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A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that made-for-Hollywood narrative has eclipsed a far more hideous trend: Many of these young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others.
Image: Shutterstock.
In September 2023, a Russian ransomware group known as ALPHV/Black Cat claimed credit for an intrusion at the MGM Resorts hotel chain that quickly brought MGM’s casinos in Las Vegas to a standstill. While MGM was still trying to evict the intruders from its systems, an individual who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the hack contacted multiple media outlets to offer interviews about how it all went down.
One account of the hack came from a 17-year-old in the United Kingdom, who told reporters the intrusion began when one of the English-speaking hackers phoned a tech support person at MGM and tricked them into resetting the password for an employee account.
The security firm CrowdStrike dubbed the group “Scattered Spider,” a recognition that the MGM hackers came from different cliques scattered across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers dedicated to financially-oriented cybercrime.
Collectively, this archipelago of crime-focused chat communities is known as “The Com,” and it functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.
But mostly, The Com is a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Top Com members are constantly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.
And as often as they extort victim companies for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world.
CrowdStrike would go on to produce and sell Scattered Spider action figures, and it featured a life-sized Scattered Spider sculpture at this year’s RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.
But marketing security products and services based on specific cybercriminal groups can be tricky, particularly if it turns out that robbing and extorting victims is by no means the most abhorrent activity those groups engage in on a daily basis.
KrebsOnSecurity examined the Telegram user ID number of the account that offered media interviews about the MGM hack — which corresponds to the screen name “@Holy” — and found the same account was used across a number of cybercrime channels that are entirely focused on extorting young people into harming themselves or others, and recording the harm on video.
Holy was known to possess multiple prized Telegram usernames, including @bomb, @halo, and @cute, as well as one of the highest-priced Telegram usernames ever put up for sale: @nazi.
In one post on a Telegram channel dedicated to youth extortion, this same user can be seen asking if anyone knows the current Telegram handles for several core members of 764, an extremist group known for victimizing children through coordinated online campaigns of extortion, doxing, swatting and harassment.
People affiliated with harm groups like 764 will often recruit new members by lurking on gaming platforms, social media sites and mobile applications that are popular with young people, including Discord, Minecraft, Roblox, Steam, Telegram, and Twitch.
“This type of offence usually starts with a direct message through gaming platforms and can move to more private chatrooms on other virtual platforms, typically one with video enabled features, where the conversation quickly becomes sexualized or violent,” warns a recent alert from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about the rise of sextortion groups on social media channels.
“One of the tactics being used by these actors is sextortion, however, they are not using it to extract money or for sexual gratification,” the RCMP continued. “Instead they use it to further manipulate and control victims to produce more harmful and violent content as part of their ideological objectives and radicalization pathway.”
The 764 network is among the most populated harm communities, but there are plenty more. Some of the largest such known groups include CVLT, Court, Kaskar, Leak Society, 7997, 8884, 2992, 6996, 555, Slit Town, 545, 404, NMK, 303, and H3ll.
In March, a consortium of reporters from Wired, Der Spiegel, Recorder and The Washington Post examined millions of messages across more than 50 Discord and Telegram chat groups.
“The abuse perpetrated by members of com groups is extreme,” Wired’s Ali Winston wrote. “They have coerced children into sexual abuse or self-harm, causing them to deeply lacerate their bodies to carve ‘cutsigns’ of an abuser’s online alias into their skin.” The story continues:
“Victims have flushed their heads in toilets, attacked their siblings, killed their pets, and in some extreme instances, attempted or died by suicide. Court records from the United States and European nations reveal participants in this network have also been accused of robberies, in-person sexual abuse of minors, kidnapping, weapons violations, swatting, and murder.”
“Some members of the network extort children for sexual pleasure, some for power and control. Some do it merely for the kick that comes from manipulation. Others sell the explicit CSAM content produced by extortion on the dark web.”
KrebsOnSecurity has learned Holy is the 17-year-old who was arrested in July 2024 by the U.K.’s West Midlands Police as part of a joint investigation with the FBI into the MGM hack.
Early in their cybercriminal career (as a 15-year-old), @Holy went by the handle “Vsphere,” and was a proud member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group. Throughout 2022, LAPSUS$ would hack and social engineer their way into some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including EA Games, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta, Samsung, and T-Mobile.
Another timely example of the overlap between harm communities and top members of The Com can be found in a group of criminals who recently stole obscene amounts of customer records from users of the cloud data provider Snowflake.
At the end of 2023, malicious hackers figured out that many major companies have uploaded massive amounts of valuable and sensitive customer data to Snowflake servers, all the while protecting those Snowflake accounts with little more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication required). The group then searched darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, and began raiding the data storage repositories used by some of the world’s largest corporations.
Among those that had data exposed in Snowflake was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information and phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all its customers.
A report on the extortion group from the incident response firm Mandiant notes that Snowflake victim companies were privately approached by the hackers, who demanded a ransom in exchange for a promise not to sell or leak the stolen data. All told, more than 160 organizations were extorted, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.
On May 2, 2024, a user by the name “Judische” claimed on the fraud-focused Telegram channel Star Chat that they had hacked Santander Bank, one of the first known Snowflake victims. Judische would repeat that claim in Star Chat on May 13 — the day before Santander publicly disclosed a data breach — and would periodically blurt out the names of other Snowflake victims before their data even went up for sale on the cybercrime forums.
A careful review of Judische’s account history and postings on Telegram shows this user is more widely known under the nickname “Waifu,” an early moniker that corresponds to one of the more accomplished SIM-swappers in The Com over the years.
In a SIM-swapping attack, the fraudsters will phish or purchase credentials for mobile phone company employees, and use those credentials to redirect a target’s mobile calls and text messages to a device the attackers control.
Several channels on Telegram maintain a frequently updated leaderboard of the 100 richest SIM-swappers, as well as the hacker handles associated with specific cybercrime groups (Waifu is ranked #24). That leaderboard has long included Waifu on a roster of hackers for a group that called itself “Beige.”
Beige members were implicated in two stories published here in 2020. The first was an August 2020 piece called Voice Phishers Targeting Corporate VPNs, which warned that the COVID-19 epidemic had brought a wave of voice phishing or “vishing” attacks that targeted work-from-home employees via their mobile devices, and tricked many of those people into giving up credentials needed to access their employer’s network remotely.
Beige group members also have claimed credit for a breach at the domain registrar GoDaddy. In November 2020, intruders thought to be associated with the Beige Group tricked a GoDaddy employee into installing malicious software, and with that access they were able to redirect the web and email traffic for multiple cryptocurrency trading platforms.
The Telegram channels that Judische and his related accounts frequented over the years show this user divides their time between posting in SIM-swapping and cybercrime cashout channels, and harassing and stalking others in harm communities like Leak Society and Court.
Mandiant has attributed the Snowflake compromises to a group it calls “UNC5537,” with members based in North America and Turkey. KrebsOnSecurity has learned Judische is a 26-year-old software engineer in Ontario, Canada.
Sources close to the investigation into the Snowflake incident tell KrebsOnSecurity the UNC5537 member in Turkey is John Erin Binns, an elusive American man indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76.6 million customers.
Binns is currently in custody in a Turkish prison and fighting his extradition. Meanwhile, he has been suing almost every federal agency and agent that contributed investigative resources to his case.
In June 2024, a Mandiant employee told Bloomberg that UNC5537 members have made death threats against cybersecurity experts investigating the hackers, and that in one case the group used artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of a researcher to harass them.
In June 2024, two American men pleaded guilty to hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that tapped into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. Sagar “Weep” Singh, a 20-year-old from Rhode Island, and Nicholas “Convict” Ceraolo, 25, of Queens, NY, were both active in SIM-swapping communities.
Singh and Ceraolo hacked into a number of foreign police department email accounts, and used them to make phony “emergency data requests” to social media platforms seeking account information about specific users they were stalking. According to the government, in each case the men impersonating the foreign police departments told those platforms the request was urgent because the account holders had been trading in child pornography or engaging in child extortion.
Eventually, the two men formed part of a group of cybercriminals known to its members as “ViLE,” who specialize in obtaining personal information about third-party victims, which they then used to harass, threaten or extort the victims, a practice known as “doxing.”
The U.S. government says Singh and Ceraolo worked closely with a third man — referenced in the indictment as co-conspirator #1 or “CC-1” — to administer a doxing forum where victims could pay to have their personal information removed.
The government doesn’t name CC-1 or the doxing forum, but CC-1’s hacker handle is “Kayte” (a.k.a. “KT“) which corresponds to the nickname of a 23-year-old man who lives with his parents in Coffs Harbor, Australia. For several years (with a brief interruption), KT has been the administrator of a truly vile doxing community known as the Doxbin.
A screenshot of the website for the cybercriminal group “ViLE.” Image: USDOJ.
People whose names and personal information appear on the Doxbin can quickly find themselves the target of extended harassment campaigns, account hacking, SIM-swapping and even swatting — which involves falsely reporting a violent incident at a target’s address to trick local police into responding with potentially deadly force.
A handful of Com members targeted by federal authorities have gone so far as to perpetrate swatting, doxing, and other harassment against the same federal agents who are trying to unravel their alleged crimes. This has led some investigators working cases involving the Com to begin redacting their names from affidavits and indictments filed in federal court.
In January 2024, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that prosecutors in Florida had charged a 19-year-old alleged Scattered Spider member named Noah Michael Urban with wire fraud and identity theft. That story recounted how Urban’s alleged hacker identities “King Bob” and “Sosa” inhabited a world in which rival cryptocurrency theft rings frequently settled disputes through so-called “violence-as-a-service” offerings — hiring strangers online to perpetrate firebombings, beatings and kidnappings against their rivals.
Urban’s indictment shows the name of the federal agent who testified to it has been blacked out:
The final page of Noah Michael Urban’s indictment shows the investigating agent redacted their name from charging documents.
In June 2022, this blog told the story of two men charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then methodically swatting each of them. Adding insult to injury, the men used the compromised security cameras to record live footage of local police swarming those homes.
McCarty, in a mugshot.
James Thomas Andrew McCarty, Charlotte, N.C., and Kya “Chumlul” Nelson, of Racine, Wisc., conspired to hack into Yahoo email accounts belonging to victims in the United States. The two would check how many of those Yahoo accounts were associated with Ring accounts, and then target people who used the same password for both accounts.
The Telegram and Discord aliases allegedly used by McCarty — “Aspertaine” and “Couch,” among others — correspond to an identity that was active in certain channels dedicated to SIM-swapping.
What KrebsOnSecurity didn’t report at the time is that both ChumLul and Aspertaine were active members of CVLT, wherein those identities clearly participated in harassing and exploiting young teens online.
In June 2024, McCarty was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to making hoax calls that elicited police SWAT responses. Nelson also pleaded guilty and received a seven-year prison sentence.
In March 2023, U.S. federal agents in New York announced they’d arrested “Pompompurin,” the alleged administrator of Breachforums, an English-language cybercrime forum where hacked corporate databases frequently appear for sale. In cases where the victim organization isn’t extorted in advance by hackers, being listed on Breachforums has often been the way many victims first learned of an intrusion.
Pompompurin had been a nemesis to the FBI for several years. In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation were blasted out from the FBI’s email systems and Internet addresses.
Pompompurin took credit for that stunt, and said he was able to send the FBI email blast by exploiting a flaw in an FBI portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities. The FBI later acknowledged that a software misconfiguration allowed someone to send the fake emails.
In December, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how hackers active on BreachForums had infiltrated the FBI’s InfraGard program, a vetted network designed to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with experts in the private sector. The hackers impersonated the CEO of a major financial company, applied for InfraGard membership in the CEO’s name, and were granted admission to the community.
The feds named Pompompurin as 21-year-old Peekskill resident Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, who was originally charged with one count of conspiracy to solicit individuals to sell unauthorized access devices (stolen usernames and passwords). But after FBI agents raided and searched the home where Fitzpatrick lived with his parents, prosecutors tacked on charges for possession of child pornography.
Recent actions by the DOJ indicate the government is well aware of the significant overlap between leading members of The Com and harm communities. But the government also is growing more sensitive to the criticism that it can often take months or years to gather enough evidence to criminally charge some of these suspects, during which time the perpetrators can abuse and recruit countless new victims.
Late last year, however, the DOJ signaled a new tactic in pursuing leaders of harm communities like 764: Charging them with domestic terrorism.
In December 2023, the government charged (PDF) a Hawaiian man with possessing and sharing sexually explicit videos and images of prepubescent children being abused. Prosecutors allege Kalana Limkin, 18, of Hilo, Hawaii, admitted he was an associate of CVLT and 764, and that he was the founder of a splinter harm group called Cultist. Limkin’s Telegram profile shows he also was active on the harm community Slit Town.
The relevant citation from Limkin’s complaint reads:
“Members of the group ‘764’ have conspired and continue to conspire in both online and in-person venues to engage in violent actions in furtherance of a Racially Motivated Violent Extremist ideology, wholly or in part through activities that violate federal criminal law meeting the statutory definition of Domestic Terrorism, defined in Title 18, United States Code, § 2331.”
Experts say charging harm groups under anti-terrorism statutes potentially gives the government access to more expedient investigative powers than it would normally have in a run-of-the-mill criminal hacking case.
“What it ultimately gets you is additional tools you can use in the investigation, possibly warrants and things like that,” said Mark Rasch, a former U.S. federal cybercrime prosecutor and now general counsel for the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. “It can also get you additional remedies at the end of the case, like greater sanctions, more jail time, fines and forfeiture.”
But Rasch said this tactic can backfire on prosecutors who overplay their hand and go after someone who ends up challenging the charges in court.
“If you’re going to charge a hacker or pedophile with a crime like terrorism, that’s going to make it harder to get a conviction,” Rasch said. “It adds to the prosecutorial burden and increases the likelihood of getting an acquittal.”
Rasch said it’s unclear where it is appropriate to draw the line in the use of terrorism statutes to disrupt harm groups online, noting that there certainly are circumstances where individuals can commit violations of domestic anti-terrorism statutes through their Internet activity alone.
“The Internet is a platform like any other, where virtually any kind of crime that can be committed in the real world can also be committed online,” he said. “That doesn’t mean all misuse of computers fits within the statutory definition of terrorism.”
The RCMP’s advisory on sexual extortion of minors over the Internet lists a number of potential warning signs that teens may exhibit if they become entangled in these harm groups. The FBI urges anyone who believes their child or someone they know is being exploited to contact their local FBI field office, call 1-800-CALL-FBI, or report it online at tips.fbi.gov.
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First, a couple of useful oneliners ;)
FreshRSS wget "https://github.com/diego-treitos/linux-smart-enumeration/releases/latest/download/lse.sh" -O lse.sh;chmod 700 lse.sh
curl "https://github.com/diego-treitos/linux-smart-enumeration/releases/latest/download/lse.sh" -Lo lse.sh;chmod 700 lse.sh
Note that since version 2.10 you can serve the script to other hosts with the -S flag!
Linux enumeration tools for pentesting and CTFs
This project was inspired by https://github.com/rebootuser/LinEnum and uses many of its tests.
Unlike LinEnum, lse tries to gradualy expose the information depending on its importance from a privesc point of view.
This shell script will show relevant information about the security of the local Linux system, helping to escalate privileges.
From version 2.0 it is mostly POSIX compliant and tested with shellcheck and posh.
It can also monitor processes to discover recurrent program executions. It monitors while it is executing all the other tests so you save some time. By default it monitors during 1 minute but you can choose the watch time with the -p parameter.
It has 3 levels of verbosity so you can control how much information you see.
In the default level you should see the highly important security flaws in the system. The level 1 (./lse.sh -l1) shows interesting information that should help you to privesc. The level 2 (./lse.sh -l2) will just dump all the information it gathers about the system.
By default it will ask you some questions: mainly the current user password (if you know it ;) so it can do some additional tests.
The idea is to get the information gradually.
First you should execute it just like ./lse.sh. If you see some green yes!, you probably have already some good stuff to work with.
If not, you should try the level 1 verbosity with ./lse.sh -l1 and you will see some more information that can be interesting.
If that does not help, level 2 will just dump everything you can gather about the service using ./lse.sh -l2. In this case you might find useful to use ./lse.sh -l2 | less -r.
You can also select what tests to execute by passing the -s parameter. With it you can select specific tests or sections to be executed. For example ./lse.sh -l2 -s usr010,net,pro will execute the test usr010 and all the tests in the sections net and pro.
Use: ./lse.sh [options]
OPTIONS
-c Disable color
-i Non interactive mode
-h This help
-l LEVEL Output verbosity level
0: Show highly important results. (default)
1: Show interesting results.
2: Show all gathered information.
-s SELECTION Comma separated list of sections or tests to run. Available
sections:
usr: User related tests.
sud: Sudo related tests.
fst: File system related tests.
sys: System related tests.
sec: Security measures related tests.
ret: Recurren tasks (cron, timers) related tests.
net: Network related tests.
srv: Services related tests.
pro: Processes related tests.
sof: Software related tests.
ctn: Container (docker, lxc) related tests.
cve: CVE related tests.
Specific tests can be used with their IDs (i.e.: usr020,sud)
-e PATHS Comma separated list of paths to exclude. This allows you
to do faster scans at the cost of completeness
-p SECONDS Time that the process monitor will spend watching for
processes. A value of 0 will disable any watch (default: 60)
-S Serve the lse.sh script in this host so it can be retrieved
from a remote host.
Also available in webm video
Direct execution oneliners
bash <(wget -q -O - "https://github.com/diego-treitos/linux-smart-enumeration/releases/latest/download/lse.sh") -l2 -i
bash <(curl -s "https://github.com/diego-treitos/linux-smart-enumeration/releases/latest/download/lse.sh") -l1 -i
BloodHound is a monolithic web application composed of an embedded React frontend with Sigma.js and a Go based REST API backend. It is deployed with a Postgresql application database and a Neo4j graph database, and is fed by the SharpHound and AzureHound data collectors.
BloodHound uses graph theory to reveal the hidden and often unintended relationships within an Active Directory or Azure environment. Attackers can use BloodHound to easily identify highly complex attack paths that would otherwise be impossible to identify quickly. Defenders can use BloodHound to identify and eliminate those same attack paths. Both blue and red teams can use BloodHound to easily gain a deeper understanding of privilege relationships in an Active Directory or Azure environment.
BloodHound CE is created and maintained by the BloodHound Enterprise Team. The original BloodHound was created by @_wald0, @CptJesus, and @harmj0y.
The easiest way to get up and running is to use our pre-configured Docker Compose setup. The following steps will get BloodHound CE up and running with the least amount of effort.
curl -L https://ghst.ly/getbhce | docker compose -f - up
http://localhost:8080/ui/login. Login with a username of admin and the randomly generated password from the logsNOTE: going forward, the default docker-compose.yml example binds only to localhost (127.0.0.1). If you want to access BloodHound outside of localhost, you'll need to follow the instructions in examples/docker-compose/README.md to configure the host binding for the container.
# Verify if Docker Engine is Running
docker info
# Attempt to stop Neo4j Service if running (on Windows)
Stop-Service "Neo4j" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
https://github.com/SpecterOps/BloodHound/assets/12970156/ea9dc042-1866-4ccb-9839-933140cc38b9
Please check out the Contact page in our wiki for details on how to reach out with questions and suggestions.
VED (Vault Exploit Defense)-eBPF leverages eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) to implement runtime kernel security monitoring and exploit detection for Linux systems.
eBPF is an in-kernel virtual machine that allows code execution in the kernel without modifying the kernel source itself. eBPF programs can be attached to tracepoints, kprobes, and other kernel events to efficiently analyze execution and collect data.
VED-eBPF uses eBPF to trace security-sensitive kernel behaviors and detect anomalies that could indicate an exploit or rootkit. It provides two main detections:
wCFI (Control Flow Integrity) traces the kernel call stack to detect control flow hijacking attacks. It works by generating a bitmap of valid call sites and validating each return address matches a known callsite.
PSD (Privilege Escalation Detection) traces changes to credential structures in the kernel to detect unauthorized privilege escalations.
VED-eBPF attaches eBPF programs to kernel functions to trace execution flows and extract security events. The eBPF programs submit these events via perf buffers to userspace for analysis.
wCFI traces the call stack by attaching to functions specified on the command line. On each call, it dumps the stack, assigns a stack ID, and validates the return addresses against a precomputed bitmap of valid call sites generated from objdump and /proc/kallsyms.
If an invalid return address is detected, indicating a corrupted stack, it generates a wcfi_stack_event containing:
* Stack trace
* Stack ID
* Invalid return address
This security event is submitted via perf buffers to userspace.
The wCFI eBPF program also tracks changes to the stack pointer and kernel text region to keep validation up-to-date.
PSD traces credential structure modifications by attaching to functions like commit_creds and prepare_kernel_cred. On each call, it extracts information like:
* Current process credentials
* Hashes of credentials and user namespace
* Call stack
It compares credentials before and after the call to detect unauthorized changes. If an illegal privilege escalation is detected, it generates a psd_event containing the credential fields and submits it via perf buffers.
VED-eBPF requires:
VED-eBPF is currently a proof-of-concept demonstrating the potential for eBPF-based kernel exploit and rootkit detection. Ongoing work includes:
VED-eBPF shows the promise of eBPF for building efficient, low-overhead kernel security monitoring without kernel modification. By leveraging eBPF tracing and perf buffers, critical security events can be extracted in real-time and analyzed to identify emerging kernel threats for cloud native envionrment.
A Linux persistence tool!
A powerful and versatile Linux persistence script designed for various security assessment and testing scenarios. This script provides a collection of features that demonstrate different methods of achieving persistence on a Linux system.
SSH Key Generation: Automatically generates SSH keys for covert access.
Cronjob Persistence: Sets up cronjobs for scheduled persistence.
Custom User with Root: Creates a custom user with root privileges.
RCE Persistence: Achieves persistence through remote code execution.
LKM/Rootkit: Demonstrates Linux Kernel Module (LKM) based rootkit persistence.
Bashrc Persistence: Modifies user-specific shell initialization files for persistence.
Systemd Service for Root: Sets up a systemd service for achieving root persistence.
LD_PRELOAD Privilege Escalation Config: Configures LD_PRELOAD for privilege escalation.
Backdooring Message of the Day / Header: Backdoors system message display for covert access.
Modify an Existing Systemd Service: Manipulates an existing systemd service for persistence.
Clone this repository to your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/Trevohack/DynastyPersist.git
One linear
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Trevohack/DynastyPersist/main/src/dynasty.sh | bash
For support, email spaceshuttle.io.all@gmail.com or join our Discord server.
https://discord.gg/WYzu65Hp
Thank You!
