Alibaba Cloud, Beijing. Attempts to purchase reports through PeopleFinderFree produce a notice saying the full report is only available via Spokeo.com.
Lynda Fairly is Entrepreneur #24, and she is quoted as co-founder of Numlooker[.]com, a domain registered in April 2021 through Alibaba in China. Searches for people on Numlooker forward visitors to Spokeo.
The photo next to Ms. Fairly’s quote in Entrepreneurs matches that of a LinkedIn profile for Lynda Fairly. But a search on that photo shows this same portrait has been used by many other identities and names, including a woman from the United Kingdom who’s a cancer survivor and mother of five; a licensed marriage and family therapist in Canada; a software security engineer at Quora; a journalist on Twitter/X; and a marketing expert in Canada.
Cocofinder[.]com is a people-search service that launched in Sept. 2019, through Alibaba in China. Cocofinder lists its market officer as Harriet Chan, but Ms. Chan’s LinkedIn profile is just as sparse on work history as the other people-search owners mentioned already. An image search online shows that outside of LinkedIn, the profile photo for Ms. Chan has only ever appeared in articles at pay-to-play media sites, like this one from outbackteambuilding.com.
Perhaps because Cocodoc and Cocosign both sell software services, they are actually tied to a physical presence in the real world — in Singapore (15 Scotts Rd. #03-12 15, Singapore). But it’s difficult to discern much from this address alone.
Who’s behind all this people-search chicanery? A January 2024 review of various people-search services at the website techjury.com states that Cocofinder is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Chinese company called Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co.
“Though it only finds results from the United States, users can choose between four main search methods,” Techjury explains. Those include people search, phone, address and email lookup. This claim is supported by a Reddit post from three years ago, wherein the Reddit user “ProtectionAdvanced” named the same Chinese company.
Is Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co. responsible for all these phony profiles? How many more fake companies and profiles are connected to this scheme? KrebsOnSecurity found other examples that didn’t appear directly tied to other fake executives listed here, but which nevertheless are registered through Alibaba and seek to drive traffic to Spokeo and other data brokers. For example, there’s the winsome Daniela Sawyer, founder of FindPeopleFast[.]net, whose profile is flogged in paid stories at entrepreneur.org.
Google currently turns up nothing else for in a search for Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co. Please feel free to sound off in the comments if you have any more information about this entity, such as how to contact it. Or reach out directly at krebsonsecurity @ gmail.com.
A mind map highlighting the key points of research in this story. Click to enlarge. Image: KrebsOnSecurity.com
It appears the purpose of this network is to conceal the location of people in China who are seeking to generate affiliate commissions when someone visits one of their sites and purchases a people-search report at Spokeo, for example. And it is clear that Spokeo and others have created incentives wherein anyone can effectively white-label their reports, and thereby make money brokering access to peoples’ personal information.
Spokeo’s Wikipedia page says the company was founded in 2006 by four graduates from Stanford University. Spokeo co-founder and current CEO Harrison Tang has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Intelius is owned by San Diego based PeopleConnect Inc., which also owns Classmates.com, USSearch, TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate. PeopleConnect Inc. in turn is owned by H.I.G. Capital, a $60 billion private equity firm. Requests for comment were sent to H.I.G. Capital. This story will be updated if they respond.
BeenVerified is owned by a New York City based holding company called The Lifetime Value Co., a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, NeighborWho, Ownerly, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.
Ross Cohen, chief operating officer at The Lifetime Value Co., said it’s likely the network of suspicious people-finder sites was set up by an affiliate. Cohen said Lifetime Value would investigate to determine if this particular affiliate was driving them any sign-ups.
All of the above people-search services operate similarly. When you find the person you’re looking for, you are put through a lengthy (often 10-20 minute) series of splash screens that require you to agree that these reports won’t be used for employment screening or in evaluating new tenant applications. Still more prompts ask if you are okay with seeing “potentially shocking” details about the subject of the report, including arrest histories and photos.
Only at the end of this process does the site disclose that viewing the report in question requires signing up for a monthly subscription, which is typically priced around $35. Exactly how and from where these major people-search websites are getting their consumer data — and customers — will be the subject of further reporting here.
The main reason these various people-search sites require you to affirm that you won’t use their reports for hiring or vetting potential tenants is that 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 don’t 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 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.
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.
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.
There are a growing number of online reputation management companies that offer to help customers remove their personal information from people-search sites and data broker databases. There are, no doubt, plenty of honest and well-meaning companies operating in this space, but it has been my experience that a great many people involved in that industry have a background in marketing or advertising — not privacy.
Also, some so-called data privacy companies may be wolves in sheep’s clothing. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published an abundance of evidence indicating that the CEO and founder of the data privacy company OneRep.com was responsible for launching dozens of people-search services over the years.
Finally, some of the more popular people-search websites are notorious for ignoring requests from consumers seeking to remove their information, regardless of which reputation or removal service you use. Some force you to create an account and provide more information before you can remove your data. Even then, the information you worked hard to remove may simply reappear a few months later.
This aptly describes countless complaints lodged against the data broker and people search giant Radaris. On March 8, KrebsOnSecurity profiled the co-founders of Radaris, two Russian brothers in Massachusetts who also operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs.
The truth is that these people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and 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. Duke University adjunct professor Justin Sherman says virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered “public” or “government” documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.
“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 said.
In 2020, the United States brought charges against four men accused of building a bulletproof hosting empire that once dominated the Russian cybercrime industry and supported multiple organized cybercrime groups. All four pleaded guilty to conspiracy and racketeering charges. But there is a fascinating and untold backstory behind the two Russian men involved, who co-ran the world’s top spam forum and worked closely with Russia’s most dangerous cybercriminals.
From January 2005 to April 2013, there were two primary administrators of the cybercrime forum Spamdot (a.k.a Spamit), an invite-only community for Russian-speaking people in the businesses of sending spam and building botnets of infected computers to relay said spam. The Spamdot admins went by the nicknames Icamis (a.k.a. Ika), and Salomon (a.k.a. Sal).
Spamdot forum administrator “Ika” a.k.a. “Icamis” responds to a message from “Tarelka,” the botmaster behind the Rustock botnet. Dmsell said: “I’m actually very glad that I switched to legal spam mailing,” prompting Tarelka and Ika to scoff.
As detailed in my 2014 book, Spam Nation, Spamdot was home to crooks controlling some of the world’s nastiest botnets, global malware contagions that went by exotic names like Rustock, Cutwail, Mega-D, Festi, Waledac, and Grum.
Icamis and Sal were in daily communications with these botmasters, via the Spamdot forum and private messages. Collectively in control over millions of spam-spewing zombies, those botmasters also continuously harvested passwords and other data from infected machines.
As we’ll see in a moment, Salomon is now behind bars, in part because he helped to rob dozens of small businesses in the United States using some of those same harvested passwords. He is currently housed in a federal prison in Michigan, serving the final stretch of a 60-month sentence.
But the identity and whereabouts of Icamis have remained a mystery to this author until recently. For years, security experts — and indeed, many top cybercriminals in the Spamit affiliate program — have expressed the belief that Sal and Icamis were likely the same person using two different identities. And there were many good reasons to support this conclusion.
For example, in 2010 Spamdot and its spam affiliate program Spamit were hacked, and its user database shows Sal and Icamis often accessed the forum from the same Internet address — usually from Cherepovets, an industrial town situated approximately 230 miles north of Moscow. Also, it was common for Icamis to reply when Spamdot members communicated a request or complaint to Sal, and vice versa.
Image: maps.google.com
Still, other clues suggested Icamis and Sal were two separate individuals. For starters, they frequently changed the status on their instant messenger clients at different times. Also, they each privately discussed with others having attended different universities.
KrebsOnSecurity began researching Icamis’s real-life identity in 2012, but failed to revisit any of that research until recently. In December 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published new details about the identity of “Rescator,” a Russian cybercriminal who is thought to be closely connected to the 2013 data breach at Target.
That story mentioned Rescator’s real-life identity was exposed by Icamis in April 2013, as part of a lengthy farewell letter Ika wrote to Spamdot members wherein Ika said he was closing the forum and quitting the cybercrime business entirely.
To no one’s shock, Icamis didn’t quit the business: He simply became more quiet and circumspect about his work, which increasingly was focused on helping crime groups siphon funds from U.S. bank accounts. But the Rescator story was a reminder that 10 years worth of research on who Ika/Icamis is in real life had been completely set aside. This post is an attempt to remedy that omission.
The farewell post from Ika (aka Icamis), the administrator of both the BlackSEO forum and Pustota, the successor forum to Spamit/Spamdot.
Icamis and Sal offered a comprehensive package of goods and services that any aspiring or accomplished spammer would need on a day-to-day basis: Virtually unlimited bulletproof domain registration and hosting services, as well as services that helped botmasters evade spam block lists generated by anti-spam groups like Spamhaus.org. Here’s snippet of Icamis’s ad on Spamdot from Aug. 2008, wherein he addresses forum members with the salutation, “Hello Gentlemen Scammers.”
We are glad to present you our services!
Many are already aware (and are our clients), but publicity is never superfluous.Domains.
– all major gtlds (com, net, org, info, biz)
– many interesting and uninteresting cctlds
– options for any topic
– processing of any quantities
– guarantees
– exceptionally low prices for domains for white and gray schemes (including any SEO and affiliate spam )
– control panel with balances and auto-registration
– all services under the Ikamis brand, proven over the years;)Servers.
– long-term partnerships with several [data centers] in several parts of the world for any topic
– your own data center (no longer in Russia ;)) for gray and white topics
– any configuration and any hardware
– your own IP networks (PI, not PA) and full legal support
– realtime backups to neutral sites
– guarantees and full responsibility for the services provided
– non-standard equipment on request
– our own admins to resolve any technical issues (services are free for clients)
– hosting (shared and vps) is also possibleNon-standard and related services.
– ssl certificates signed by geotrust and thawte
– old domains (any year, any quantity)
– beautiful domains (keyword, short, etc.)
– domains with indicators (any, for SEO, etc.)
– making unstable gtld domains stable
– interception and hijacking of custom domains (expensive)
– full domain posting via web.archive.org with restoration of native content (preliminary applications)
– any updates to our panels to suit your needs upon request (our own coders)All orders for the “Domains” sections and “Servers” are carried out during the day (depending on our workload).
For non-standard and related services, a preliminary application is required 30 days in advance (except for ssl certificates – within 24 hours).
Icamis and Sal frequently claimed that their service kept Spamhaus and other anti-spam groups several steps behind their operations. But it’s clear that those anti-spam operations had a real and painful impact on spam revenues, and Salomon was obsessed with striking back at anti-spam groups, particularly Spamhaus.
In 2007, Salomon collected more than $3,000 from botmasters affiliated with competing spam affiliate programs that wanted to see Spamhaus suffer, and the money was used to fund a week-long distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Spamhaus and its online infrastructure. But rather than divert their spam botnets from their normal activity and thereby decrease sales, the botmasters voted to create a new DDoS botnet by purchasing installations of DDoS malware on thousands of already-hacked PCs (at a rate of $25 per 1,000 installs).
As an affiliate of Spamdot, Salomon used the email address ad1@safe-mail.net, and the password 19871987gr. The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence found the password 19871987gr was used by the email address grichishkin@gmail.com. Multiple accounts are registered to that email address under the name Alexander Valerievich Grichishkin, from Cherepovets.
In 2020, Grichishkin was arrested outside of Russia on a warrant for providing bulletproof hosting services to cybercriminal gangs. The U.S. government said Grichishkin and three others set up the infrastructure used by cybercriminals between 2009 to 2015 to distribute malware and attack financial institutions and victims throughout the United States.
Those clients included crooks using malware like Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel and the Blackhole exploit kit to build botnets and steal banking credentials.
“The Organization and its members helped their clients to access computers without authorization, steal financial information (including banking credentials), and initiate unauthorized wire transfers from victims’ financial accounts,” the government’s complaint stated.
Grichishkin pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. He is 36 years old, has a wife and kids in Thailand, and is slated for release on February 8, 2024.
The identity of Icamis came into view when KrebsOnSecurity began focusing on clues that might connect Icamis to Cherepovets (Ika’s apparent hometown based on the Internet addresses he regularly used to access Spamdot).
Historic domain ownership records from DomainTools.com reveal that many of the email addresses and domains connected to Icamis invoke the name “Andrew Artz,” including icamis[.]ws, icamis[.]ru, and icamis[.]biz. Icamis promoted his services in 2003 — such as bulk-domains[.]info — using the email address icamis@4host.info. From one of his ads in 2005:
Domains For Projects Advertised By Spam
I can register bulletproof domains for sites and projects advertised by spam(of course they must be legal). I can not provide DNS for u, only domains. The price will be:
65$ for domain[if u will buy less than 5 domains]
50$ for domain[more than 5 domains]
45$ for domain[more than 10 domains]
These prices are for domains in the .net & .com zones.
If u want to order domains write me to: icamis@4host.info
In 2009, an “Andrew Artz” registered at the hosting service FirstVDS.com using the email address icamis@4host.info, with a notation saying the company name attached to the account was “WMPay.” Likewise, the bulletproof domain service icamis[.]ws was registered to an Andrew Artz.
The domain wmpay.ru is registered to the phonetically similar name “Andrew Hertz,” at andrew@wmpay.ru. A search on “icamis.ru” in Google brings up a 2003 post by him on a discussion forum designed by and for students of Amtek, a secondary school in Cherepovets (Icamis was commenting from an Internet address in Cherepovets).
The website amtek-foreva-narod.ru is still online, and it links to several yearbooks for Amtek graduates. It states that the yearbook for the Amtek class of 2004 is hosted at 41.wmpay[.]com.
The yearbook photos for the Amtek class of 2004 are not indexed in the Wayback Machine at archive.org, but the names and nicknames of 16 students remain. However, it appears that the entry for one student — the Wmpay[.]com site administrator — was removed at some point.
In 2004, the administrator of the Amtek discussion forum — a 2003 graduate who used the handle “Grand” — observed that there were three people named Andrey who graduated from Amtek in 2004, but one of them was conspicuously absent from the yearbook at wmpay[.]ru: Andrey Skvortsov.
To bring this full circle, Icamis was Andrey Skvortsov, the other Russian man charged alongside Grichiskin (the two others who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges were from Estonia and Lithuania). All of the defendants in that case pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO).
[Author’s note: No doubt government prosecutors had their own reasons for omitting the nicknames of the defendants in their press releases, but that information sure would have saved me a lot of time and effort].
Skvortsov was sentenced to time served, and presumably deported. His current whereabouts are unknown and he was not reachable for comment via his known contact addresses.
The government says Ika and Sal’s bulletproof hosting empire provided extensive support for a highly damaging cybercrime group known as the JabberZeus Crew, which worked closely with the author of the Zeus Trojan — Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev — to develop a then-advanced strain of the Zeus malware that was designed to defeat one-time codes for authentication. Bogachev is a top Russian cybercriminal with a standing $3 million bounty on his head from the FBI.
The JabberZeus Crew stole money by constantly recruiting money mules, people in the United States and in Europe who could be enticed or tricked into forwarding money stolen from cybercrime victims. Interestingly, Icamis’s various email addresses are connected to websites for a vast network of phony technology companies that claimed they needed people with bank accounts to help pay their overseas employees.
Icamis used the email address tech@safe-mail.net on Spamdot, and this email address is tied to the registration records for multiple phony technology companies that were set up to recruit money mules.
One such site — sun-technology[.]net — advertised itself as a Hong Kong-based electronics firm that was looking for “honest, responsible and motivated people in UK, USA, AU and NZ to be Sales Representatives in your particular region and receive payments from our clients. Agent commission is 5 percent of total amount received to the personal bank account. You may use your existing bank account or open a new one for these purposes.”
In January 2010, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the JabberZeus crew had just used money mules to steal $500,000 from tiny Duanesburg Central School District in upstate New York. As part of his sentence, Skvortsov was ordered to pay $497,200 in restitution to the Duanesburg Central School District.
The JabberZeus Crew operated mainly out of the eastern Ukraine city of Donetsk, which was always pro-Russia and is now occupied by Russian forces. But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the alleged leader of the notorious cybercrime gang — Vyacheslav Igoravich Andreev (a.ka. Penchukov) — fled his mandatory military service orders and was arrested in Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently in federal custody awaiting trial, and is slated to be arraigned in U.S. federal court tomorrow (Jan. 9, 2024). A copy of the indictment against Andreev is here (PDF).
Andreev, aka “Tank,” seen here performing as a DJ in Ukraine in an undated photo from social media.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of the largest cybercrime services for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked recently, exposing its internal operations, finances and organizational structure. In today’s Part II, we’ll examine clues about the real-life identity of “Fearlless,” the nickname chosen by the proprietor of the SWAT USA Drops service.
Based in Russia, SWAT USA recruits people in the United States to reship packages containing pricey electronics that are purchased with stolen credit cards. As detailed in this Nov. 2 story, SWAT currently employs more than 1,200 U.S. residents, all of whom will be cut loose without a promised payday at the end of their first month reshipping stolen goods.
The current co-owner of SWAT, a cybercriminal who uses the nickname “Fearlless,” operates primarily on the cybercrime forum Verified. This Russian-language forum has tens of thousands of members, and it has suffered several hacks that exposed more than a decade’s worth of user data and direct messages.
January 2021 posts on Verified show that Fearlless and his partner Universalo purchased the SWAT reshipping business from a Verified member named SWAT, who’d been operating the service for years. SWAT agreed to transfer the business in exchange for 30 percent of the net profit over the ensuing six months.
Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says Fearlless first registered on Verified in February 2013. The email address Fearlless used on Verified leads nowhere, but a review of Fearlless’ direct messages on Verified indicates this user originally registered on Verified a year earlier as a reshipping vendor, under the alias “Apathyp.”
There are two clues supporting the conclusion that Apathyp and Fearlless are the same person. First, the Verified administrators warned Apathyp he had violated the forum’s rules barring the use of multiple accounts by the same person, and that Verified’s automated systems had detected that Apathyp and Fearlless were logging in from the same device. Second, in his earliest private messages on Verified, Fearlless told others to contact him on an instant messenger address that Apathyp had claimed as his.
Intel 471 says Apathyp registered on Verified using the email address triploo@mail.ru. A search on that email address at the breach intelligence service Constella Intelligence found that a password commonly associated with it was “niceone.” But the triploo@mail.ru account isn’t connected to much else that’s interesting except a now-deleted account at Vkontakte, the Russian answer to Facebook.
However, in Sept. 2020, Apathyp sent a private message on Verified to the owner of a stolen credit card shop, saying his credentials no longer worked. Apathyp told the proprietor that his chosen password on the service was “12Apathy.”
A search on that password at Constella reveals it was used by just four different email addresses, two of which are particularly interesting: gezze@yandex.ru and gezze@mail.ru. Constella discovered that both of these addresses were previously associated with the same password as triploo@mail.ru — “niceone,” or some variation thereof.
Constella found that years ago gezze@mail.ru was used to create a Vkontakte account under the name Ivan Sherban (former password: “12niceone“) from Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the southern region of Russia. That same email address is now tied to a Vkontakte account for an Ivan Sherban who lists his home as Saint Petersburg, Russia. Sherban’s profile photo shows a heavily tattooed, muscular and recently married individual with his beautiful new bride getting ready to drive off in a convertible sports car.
A pivotal clue for validating the research into Apathyp/Fearlless came from the identity intelligence firm myNetWatchman, which found that gezze@mail.ru at one time used the passwords “геззи1991” (gezze1991) and “gezze18081991.”
Care to place a wager on when Vkontakte says is Mr. Sherban’s birthday? Ten points if you answered August 18 (18081991).
Mr. Sherban did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
SecuSphere is a comprehensive DevSecOps platform designed to streamline and enhance your organization's security posture throughout the software development life cycle. Our platform serves as a centralized hub for vulnerability management, security assessments, CI/CD pipeline integration, and fostering DevSecOps practices and culture.
At the heart of SecuSphere is a powerful vulnerability management system. Our platform collects, processes, and prioritizes vulnerabilities, integrating with a wide array of vulnerability scanners and security testing tools. Risk-based prioritization and automated assignment of vulnerabilities streamline the remediation process, ensuring that your teams tackle the most critical issues first. Additionally, our platform offers robust dashboards and reporting capabilities, allowing you to track and monitor vulnerability status in real-time.
SecuSphere integrates seamlessly with your existing CI/CD pipelines, providing real-time security feedback throughout your development process. Our platform enables automated triggering of security scans and assessments at various stages of your pipeline. Furthermore, SecuSphere enforces security gates to prevent vulnerable code from progressing to production, ensuring that security is built into your applications from the ground up. This continuous feedback loop empowers developers to identify and fix vulnerabilities early in the development cycle.
SecuSphere offers a robust framework for consuming and analyzing security assessment reports from various CI/CD pipeline stages. Our platform automates the aggregation, normalization, and correlation of security findings, providing a holistic view of your application's security landscape. Intelligent deduplication and false-positive elimination reduce noise in the vulnerability data, ensuring that your teams focus on real threats. Furthermore, SecuSphere integrates with ticketing systems to facilitate the creation and management of remediation tasks.
SecuSphere goes beyond tools and technology to help you drive and accelerate the adoption of DevSecOps principles and practices within your organization. Our platform provides security training and awareness for developers, security, and operations teams, helping to embed security within your development and operations processes. SecuSphere aids in establishing secure coding guidelines and best practices and fosters collaboration and communication between security, development, and operations teams. With SecuSphere, you'll create a culture of shared responsibility for security, enabling you to build more secure, reliable software.
Embrace the power of integrated DevSecOps with SecuSphere – secure your software development, from code to cloud.
SecuSphere offers built-in dashboards and reporting capabilities that allow you to easily track and monitor the status of vulnerabilities. With our risk-based prioritization and automated assignment features, vulnerabilities are efficiently managed and sent to the relevant teams for remediation.
SecuSphere provides a comprehensive REST API and Web Console. This allows for greater flexibility and control over your security operations, ensuring you can automate and integrate SecuSphere into your existing systems and workflows as seamlessly as possible.
For more information please refer to our Official Rest API Documentation
SecuSphere integrates with popular ticketing systems, enabling the creation and management of remediation tasks directly within the platform. This helps streamline your security operations and ensure faster resolution of identified vulnerabilities.
SecuSphere is not just a tool, it's a comprehensive solution that drives and accelerates the adoption of DevSecOps principles and practices. We provide security training and awareness for developers, security, and operations teams, and aid in establishing secure coding guidelines and best practices.
Get started with SecuSphere using our comprehensive user guide.
You can install SecuSphere by cloning the repository, setting up locally, or using Docker.
FreshRSS 
$ git clone https://github.com/SecurityUniversalOrg/SecuSphere.gitNavigate to the source directory and run the Python file:
$ cd src/
$ python run.pyBuild and run the Dockerfile in the cicd directory:
$ # From repository root
$ docker build -t secusphere:latest .
$ docker run secusphere:latestUse Docker Compose in the ci_cd/iac/ directory:
$ cd ci_cd/iac/
$ docker-compose -f secusphere.yml upPull the latest version of SecuSphere from Docker Hub and run it:
$ docker pull securityuniversal/secusphere:latest
$ docker run -p 8081:80 -d secusphere:latestWe value your feedback and are committed to providing the best possible experience with SecuSphere. If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvement, please create an issue in this repository or contact our support team.
We welcome contributions to SecuSphere. If you're interested in improving SecuSphere or adding new features, please read our contributing guide.
This is a command-line tool written in Python that applies one or more transmutation rules to a given password or a list of passwords read from one or more files. The tool can be used to generate transformed passwords for security testing or research purposes. Also, while you doing pentesting it will be very useful tool for you to brute force the passwords!!
How Passmute can also help to secure our passwords more?
PassMute can help to generate strong and complex passwords by applying different transformation rules to the input password. However, password security also depends on other factors such as the length of the password, randomness, and avoiding common phrases or patterns.
The transformation rules include:
reverse: reverses the password string
uppercase: converts the password to uppercase letters
lowercase: converts the password to lowercase letters
swapcase: swaps the case of each letter in the password
capitalize: capitalizes the first letter of the password
leet: replaces some letters in the password with their leet equivalents
strip: removes all whitespace characters from the password
The tool can also write the transformed passwords to an output file and run the transformation process in parallel using multiple threads.
Installation
git clone https://HITH-Hackerinthehouse/PassMute.git
cd PassMute
chmod +x PassMute.py
Usage To use the tool, you need to have Python 3 installed on your system. Then, you can run the tool from the command line using the following options:
python PassMute.py [-h] [-f FILE [FILE ...]] -r RULES [RULES ...] [-v] [-p PASSWORD] [-o OUTPUT] [-t THREAD_TIMEOUT] [--max-threads MAX_THREADS]
Here's a brief explanation of the available options:
-h or --help: shows the help message and exits
-f (FILE) [FILE ...], --file (FILE) [FILE ...]: one or more files to read passwords from
-r (RULES) [RULES ...] or --rules (RULES) [RULES ...]: one or more transformation rules to apply
-v or --verbose: prints verbose output for each password transformation
-p (PASSWORD) or --password (PASSWORD): transforms a single password
-o (OUTPUT) or --output (OUTPUT): output file to save the transformed passwords
-t (THREAD_TIMEOUT) or --thread-timeout (THREAD_TIMEOUT): timeout for threads to complete (in seconds)
--max-threads (MAX_THREADS): maximum number of threads to run simultaneously (default: 10)
NOTE: If you are getting any error regarding argparse module then simply install the module by following command: pip install argparse
Examples
Here are some example commands those read passwords from a file, applies two transformation rules, and saves the transformed passwords to an output file:
Single Password transmutation: python PassMute.py -p HITHHack3r -r leet reverse swapcase -v -t 50
Multiple Password transmutation: python PassMute.py -f testwordlists.txt -r leet reverse -v -t 100 -o testupdatelists.txt
Here Verbose and Thread are recommended to use in case you're transmutating big files and also it depends upon your microprocessor as well, it's not required every time to use threads and verbose mode.
Legal Disclaimer:
You might be super excited to use this tool, we too. But here we need to confirm! Hackerinthehouse, any contributor of this project and Github won't be responsible for any actions made by you. This tool is made for security research and educational purposes only. It is the end user's responsibility to obey all applicable local, state and federal laws.
A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
A researcher found DC Health had five Salesforce Community sites exposing data.
Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.
Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
This misconfigured Salesforce Community site from the state of Vermont was leaking pandemic assistance loan application data, including names, SSNs, email address and bank account information.
Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.
“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.
Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.
“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.
Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.
“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”
The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).
On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.
Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.
But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.
Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.
That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”
Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.
“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”
In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:
Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See
Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile
“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”
WAF bypass Tool is an open source tool to analyze the security of any WAF for False Positives and False Negatives using predefined and customizable payloads. Check your WAF before an attacker does. WAF Bypass Tool is developed by Nemesida WAF team with the participation of community.
It is forbidden to use for illegal and illegal purposes. Don't break the law. We are not responsible for possible risks associated with the use of this software.
The latest waf-bypass always available via the Docker Hub. It can be easily pulled via the following command:
# docker pull nemesida/waf-bypass
# docker run nemesida/waf-bypass --host='example.com'
# git clone https://github.com/nemesida-waf/waf_bypass.git /opt/waf-bypass/
# python3 -m pip install -r /opt/waf-bypass/requirements.txt
# python3 /opt/waf-bypass/main.py --host='example.com'
'--proxy' (--proxy='http://proxy.example.com:3128') - option allows to specify where to connect to instead of the host.
'--header' (--header 'Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=' --header 'X-TOKEN: ABCDEF') - option allows to specify the HTTP header to send with all requests (e.g. for authentication). Multiple use is allowed.
'--user-agent' (--user-agent 'MyUserAgent 1/1') - option allows to specify the HTTP User-Agent to send with all requests, except when the User-Agent is set by the payload ("USER-AGENT").
'--block-code' (--block-code='403' --block-code='222') - option allows you to specify the HTTP status code to expect when the WAF is blocked. (default is 403). Multiple use is allowed.
'--threads' (--threads=15) - option allows to specify the number of parallel scan threads (default is 10).
'--timeout' (--timeout=10) - option allows to specify a request processing timeout in sec. (default is 30).
'--json-format' - an option that allows you to display the result of the work in JSON format (useful for integrating the tool with security platforms).
'--details' - display the False Positive and False Negative payloads. Not available in JSON format.
'--exclude-dir' - exclude the payload's directory (--exclude-dir='SQLi' --exclude-dir='XSS'). Multiple use is allowed.
Depending on the purpose, payloads are located in the appropriate folders:
When compiling a payload, the following zones, method and options are used:
Base64, HTML-ENTITY, UTF-16) in addition to the encoding for the payload. Multiple values are indicated with a space (e.g. Base64 UTF-16). Applicable only to for ARGS, BODY, COOKIE and HEADER zone. Not applicable to payloads in API and MFD directories. Not compatible with option JSON.Except for some cases described below, the zones are independent of each other and are tested separately (those if 2 zones are specified - the script will send 2 requests - alternately checking one and the second zone).
For the zones you can use %RND% suffix, which allows you to generate an arbitrary string of 6 letters and numbers. (e.g.: param%RND=my_payload or param=%RND% OR A%RND%B)
You can create your own payloads, to do this, create your own folder on the '/payload/' folder, or place the payload in an existing one (e.g.: '/payload/XSS'). Allowed data format is JSON.
API testing payloads located in this directory are automatically appended with a header 'Content-Type: application/json'.
For MFD (multipart/form-data) payloads located in this directory, you must specify the BODY (required) and BOUNDARY (optional). If BOUNDARY is not set, it will be generated automatically (in this case, only the payload must be specified for the BODY, without additional data ('... Content-Disposition: form-data; ...').
If a BOUNDARY is specified, then the content of the BODY must be formatted in accordance with the RFC, but this allows for multiple payloads in BODY a separated by BOUNDARY.
Other zones are allowed in this directory (e.g.: URL, ARGS etc.). Regardless of the zone, header 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=...' will be added to all requests.
Introduction The CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) is one of the most well-known entry-level certifications within the IT industry. Holding this credential proves your ability to install, configure, manage and support small- to medium-sized networks. A study by CompTIA found that 47% of SMBs see the IT skills gap growing. This IT skills gap is […]
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