Category: Breadcrumbs

Scammers are flooding Facebook with groups that purport to offer video streaming of funeral services for the recently deceased. Friends and family who follow the links for the streaming services are then asked to cough up their credit card information. Recently, these scammers have branched out into offering fake streaming services for nearly any kind of event advertised on Facebook. Here’s a closer look at the size of this scheme, and some findings about who may be responsible.

One of the many scam funeral group pages on Facebook. Clicking to view the “live stream” of the funeral takes one to a newly registered website that requests credit card information.

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader named George who said a friend had just passed away, and he noticed that a Facebook group had been created in that friend’s memory. The page listed the correct time and date of the funeral service, which it claimed could be streamed over the Internet by following a link that led to a page requesting credit card information.

“After I posted about the site, a buddy of mine indicated [the same thing] happened to her when her friend passed away two weeks ago,” George said.

Searching Facebook/Meta for a few simple keywords like “funeral” and “stream” reveals countless funeral group pages on Facebook, some of them for services in the past and others erected for an upcoming funeral.

All of these groups include images of the deceased as their profile photo, and seek to funnel users to a handful of newly-registered video streaming websites that require a credit card payment before one can continue. Even more galling, some of these pages request donations in the name of the deceased.

It’s not clear how many Facebook users fall for this scam, but it’s worth noting that many of these fake funeral groups attract subscribers from at least some of the deceased’s followers, suggesting those users have subscribed to the groups in anticipation of the service being streamed. It’s also unclear how many people end up missing a friend or loved one’s funeral because they mistakenly thought it was being streamed online.

One of many look-alike landing pages for video streaming services linked to scam Facebook funeral groups.

George said their friend’s funeral service page on Facebook included a link to the supposed live-streamed service at livestreamnow[.]xyz, a domain registered in November 2023.

According to DomainTools.com, the organization that registered this domain is called “apkdownloadweb,” is based in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, and uses the DNS servers of a Web hosting company in Bangladesh called webhostbd[.]net.

A search on “apkdownloadweb” in DomainTools shows three domains registered to this entity, including live24sports[.]xyz and onlinestreaming[.]xyz. Both of those domains also used webhostbd[.]net for DNS. Apkdownloadweb has a Facebook page, which shows a number of “live video” teasers for sports events that have already happened, and says its domain is apkdownloadweb[.]com.

Livestreamnow[.]xyz is currently hosted at a Bangladeshi web hosting provider named cloudswebserver[.]com, but historical DNS records show this website also used DNS servers from webhostbd[.]net.

The Internet address of livestreamnow[.]xyz is 148.251.54.196, at the hosting giant Hetzner in Germany. DomainTools shows this same Internet address is home to nearly 6,000 other domains (.CSV), including hundreds that reference video streaming terms, like watchliveon24[.]com and foxsportsplus[.]com.

There are thousands of domains at this IP address that include or end in the letters “bd,” the country code top-level domain for Bangladesh. Although many domains correspond to websites for electronics stores or blogs about IT topics, just as many contain a fair amount of placeholder content (think “lorem ipsum” text on the “contact” page). In other words, the sites appear legitimate at first glance, but upon closer inspection it is clear they are not currently used by active businesses.

The passive DNS records for 148.251.54.196 show a surprising number of results that are basically two domain names mushed together. For example, there is watchliveon24[.]com.playehq4ks[.]com, which displays links to multiple funeral service streaming groups on Facebook.

Another combined domain on the same Internet address — livestreaming24[.]xyz.allsportslivenow[.]com — lists dozens of links to Facebook groups for funerals, but also for virtually all types of events that are announced or posted about by Facebook users, including graduations, concerts, award ceremonies, weddings, and rodeos.

Even community events promoted by state and local police departments on Facebook are fair game for these scammers. A Facebook page maintained by the police force in Plympton, Mass. for a town social event this summer called Plympton Night Out was quickly made into two different Facebook groups that informed visitors they could stream the festivities at either espnstreamlive[.]co or skysports[.]live.

WHO’S BEHIND THE FAKEBOOK FUNERALS?

Recall that the registrant of livestreamnow[.]xyz — the bogus streaming site linked in the Facebook group for George’s late friend — was an organization called “Apkdownloadweb.” That entity’s domain — apkdownloadweb[.]com — is registered to a Mazidul Islam in Rajshahi, Bangladesh (this domain is also using Webhostbd[.]net DNS servers).

Mazidul Islam’s LinkedIn page says he is the organizer of a now defunct IT blog called gadgetsbiz[.]com, which DomainTools finds was registered to a Mehedi Hasan from Rajshahi, Bangladesh.

To bring this full circle, DomainTools finds the domain name for the DNS provider on all of the above-mentioned sites  — webhostbd[.]net — was originally registered to a Md Mehedi, and to the email address webhostbd.net@gmail.com (“MD” is a common abbreviation for Muhammad/Mohammod/Muhammed).

A search on that email address at Constella finds a breached record from the data broker Apollo.io saying its owner’s full name is Mohammod Mehedi Hasan. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly unique name in that region of the world.

But as luck would have it, sometime last year the administrator of apkdownloadweb[.]com managed to infect their Windows PC with password-stealing malware. We know this because the raw logs of data stolen from this administrator’s PC were indexed by the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence [full disclosure: As of this month, Constella is an advertiser on this website].

These so-called “stealer logs” are mostly generated by opportunistic infections from information-stealing trojans that are sold on cybercrime markets. A typical set of logs for a compromised PC will include any usernames and passwords stored in any browser on the system, as well as a list of recent URLs visited and files downloaded.

Malware purveyors will often deploy infostealer malware by bundling it with “cracked” or pirated software titles. Indeed, the stealer logs for the administrator of apkdownloadweb[.]com show this user’s PC became infected immediately after they downloaded a booby-trapped mobile application development toolkit.

Those stolen credentials indicate Apkdownloadweb[.]com is maintained by a 20-something native of Dhaka, Bangladesh named Mohammod Abdullah Khondokar.

The “browser history” folder from the admin of Apkdownloadweb shows Khondokar recently left a comment on the Facebook page of Mohammod Mehedi Hasan, and Khondokar’s Facebook profile says the two are friends.

Neither MD Hasan nor MD Abdullah Khondokar responded to requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from Meta.

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 hacker 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 constantly 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.

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.

HOLY NAZI

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. A source close to the investigation said @Holy also was a moderator on “Harm Nation,” an offshoot of 764.

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’s real name is Owen David Flowers, and that he is the previously unnamed 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.

JUDISCHE/WAIFU

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.

ViLE

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 is currently sealed. But a copy of the document obtained by KrebsOnSecurity 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.

HACKING RINGS, STALKING VICTIMS

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 Christian 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.

POMPOMPURIN

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 Peeksill 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.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM?

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 warning on sexual extortion of minors over the Internet lists a number of potential warning signs that teens may exhibit if they become immeshed 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.

Multiple media reports this week warned Americans to be on guard against a new phishing scam that arrives in a text message informing recipients they are not yet registered to vote. A bit of digging reveals the missives were sent by a California political consulting firm as part of a well-meaning but potentially counterproductive get-out-the-vote effort that had all the hallmarks of a phishing campaign.

Image: WDIV Detroit on Youtube.

On Aug. 27, the local Channel 4 affiliate WDIV in Detroit warned about a new SMS message wave that they said could prevent registered voters from casting their ballot. The story didn’t explain how or why the scam could block eligible voters from casting ballots, but it did show one of the related text messages, which linked to the site all-vote.com.

“We have you in our records as not registered to vote,” the unbidden SMS advised. “Check your registration status & register in 2 minutes.”

Similar warnings came from an ABC station in Arizona, and from an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, where election officials just issued an alert to be on the lookout for scam messages coming from all-vote.com. Some people interviewed who received the messages said they figured it was a scam because they knew for a fact they were registered to vote in their state. WDIV even interviewed a seventh-grader from Canada who said he also got the SMS saying he wasn’t registered to vote.

Someone trying to determine whether all-vote.com was legitimate might visit the main URL first (as opposed to just clicking the link in the SMS) to find out more about the organization. But visiting all-vote.com directly presents one with a login page to an online service called bl.ink. DomainTools.com finds all-vote.com was registered on July 10, 2024. Red flag #1.

The information requested from people who visited votewin.org via the SMS campaign.

Another version of this SMS campaign told recipients to check their voter status at a site called votewin.org, which DomainTools says was registered July 9, 2024. There is little information about who runs votewin.org on its website, and the contact page leads to generic contact form. Red Flag #2.

What’s more, Votewin.org asks visitors to supply their name, address, email address, date of birth, mobile phone number, while pre-checking options to sign the visitor up for more notifications. Big Red Flag #3.

Votewin.org’s Terms of Service referenced a California-based voter engagement platform called VoteAmerica LLC. The same voter registration query form advertised in the SMS messages is available if one clicks the “check your registration status” link on voteamerica.org.

VoteAmerica founder Debra Cleaver told KrebsOnSecurity the entity responsible for the SMS campaigns telling people they weren’t registered is Movement Labs, a political consulting firm in San Francisco.

Cleaver said her office had received several inquiries about the messages, which violate a key tenet of election outreach: Never tell the recipient what their voter status may be.

“That’s one of the worst practices,” Cleaver said. “You never tell someone what the voter file says because voter files are not reliable, and are often out of date.”

Reached via email, Movement Labs founder Yoni Landau said the SMS campaigns targeted “underrepresented groups in the electorate, young people, folks who are moving, low income households and the like, who are unregistered in our databases, with the intent to help them register to vote.”

Landau said filling out the form on Votewin.org merely checks to see if the visitor is registered to vote in their state, and then attempts to help them register if not.

“We understand that many people are jarred by the messages – we tested hundreds of variations of messages and found that these had the largest impact on someone’s likelihood to register,” he said. “I’m deeply sorry for anyone that may have gotten the message in error, who is registered to vote, and we’re looking into our content now to see if there are any variations that might be less certain but still as effective in generating new legal registrations.”

Cleaver said Movement Labs’ SMS campaign may have been incompetent, but it wasn’t malicious.

“When you work in voter mobilization, it’s not enough to want to do good, you actually need to be good,” she said. “At the end of the day the end result of incompetence and maliciousness is the same: increased chaos, reduced voter turnout, and long-term harm to our democracy.”

To register to vote or to update your voter registration, visit vote.gov and select your state or region.

Multiple media reports this week warned Americans to be on guard against a new phishing scam that arrives in a text message informing recipients they are not yet registered to vote. A bit of digging reveals the missives were sent by a California political consulting firm as part of a well-meaning but potentially counterproductive get-out-the-vote effort that had all the hallmarks of a phishing campaign.

Image: WDIV Detroit on Youtube.

On Aug. 27, the local Channel 4 affiliate WDIV in Detroit warned about a new SMS message wave that they said could prevent registered voters from casting their ballot. The story didn’t explain how or why the scam could block eligible voters from casting ballots, but it did show one of the related text messages, which linked to the site all-vote.com.

“We have you in our records as not registered to vote,” the unbidden SMS advised. “Check your registration status & register in 2 minutes.”

Similar warnings came from an ABC station in Arizona, and from an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, where election officials just issued an alert to be on the lookout for scam messages coming from all-vote.com. Some people interviewed who received the messages said they figured it was a scam because they knew for a fact they were registered to vote in their state. WDIV even interviewed a seventh-grader from Canada who said he also got the SMS saying he wasn’t registered to vote.

Someone trying to determine whether all-vote.com was legitimate might visit the main URL first (as opposed to just clicking the link in the SMS) to find out more about the organization. But visiting all-vote.com directly presents one with a login page to an online service called bl.ink. DomainTools.com finds all-vote.com was registered on July 10, 2024. Red flag #1.

The information requested from people who visited votewin.org via the SMS campaign.

Another version of this SMS campaign told recipients to check their voter status at a site called votewin.org, which DomainTools says was registered July 9, 2024. There is little information about who runs votewin.org on its website, and the contact page leads to generic contact form. Red Flag #2.

What’s more, Votewin.org asks visitors to supply their name, address, email address, date of birth, mobile phone number, while pre-checking options to sign the visitor up for more notifications. Big Red Flag #3.

Votewin.org’s Terms of Service referenced a California-based voter engagement platform called VoteAmerica LLC. The same voter registration query form advertised in the SMS messages is available if one clicks the “check your registration status” link on voteamerica.org.

VoteAmerica founder Debra Cleaver told KrebsOnSecurity the entity responsible for the SMS campaigns telling people they weren’t registered is Movement Labs, a political consulting firm in San Francisco.

Cleaver said her office had received several inquiries about the messages, which violate a key tenet of election outreach: Never tell the recipient what their voter status may be.

“That’s one of the worst practices,” Cleaver said. “You never tell someone what the voter file says because voter files are not reliable, and are often out of date.”

Reached via email, Movement Labs founder Yoni Landau said the SMS campaigns targeted “underrepresented groups in the electorate, young people, folks who are moving, low income households and the like, who are unregistered in our databases, with the intent to help them register to vote.”

Landau said filling out the form on Votewin.org merely checks to see if the visitor is registered to vote in their state, and then attempts to help them register if not.

“We understand that many people are jarred by the messages – we tested hundreds of variations of messages and found that these had the largest impact on someone’s likelihood to register,” he said. “I’m deeply sorry for anyone that may have gotten the message in error, who is registered to vote, and we’re looking into our content now to see if there are any variations that might be less certain but still as effective in generating new legal registrations.”

Cleaver said Movement Labs’ SMS campaign may have been incompetent, but it wasn’t malicious.

“When you work in voter mobilization, it’s not enough to want to do good, you actually need to be good,” she said. “At the end of the day the end result of incompetence and maliciousness is the same: increased chaos, reduced voter turnout, and long-term harm to our democracy.”

To register to vote or to update your voter registration, visit vote.gov and select your state or region.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALIAS: MAXNM

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

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

Personal photos Maxnm shared on Vktontakte in 2016. The caption has been machine translated from Russian.

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

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

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

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

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

x999xx’s Imageshack account includes screenshots of bank account balances from dozens of financial institutions, as well as chat logs with other hackers and pictures of homegrown weed.

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

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

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

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

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

A visual depiction of the data points connecting x999xx to Max Kirtsov.

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

CONFIRMATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On March 8, 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on the consumer data broker Radaris, showing how the original owners are two men in Massachusetts who operated multiple Russian language dating services and affiliate programs, in addition to a dizzying array of people-search websites. The subjects of that piece are threatening to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story is retracted. Meanwhile, their attorney has admitted that the person Radaris named as the CEO from its inception is a fabricated identity.

Radaris is just one cog in a sprawling network of people-search properties online that sell highly detailed background reports on U.S. consumers and businesses. Those reports typically include the subject’s current and previous addresses, partial Social Security numbers, any known licenses, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as the same information for any of their immediate relatives.

Radaris has a less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to responding to consumers seeking to have their reports removed from its various people-search services. That poor reputation, combined with indications that the true founders of Radaris have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their stewardship of the company, was what prompted KrebsOnSecurity to investigate the origins of Radaris in the first place.

On April 18, KrebsOnSecurity received a certified letter (PDF) from Valentin “Val” Gurvits, an attorney with the Boston Law Group, stating that KrebsOnSecurity would face a withering defamation lawsuit unless the Radaris story was immediately retracted and an apology issued to the two brothers named in the story as co-founders.

That March story worked backwards from the email address used to register radaris.com, and charted an impressive array of data broker companies created over the past 15 years by Massachusetts residents Dmitry and Igor Lubarsky (also sometimes spelled Lybarsky or Lubarski). Dmitry goes by “Dan,” and Igor uses the name “Gary.”

Those businesses included numerous websites marketed to Russian-speaking people who are new to the United States, such as russianamerica.com, newyork.ru, russiancleveland.com, russianla.com, russianmiami.com, etc. Other domains connected to the Lubarskys included Russian-language dating and adult websites, as well as affiliate programs for their international calling card businesses.

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

The story on Radaris noted that the Lubarsky brothers registered most of their businesses using a made-up name — “Gary Norden,” sometimes called Gary Nord or Gary Nard.

Mr. Gurvits’ letter stated emphatically that my reporting was lazy, mean-spirited, and obviously intended to smear the reputation of his clients. By way of example, Mr. Gurvits said the Lubarskys were actually Ukrainian, and that the story painted his clients in a negative light by insinuating that they were somehow associated with Radaris and with vaguely nefarious elements in Russia.

But more to the point, Mr. Gurvits said, neither of his clients were Gary Norden, and neither had ever held any leadership positions at Radaris, nor were they financial beneficiaries of the company in any way.

“Neither of my clients is a founder of Radaris, and neither of my clients is the CEOs of Radaris,” Gurvits wrote. “Additionally, presently and going back at least the past 10 years, neither of my clients are (or were) officers or employees of Radaris. Indeed, neither of them even owns (or ever owned) any equity in Radaris. In intentional disregard of these facts, the Article implies that my clients are personally responsible for Radaris’ actions. Therefore, you intentionally caused all negative allegations in the Article made with respect to Radaris to be imputed against my clients personally.”

Dan Lubarsky’s Facebook page, just prior to the March 8 story about Radaris, said he was from Moscow.

We took Mr. Gurvits’ word on the ethnicity of his clients, and adjusted the story to remove a single mention that they were Russian. We did so even though Dan Lubarsky’s own Facebook page said (until recently) that he was from Moscow, Russia.

KrebsOnSecurity asked Mr. Gurvits to explain precisely which other details in the story were incorrect, and replied that we would be happy to update the story with a correction if they could demonstrate any errors of fact or omission.

We also requested specifics about several aspects of the story, such as the identity of the current Radaris CEO — listed on the Radaris website as “Victor K.” Mr. Gurvits replied that Radaris is and always has been based in Ukraine, and that the company’s true founder “Eugene L” is based there.

While Radaris has claimed to have offices in Massachusetts, Cyprus and Latvia, its website has never mentioned Ukraine. Mr. Gurvits has not responded to requests for more information about the identities of “Eugene L” or “Victor K.”

Gurvits said he had no intention of doing anyone’s reporting for them, and that the Lubarskys were going to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story was retracted in full. KrebsOnSecurity replied that journalists often face challenges to things that they report, but it is more than rare for one who makes a challenge to take umbrage at being asked for supporting information.

On June 13, Mr. Gurvits sent another letter (PDF) that continued to claim KrebsOnSecurity was defaming his clients, only this time Gurvits said his clients would be satisfied if KrebsOnSecurity just removed their names from the story.

“Ultimately, my clients don’t care what you say about any of the websites or corporate entities in your Article, as long as you completely remove my clients’ names from the Article and cooperate with my clients to have copies of the Article where my clients’ names appear removed from the Internet,” Mr. Gurvits wrote.

MEET THE FAKE RADARIS CEO

The June 13 letter explained that the name Gary Norden was a pseudonym invented by the Radaris marketing division, but that neither of the Lubarsky brothers were Norden.

This was a startling admission, given that Radaris has quoted the fictitious Gary Norden in press releases published and paid for by Radaris, and in news media stories where the company is explicitly seeking money from investors. In other words, Radaris has been misrepresenting itself to investors from the beginning. Here’s a press release from Radaris that was published on PR Newswire in April 2011:

A press release published by Radaris in 2011 names the CEO of Radaris as Gary Norden, which was a fake name made up by Radaris’ marketing department.

In April 2014, the Boston Business Journal published a story (PDF) about Radaris that extolled the company’s rapid growth and considerable customer base. The story noted that, “to date, the company has raised less than $1 million from Cyprus-based investment company Difive.”

“We live in a world where information becomes much more broad and much more available every single day,” the Boston Business Journal quoted Radaris’ fake CEO Gary Norden, who by then had somehow been demoted from CEO to vice president of business development.

A Boston Business Journal story from April 2014 quotes the fictitious Radaris CEO Gary Norden.

“We decided there needs to be a service that allows for ease of monitoring of information about people,” the fake CEO said. The story went on to say Radaris was seeking to raise between $5 million and $7 million from investors in the ensuing months.

THE BIG LUBARSKY

In his most recent demand letter, Mr. Gurvits helpfully included resumes for both of the Lubarsky brothers.

Gary/Dmitry Lubarsky’s resume states he is the owner of Difive.com, a startup incubator for IT companies. Recall that Difive is the same company mentioned by the fake Radaris CEO in the 2014 Boston Business Journal story, which said Difive was the company’s initial and sole investor.

Difive’s website in 2016 said it had offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Riga (Latvia) and Moscow (nothing in Ukraine). Meanwhile, DomainTools.com reports difive.com was originally registered in 2007 to the fictitious Gary Norden from Massachusetts.

Archived copies of the Difive website from 2017 include a “Portfolio” page indexing all of the companies in which Difive has invested. That list, available here, includes virtually every “Gary Norden” domain name mentioned in my original report, plus a few that escaped notice earlier.

Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was CEO of a people search company called HumanBook. The Wayback machine at archive.org shows the Humanbook domain (humanbook.com) came online around April 2008, when the company was still in “beta” mode.

By August 2008, however, humanbook.com had changed the name advertised on its homepage to Radaris Beta. Eventually, Humanbook simply redirected to radaris.com.

Archive.org’s record of humanbook.com from 2008, just after its homepage changed to Radaris Beta.

Astute readers may notice that the domain radaris.com is not among the companies listed as Difive investments. However, passive domain name system (DNS) records from DomainTools show that between October 2023 and March 2024 radaris.com was hosted alongside all of the other Gary Norden domains at the Internet address range 38.111.228.x.

That address range simultaneously hosted every domain mentioned in this story and in the original March 2024 report as connected to email addresses used by Gary Norden, including radaris.com, radaris.ru, radaris.de, difive.com, privet.ru, blog.ru, comfi.com, phoneowner.com, russianamerica.com, eprofit.com, rehold.com, homeflock.com, humanbook.com and dozens more. A spreadsheet of those historical DNS entries for radaris.com is available here (.csv).

Image: DomainTools.com

The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds just two email addresses ending in difive.com have been exposed in data breaches over the years: dan@difive.com, and gn@difive.com. Presumably, “gn” stands for Gary Norden.

A search on the email address gn@difive.com via the breach tracking service osint.industries reveals this address was used to create an account at Airbnb under the name Gary, with the last four digits of the account’s phone number ending in “0001.”

Constella Intelligence finds gn@difive.com was associated with the Massachusetts number 617-794-0001, which was used to register accounts for “Igor Lybarsky” from Wellesley or Sherborn, Ma. at multiple online businesses, including audiusa.com and the designer eyewear store luxottica.com.

The phone number 617-794-0001 also appears for a “Gary Nard” user at russianamerica.com. Igor Lubarsky’s resume says he was the manager of russianamerica.com.

DomainTools finds 617-794-0001 is connected to registration records for three domains, including paytone.com, a domain that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed. DomainTools also found that number on the registration records for trustoria.com, another major consumer data broker that has an atrocious reputation, according to the Better Business Bureau.

Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was responsible for several international telecommunications services, including the website comfi.com. DomainTools says the phone number connected to that domain — 617-952-4234 — was also used on the registration records for humanbook.net/biz/info/mobi/us, as well as for radaris.me, radaris.in, and radaris.tel.

Two other key domains are connected to that phone number. The first is barsky.com, which is the website for Barsky Estate Realty Trust (PDF), a real estate holding company controlled by the Lubarskys. Naturally, DomainTools finds barsky.com also was registered to a Gary Norden from Massachusetts. But the organization listed in the barsky.com registration records is Comfi Inc., a VOIP communications firm that Igor Lubarsky’s resume says he managed.

The other domain of note is unipointtechnologies.com. Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was the CEO of Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. In 2012, Unipoint was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said the company had failed to apply for a license to provide international telecommunications services.

PATENTLY REMARKABLE

The 2011 Radaris press release quoting their fake CEO Gary Norden said the company had four patents pending from a team of computer science PhDs. According to the resume shared by Mr. Gurvits, Dan Lubarsky has a PhD in computer science.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) says Dan Lubarsky/Lubarski has at least nine technology patents to his name. The fake CEO press release from Radaris mentioning its four patents was published in April 2011. By that time, the PTO says Dan Lubarsky had applied for exactly four patents, including, “System and Method for a Web-Based People Directory.” The first of those patents, published in 2009, is tied to Humanbook.com, the company Dan Lubarsky founded that later changed its name to Radaris.

If the Lubarskys were never involved in Radaris, how do they or their attorney know the inside information that Gary Norden is a fiction of Radaris’ marketing department? KrebsOnSecurity has learned that Mr. Gurvits is the same attorney responding on behalf of Radaris in a lawsuit against the data broker filed earlier this year by Atlas Data Privacy.

Mr. Gurvits also stepped forward as Radaris’ attorney in a class action lawsuit the company lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn’t collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the judge ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed the verdict, arguing that the lawsuit hadn’t named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge ruled in Radaris’ favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. Andtop also operates the aforementioned people-search service Trustoria.

Mr. Gurvits’ most-publicized defamation case was a client named Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology executive whose name appeared in the Steele Dossier. That document included a collection of salacious, unverified information gathered by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign at the direction of former president Donald Trump’s political rivals.

Gubarev, the head of the IT services company XBT Holding and the Florida web hosting firm Webzilla, sued BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele dossier. One of the items in the dossier alleged that XBT/Webzilla and affiliated companies played a key role in the hack of Democratic Party computers in the spring of 2016. The memo alleged Gubarev had been coerced into providing services to Russia’s main domestic security agency, known as the FSB.

In December 2018, a federal judge in Miami ruled in favor of BuzzFeed, saying the publication was protected by the fair report privilege, which gives news organizations latitude in reporting on official government proceedings.

Radaris was originally operated by Bitseller Expert Limited. Who owns Bitseller Expert Limited? A report (PDF) obtained from the Cyprus business registry shows this company lists its director as Pavel Kaydash from Moscow. Mr. Kaydash could not be reached for comment.

The homepage of Stark Industries Solutions.

Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

At least a dozen patriotic Russian hacking groups have been launching DDoS attacks since the start of the war at a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. But by all accounts, few attacks from those gangs have come close to the amount of firepower wielded by a pro-Russia group calling itself “NoName057(16).”

This graphic comes from a recent report from Arbor NETSCOUT about DDoS attacks from Russian hacktivist groups.

As detailed by researchers at Radware, NoName has effectively gamified DDoS attacks, recruiting hacktivists via its Telegram channel and offering to pay people who agree to install a piece of software called DDoSia. That program allows NoName to commandeer the host computers and their Internet connections in coordinated DDoS campaigns, and DDoSia users with the most attacks can win cash prizes.

The NoName DDoS group advertising on Telegram. Image: SentinelOne.com.

A report from the security firm Team Cymru found the DDoS attack infrastructure used in NoName campaigns is assigned to two interlinked hosting providers: MIRhosting and Stark Industries. MIRhosting is a hosting provider founded in The Netherlands in 2004. But Stark Industries Solutions Ltd was incorporated on February 10, 2022, just two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

PROXY WARS

Security experts say that not long after the war started, Stark began hosting dozens of proxy services and free virtual private networking (VPN) services, which are designed to help users shield their Internet usage and location from prying eyes.

Proxy providers allow users to route their Internet and Web browsing traffic through someone else’s computer. From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer.

These services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are also massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

What’s more, many proxy services do not disclose how they obtain access to the proxies they are renting out, and in many cases the access is obtained through the dissemination of malicious software that turns the infected system in a traffic relay — usually unbeknownst to the legitimate owner of the Internet connection. Other proxy services will allow users to make money by renting out their Internet connection to anyone.

Spur.us is a company that tracks VPNs and proxy services worldwide. Spur finds that Stark Industries (AS44477) currently is home to at least 74 VPN services, and 40 different proxy services. As we’ll see in the final section of this story, just one of those proxy networks has over a million Internet addresses worldwide available for rent worldwide.

Raymond Dijkxhoorn operates a hosting firm in The Netherlands called Prolocation. He also co-runs SURBL, an anti-abuse service that flags domains and Internet address ranges that are strongly associated with spam and cybercrime activity, including DDoS.

Dijkxhoorn said last year SURBL heard from multiple people who said they operated VPN services whose web resources were included in SURBL’s block lists.

“We had people doing delistings at SURBL for domain names that were suspended by the registrars,” Dijkhoorn told KrebsOnSecurity. “And at least two of them explained that Stark offered them free VPN services that they were reselling.”

Dijkxhoorn added that Stark Industries also sponsored activist groups from Ukraine.

“How valuable would it be for Russia to know the real IPs from Ukraine’s tech warriors?” he observed.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF BULLETS

Richard Hummel is threat intelligence lead at Arbor NETSCOUT. Hummel said when he considers the worst of all the hosting providers out there today, Stark Industries is consistently near or at the top of that list.

“The reason is we’ve had at least a dozen service providers come to us saying, ‘There’s this network out there inundating us with traffic,'” Hummel said. “And it wasn’t even DDoS attacks. [The systems] on Stark were just scanning these providers so fast it was crashing some of their services.”

Hummel said NoName will typically launch their attacks using a mix of resources from rented from major, legitimate cloud services, and those from so-called “bulletproof” hosting providers like Stark. Bulletproof providers are so named when they earn or cultivate a reputation for ignoring any abuse complaints or police reports about activity on their networks.

Combining bulletproof providers with legitimate cloud hosting, Hummel said, likely makes NoName’s DDoS campaigns more resilient because many network operators will hesitate to be too aggressive in blocking Internet addresses associated with the major cloud services.

“What we typically see here is a distribution of cloud hosting providers and bulletproof hosting providers in DDoS attacks,” he said. “They’re using public cloud hosting providers because a lot of times that’s your first layer of network defense, and because [many companies are wary of] over-blocking access to legitimate cloud resources.”

But even if the cloud provider detects abuse coming from the customer, the provider is probably not going to shut the customer down immediately, Hummel said.

“There is usually a grace period, and even if that’s only an hour or two, you can still launch a large number of attacks in that time,” he said. “And then they just keep coming back and opening new cloud accounts.”

MERCENARIES TEAM

Stark Industries is incorporated at a mail drop address in the United Kingdom. UK business records list an Ivan Vladimirovich Neculiti as the company’s secretary. Mr. Neculiti also is named as the CEO and founder of PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L. (aka Perfect Quality Hosting), a Moldovan company formed in 2019 that lists the same UK mail drop address as Stark Industries.

Ivan Neculiti, as pictured on LinkedIn.

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Neculiti said PQ Hosting established Stark Industries as a “white label” of its brand so that “resellers could distribute our services using our IP addresses and their clients would not have any affairs with PQ Hosting.”

“PQ Hosting is a company with over 1,000+ of [our] own physical servers in 38 countries and we have over 100,000 clients,” he said. “Though we are not as large as Hetzner, Amazon and OVH, nevertheless we are a fast growing company that provides services to tens of thousands of private customers and legal entities.”

Asked about the constant stream of DDoS attacks whose origins have traced back to Stark Industries over the past two years, Neculiti maintained Stark hasn’t received any official abuse reports about attacks coming from its networks.

“It was probably some kind of clever attack that we did not see, I do not rule out this fact, because we have a very large number of clients and our Internet channels are quite large,” he said. “But, in this situation, unfortunately, no one contacted us to report that there was an attack from our addresses; if someone had contacted us, we would have definitely blocked the network data.”

DomainTools.com finds Ivan V. Neculiti was the owner of war[.]md, a website launched in 2008 that chronicled the history of a 1990 armed conflict in Moldova known as the Transnistria War and the Moldo-Russian war.

An ad for war.md, circa 2009.

Transnistria is a breakaway pro-Russian region that declared itself a state in 1990, although it is not internationally recognized. The copyright on that website credits the “MercenarieS TeaM,” which was at one time a Moldovan IT firm. Mr. Neculiti confirmed personally registering this domain.

DON CHICHO & DFYZ

The data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reports that an Ivan V. Neculiti registered multiple online accounts under the email address dfyz_bk@bk.ru. Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows this email address is tied to the username “dfyz” on more than a half-dozen Russian language cybercrime forums since 2008. The user dfyz on Searchengines[.]ru in 2008 asked other forum members to review war.md, and said they were part of the MercenarieS TeaM.

Back then, dfyz was selling “bulletproof servers for any purpose,” meaning the hosting company would willfully ignore abuse complaints or police inquiries about the activity of its customers.

DomainTools reports there are at least 33 domain names registered to dfyz_bk@bk.ru. Several of these domains have Ivan Neculiti in their registration records, including tracker-free.cn, which was registered to an Ivan Neculiti at dfyz_bk@bk.ru and referenced the MercenarieS TeaM in its original registration records.

Dfyz also used the nickname DonChicho, who likewise sold bulletproof hosting services and access to hacked Internet servers. In 2014, a prominent member of the Russian language cybercrime community Antichat filed a complaint against DonChicho, saying this user scammed them and had used the email address dfyz_bk@bk.ru.

The complaint said DonChicho registered on Antichat from the Transnistria Internet address 84.234.55[.]29. Searching this address in Constella reveals it has been used to register just five accounts online that have been created over the years, including one at ask.ru, where the user registered with the email address neculitzy1@yandex.ru. Constella also returns for that email address a user by the name “Ivan” at memoraleak.com and 000webhost.com.

Constella finds that the password most frequently used by the email address dfyz_bk@bk.ru was “filecast,” and that there are more than 90 email addresses associated with this password. Among them are roughly two dozen addresses with the name “Neculiti” in them, as well as the address support@donservers[.]ru.

Intel 471 says DonChicho posted to several Russian cybercrime forums that support@donservers[.]ru was his address, and that he logged into cybercrime forums almost exclusively from Internet addresses in Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria. A review of DonChicho’s posts shows this person was banned from several forums in 2014 for scamming other users.

Cached copies of DonChicho’s vanity domain (donchicho[.]ru) show that in 2009 he was a spammer who peddled knockoff prescription drugs via Rx-Promotion, once one of the largest pharmacy spam moneymaking programs for Russian-speaking affiliates.

Mr. Neculiti told KrebsOnSecurity he has never used the nickname DonChicho.

“I may assure you that I have no relation to DonChicho nor to his bulletproof servers,” he said.

Below is a mind map that shows the connections between the accounts mentioned above.

A mind map tracing the history of the user Dfyz. Click to enlarge.

Earlier this year, NoName began massively hitting government and industry websites in Moldova. A new report from Arbor Networks says the attacks began around March 6, when NoName alleged the government of Moldova was “craving for Russophobia.”

“Since early March, more than 50 websites have been targeted, according to posted ‘proof’ by the groups involved in attacking the country,” Arbor’s ASERT Team wrote. “While NoName seemingly initiated the ramp of attacks, a host of other DDoS hacktivists have joined the fray in claiming credit for attacks across more than 15 industries.”

CORRECTIV ACTION

The German independent news outlet Correctiv.org last week published a scathing investigative report on Stark Industries and MIRhosting, which notes that Ivan Neculiti operates his hosting companies with the help of his brother, Yuri.

Image credit: correctiv.org.

The report points out that Stark Industries continues to host a Russian disinformation news outlet called “Recent Reliable News” (RRN) that was sanctioned by the European Union in 2023 for spreading links to propaganda blogs and fake European media and government websites.

“The website was not running on computers in Moscow or St. Petersburg until recently, but in the middle of the EU, in the Netherlands, on the computers of the Neculiti brothers,” Correctiv reporters wrote.

“After a request from this editorial team, a well-known service was installed that hides the actual web host,” the report continues. “Ivan Neculiti announced that he had blocked the associated access and server following internal investigations. “We very much regret that we are only now finding out that one of our customers is a sanctioned portal,” said the company boss. However, RRN is still accessible via its servers.”

Correctiv also points to a January 2023 report from the Ukrainian government, which found servers from Stark Industries Solutions were used as part of a cyber attack on the Ukrainian news agency “Ukrinform”. Correctiv notes the notorious hacker group Sandworm — an advanced persistent threat (APT) group operated by a cyberwarfare unit of Russia’s military intelligence service — was identified by Ukrainian government authorities as responsible for that attack.

PEACE HOSTING?

Public records indicate MIRhosting is based in The Netherlands and is operated by 37-year old Andrey Nesterenko, whose personal website says he is an accomplished concert pianist who began performing publicly at a young age.

DomainTools says mirhosting[.]com is registered to Mr. Nesterenko and to Innovation IT Solutions Corp, which lists addresses in London and in Nesterenko’s stated hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

This is interesting because according to the book Inside Cyber Warfare by Jeffrey Carr, Innovation IT Solutions Corp. was responsible for hosting StopGeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Responding to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Mr. Nesterenko said he couldn’t say whether his network had ever hosted the StopGeorgia website back in 2008 because his company didn’t keep records going back that far. But he said Stark Industries Solutions is indeed one of MIRhsoting’s colocation customers.

“Our relationship is purely provider-customer,” Nesterenko said. “They also utilize multiple providers and data centers globally, so connecting them directly to MIRhosting overlooks their broader network.”

“We take any report of malicious activity seriously and are always open to information that can help us identify and prevent misuse of our infrastructure, whether involving Stark Industries or any other customer,” Nesterenko continued. “In cases where our services are exploited for malicious purposes, we collaborate fully with Dutch cyber police and other relevant authorities to investigate and take appropriate measures. However, we have yet to receive any actionable information beyond the article itself, which has not provided us with sufficient detail to identify or block malicious actors.”

In December 2022, security firm Recorded Future profiled the phishing and credential harvesting infrastructure used for Russia-aligned espionage operations by a group dubbed Blue Charlie (aka TAG-53), which has targeted email accounts of nongovernmental organizations and think tanks, journalists, and government and defense officials.

Recorded Future found that virtually all the Blue Charlie domains existed in just ten different ISPs, with a significant concentration located in two networks, one of which was MIRhosting. Both Microsoft and the UK government assess that Blue Charlie is linked to the Russian threat activity groups variously known as Callisto Group, COLDRIVER, and SEABORGIUM.

Mr. Nesterenko took exception to Recorded Future’s report.

“We’ve discussed its contents with our customer, Stark Industries,” he said. “We understand that they have initiated legal proceedings against the website in question, as they firmly believe that the claims made are inaccurate.”

Recorded Future said they updated their story with comments from Mr. Nesterenko, but that they stand by their reporting.

Mr. Nesterenko’s LinkedIn profile says he was previously the foreign region sales manager at Serverius-as, a hosting company in The Netherlands that remains in the same data center as MIRhosting.

In February, the Dutch police took 13 servers offline that were used by the infamous LockBit ransomware group, which had originally bragged on its darknet website that its home base was in The Netherlands. Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the servers seized by the Dutch police were located in Serverius’ data center in Dronten, which is also shared by MIRhosting.

Serverius-as did not respond to requests for comment. Nesterenko said MIRhosting does use one of Serverius’s data centers for its operations in the Netherlands, alongside two other data centers, but that the recent incident involving the seizure of servers has no connection to MIRhosting.

“We are legally prohibited by Dutch law and police regulations from sharing information with third parties regarding any communications we may have had,” he said.

A February 2024 report from security firm ESET found Serverius-as systems were involved in a series of targeted phishing attacks by Russia-aligned groups against Ukrainian entities throughout 2023. ESET observed that after the spearphishing domains were no longer active, they were converted to promoting rogue Internet pharmacy websites.

PEERING INTO THE VOID

A review of the Internet address ranges recently added to the network operated by Stark Industries Solutions offers some insight into its customer base, usage, and maybe even true origins. Here is a snapshot (PDF) of all Internet address ranges announced by Stark Industries so far in the month of May 2024 (this information was graciously collated by the network observability platform Kentik.com).

Those records indicate that the largest portion of the IP space used by Stark is in The Netherlands, followed by Germany and the United States. Stark says it is connected to roughly 4,600 Internet addresses that currently list their ownership as Comcast Cable Communications.

A review of those address ranges at spur.us shows all of them are connected to an entity called Proxyline, which is a sprawling proxy service based in Russia that currently says it has more than 1.6 million proxies globally that are available for rent.

Proxyline dot net.

Reached for comment, Comcast said the Internet address ranges never did belong to Comcast, so it is likely that Stark has been fudging the real location of its routing announcements in some cases.

Stark reports that it has more than 67,000 Internet addresses at Santa Clara, Calif.-based EGIhosting. Spur says the Stark addresses involving EGIhosting all map to Proxyline as well. EGIhosting did not respond to requests for comment.

EGIhosting manages Internet addresses for the Cyprus-based hosting firm ITHOSTLINE LTD (aka HOSTLINE-LTD), which is represented throughout Stark’s announced Internet ranges. Stark says it has more than 21,000 Internet addresses with HOSTLINE. Spur.us finds Proxyline addresses are especially concentrated in the Stark ranges labeled ITHOSTLINE LTD, HOSTLINE-LTD, and Proline IT.

Stark’s network list includes approximately 21,000 Internet addresses at Hockessin, De. based DediPath, which abruptly ceased operations without warning in August 2023. According to a phishing report released last year by Interisle Consulting, DediPath was the fourth most common source of phishing attacks in the year ending Oct. 2022. Spur.us likewise finds that virtually all of the Stark address ranges marked “DediPath LLC” are tied to Proxyline.

Image: Interisle Consulting.

A large number of the Internet address ranges announced by Stark in May originate in India, and the names that are self-assigned to many of these networks indicate they were previously used to send large volumes of spam for herbal medicinal products, with names like HerbalFarm, AdsChrome, Nutravo, Herbzoot and Herbalve.

The anti-spam organization SpamHaus reports that many of the Indian IP address ranges are associated with known “snowshoe spam,” a form of abuse that involves mass email campaigns spread across several domains and IP addresses to weaken reputation metrics and avoid spam filters.

It’s not clear how much of Stark’s network address space traces its origins to Russia, but big chunks of it recently belonged to some of the oldest entities on the Russian Internet (a.k.a. “Runet”).

For example, many Stark address ranges were most recently assigned to a Russian government entity whose full name is the “Federal State Autonomous Educational Establishment of Additional Professional Education Center of Realization of State Educational Policy and Informational Technologies.”

A review of Internet address ranges adjacent to this entity reveals a long list of Russian government organizations that are part of the Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation. Wikipedia says the Federal Guard Service is a Russian federal government agency concerned with tasks related to protection of several high-ranking state officials, including the President of Russia, as well as certain federal properties. The agency traces its origins to the USSR’s Ninth Directorate of the KGB, and later the presidential security service.

Stark recently announced the address range 213.159.64.0/20 from April 27 to May 1, and this range was previously assigned to an ancient ISP in St. Petersburg, RU called the Computer Technologies Institute Ltd.

According to a post on the Russian language webmaster forum searchengines[.]ru, the domain for Computer Technologies Institute — ctinet[.]ru — is the seventh-oldest domain in the entire history of the Runet.

Curiously, Stark also lists large tracts of Internet addresses (close to 48,000 in total) assigned to a small ISP in Kharkiv, Ukraine called NetAssist. Reached via email, the CEO of NetAssist Max Tulyev confirmed his company provides a number of services to PQ Hosting.

“We colocate their equipment in Warsaw, Madrid, Sofia and Thessaloniki, provide them IP transit and IPv4 addresses,” Tulyev said. “For their size, we receive relatively low number of complains to their networks. I never seen anything about their pro-Russian activity or support of Russian hackers. It is very interesting for me to see proofs of your accusations.”

Spur.us mapped the entire infrastructure of Proxyline, and found more than one million proxies across multiple providers, but by far the biggest concentration was at Stark Industries Solutions. The full list of Proxyline address ranges (.CSV) shows two other ISPs appear repeatedly throughout the list. One is Kharkiv, Ukraine based ITL LLC, also known as Information Technology Laboratories Group, and Integrated Technologies Laboratory.

The second is a related hosting company in Miami, called Green Floid LLC. Green Floid featured in a 2017 scoop by CNN, which profiled the company’s owner and quizzed him about Russian troll farms using proxy networks on Green Floid and its parent firm ITL to mask disinformation efforts tied to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). At the time, the IRA was using Facebook and other social media networks to spread videos showing police brutality against African Americans in an effort to encourage protests across the United States.

Last week, the United States joined the U.K. and Australia in sanctioning and charging a Russian man named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the leader of the infamous LockBit ransomware group. LockBit’s leader “LockBitSupp” claims the feds named the wrong guy, saying the charges don’t explain how they connected him to Khoroshev. This post examines the activities of Khoroshev’s many alter egos on the cybercrime forums, and tracks the career of a gifted malware author who has written and sold malicious code for the past 14 years.

Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev. Image: treasury.gov.

On May 7, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Khoroshev on 26 criminal counts, including extortion, wire fraud, and conspiracy. The government alleges Khoroshev created, sold and used the LockBit ransomware strain to personally extort more than $100 million from hundreds of victim organizations, and that LockBit as a group extorted roughly half a billion dollars over four years.

Federal investigators say Khoroshev ran LockBit as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation, wherein he kept 20 percent of any ransom amount paid by a victim organization infected with his code, with the remaining 80 percent of the payment going to LockBit affiliates responsible for spreading the malware.

Financial sanctions levied against Khoroshev by the U.S. Department of the Treasury listed his known email and street address (in Voronezh, in southwest Russia), passport number, and even his tax ID number (hello, Russian tax authorities). The Treasury filing says Khoroshev used the emails sitedev5@yandex.ru, and khoroshev1@icloud.com.

According to DomainTools.com, the address sitedev5@yandex.ru was used to register at least six domains, including a Russian business registered in Khoroshev’s name called tkaner.com, which is a blog about clothing and fabrics.

A search at the breach-tracking service Constella Intelligence on the phone number in Tkaner’s registration records  — 7.9521020220 — brings up multiple official Russian government documents listing the number’s owner as Dmitri Yurievich Khoroshev.

Another domain registered to that phone number was stairwell[.]ru, which at one point advertised the sale of wooden staircases. Constella finds that the email addresses webmaster@stairwell.ru and admin@stairwell.ru used the password 225948.

DomainTools reports that stairwell.ru for several years included the registrant’s name as “Dmitrij Ju Horoshev,” and the email address pin@darktower.su. According to Constella, this email address was used in 2010 to register an account for a Dmitry Yurievich Khoroshev from Voronezh, Russia at the hosting provider firstvds.ru.

Image: Shutterstock.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 finds that pin@darktower.ru was used by a Russian-speaking member called Pin on the English-language cybercrime forum Opensc. Pin was active on Opensc around March 2012, and authored 13 posts that mostly concerned data encryption issues, or how to fix bugs in code.

Other posts concerned custom code Pin claimed to have written that would bypass memory protections on Windows XP and Windows 7 systems, and inject malware into memory space normally allocated to trusted applications on a Windows machine.

Pin also was active at that same time on the Russian-language security forum Antichat, where they told fellow forum members to contact them at the ICQ instant messenger number 669316.

NEROWOLFE

A search on the ICQ number 669316 at Intel 471 shows that in April 2011, a user by the name NeroWolfe joined the Russian cybercrime forum Zloy using the email address d.horoshev@gmail.com, and from an Internet address in Voronezh, RU.

Constella finds the same password tied to webmaster@stairwell.ru (225948) was used by the email address 3k@xakep.ru, which Intel 471 says was registered to more than a dozen NeroWolfe accounts across just as many Russian cybercrime forums between 2011 and 2015.

NeroWolfe’s introductory post to the forum Verified in Oct. 2011 said he was a system administrator and C++ coder.

“Installing SpyEYE, ZeuS, any DDoS and spam admin panels,” NeroWolfe wrote. This user said they specialize in developing malware, creating computer worms, and crafting new ways to hijack Web browsers.

“I can provide my portfolio on request,” NeroWolfe wrote. “P.S. I don’t modify someone else’s code or work with someone else’s frameworks.”

In April 2013, NeroWolfe wrote in a private message to another Verified forum user that he was selling a malware “loader” program that could bypass all of the security protections on Windows XP and Windows 7.

“The access to the network is slightly restricted,” NeroWolfe said of the loader, which he was selling for $5,000. “You won’t manage to bind a port. However, it’s quite possible to send data. The code is written in C.”

In an October 2013 discussion on the cybercrime forum Exploit, NeroWolfe weighed in on the karmic ramifications of ransomware. At the time, ransomware-as-a-service didn’t exist yet, and many members of Exploit were still making good money from “lockers,” relatively crude programs that locked the user out of their system until they agreed to make a small payment (usually a few hundred dollars via prepaid Green Dot cards).

Lockers, which presaged the coming ransomware scourge, were generally viewed by the Russian-speaking cybercrime forums as harmless moneymaking opportunities, because they usually didn’t seek to harm the host computer or endanger files on the system. Also, there were still plenty of locker programs that aspiring cybercriminals could either buy or rent to make a steady income.

NeroWolfe reminded forum denizens that they were just as vulnerable to ransomware attacks as their would-be victims, and that what goes around comes around.

“Guys, do you have a conscience?,” NeroWolfe wrote. “Okay, lockers, network gopstop aka business in Russian. The last thing was always squeezed out of the suckers. But encoders, no one is protected from them, including the local audience.”

If Khoroshev was ever worried that someone outside of Russia might be able to connect his early hacker handles to his real life persona, that’s not clear from reviewing his history online. In fact, the same email address tied to so many of NeroWolfe’s accounts on the forums — 3k@xakep.ru — was used in 2011 to create an account for a Dmitry Yurevich Khoroshev on the Russian social media network Vkontakte.

NeroWolfe seems to have abandoned all of his forum accounts sometime in 2016. In November 2016, an exploit[.]ru member filed an official complaint against NeroWolfe, saying NeroWolfe had been paid $2,000 to produce custom code but never finished the project and vanished.

It’s unclear what happened to NeroWolfe or to Khoroshev during this time. Maybe he got arrested, or some close associates did. Perhaps he just decided it was time to lay low and hit the reset on his operational security efforts, given his past failures in this regard. It’s also possible NeroWolfe landed a real job somewhere for a few years, fathered a child, and/or had to put his cybercrime career on hold.

PUTINKRAB

Or perhaps Khoroshev saw the coming ransomware industry for the endless pot of gold that it was about to become, and then dedicated himself to working on custom ransomware code. That’s what the government believes.

The indictment against Khoroshev says he used the hacker nickname Putinkrab, and Intel 471 says this corresponds to a username that was first registered across three major Russian cybercrime forums in early 2019.

KrebsOnSecurity could find no obvious connections between Putinkrab and any of Khoroshev’s older identities. However, if Putinkrab was Khoroshev, he would have learned from his past mistakes and started fresh with a new identity (which he did). But also, it is likely the government hasn’t shared all of the intelligence it has collected against him (more on that in a bit).

Putinkrab’s first posts on the Russian cybercrime forums XSS, Exploit and UFOLabs saw this user selling ransomware source code written in C.

A machine-translated ad for ransomware source code from Putinkrab on the Russian language cybercrime forum UFOlabs in 2019. Image: Ke-la.com.

In April 2019, Putkinkrab offered an affiliate program that would run on top of his custom-made ransomware code.

“I want to work for a share of the ransoms: 20/80,” Putinkrab wrote on Exploit. “20 percent is my percentage for the work, you get 80% of the ransoms. The percentage can be reduced up to 10/90 if the volumes are good. But now, temporarily, until the service is fully automated, we are working using a different algorithm.”

Throughout the summer of 2019, Putinkrab posted multiple updates to Exploit about new features being added to his ransomware strain, as well as novel evasion techniques to avoid detection by security tools. He also told forum members he was looking for investors for a new ransomware project based on his code.

In response to an Exploit member who complained that the security industry was making it harder to profit from ransomware, Putinkrab said that was because so many cybercriminals were relying on crappy ransomware code.

“The vast majority of top antiviruses have acquired behavioral analysis, which blocks 95% of crypto-lockers at their root,” Putinkrab wrote. “Cryptolockers made a lot of noise in the press, but lazy system administrators don’t make backups after that. The vast majority of cryptolockers are written by people who have little understanding of cryptography. Therefore, decryptors appear on the Internet, and with them the hope that files can be decrypted without paying a ransom. They just sit and wait. Contact with the owner of the key is lost over time.”

Putinkrab said he had every confidence his ransomware code was a game-changer, and a huge money machine.

“The game is just gaining momentum,” Putinkrab wrote. “Weak players lose and are eliminated.”

The rest of his response was structured like a poem:

“In this world, the strongest survive.
Our life is just a struggle.
The winner will be the smartest,
Who has his head on his shoulders.”

Putinkrab’s final post came on August 23, 2019. The Justice Department says the LockBit ransomware affiliate program was officially launched five months later. From there on out, the government says, Khoroshev adopted the persona of LockBitSupp. In his introductory post on Exploit, LockBit’s mastermind said the ransomware strain had been in development since September 2019.

The original LockBit malware was written in C (a language that NeroWolfe excelled at). Here’s the original description of LockBit, from its maker:

“The software is written in C and Assembler; encryption is performed through the I/O Completion Port; there is a port scanning local networks and an option to find all DFS, SMB, WebDAV network shares, an admin panel in Tor, automatic test decryption; a decryption tool is provided; there is a chat with Push notifications, a Jabber bot that forwards correspondence and an option to terminate services/processes in line which prevent the ransomware from opening files at a certain moment. The ransomware sets file permissions and removes blocking attributes, deletes shadow copies, clears logs and mounts hidden partitions; there is an option to drag-and-drop files/folders and a console/hidden mode. The ransomware encrypts files in parts in various places: the larger the file size, the more parts there are. The algorithms used are AES + RSA.

You are the one who determines the ransom amount after communicating with the victim. The ransom paid in any currency that suits you will be transferred to your wallets. The Jabber bot serves as an admin panel and is used for banning, providing decryption tools, chatting – Jabber is used for absolutely everything.”

CONCLUSION

Does the above timeline prove that NeroWolfe/Khoroshev is LockBitSupp? No. However, it does indicate Khoroshev was for many years deeply invested in countless schemes involving botnets, stolen data, and malware he wrote that others used to great effect. NeroWolfe’s many private messages from fellow forum members confirm this.

NeroWolfe’s specialty was creating custom code that employed novel stealth and evasion techniques, and he was always quick to volunteer his services on the forums whenever anyone was looking help on a malware project that called for a strong C or C++ programmer.

Someone with those qualifications — as well as demonstrated mastery of data encryption and decryption techniques — would have been in great demand by the ransomware-as-a-service industry that took off at around the same time NeroWolfe vanished from the forums.

Someone like that who is near or at the top of their game vis-a-vis their peers does not simply walk away from that level of influence, community status, and potential income stream unless forced to do so by circumstances beyond their immediate control.

It’s important to note that Putinkrab didn’t just materialize out of thin air in 2019 — suddenly endowed with knowledge about how to write advanced, stealthy ransomware strains. That knowledge clearly came from someone who’d already had years of experience building and deploying ransomware strains against real-life victim organizations.

Thus, whoever Putinkrab was before they adopted that moniker, it’s a safe bet they were involved in the development and use of earlier, highly successful ransomware strains. One strong possible candidate is Cerber ransomware, the most popular and effective affiliate program operating between early 2016 and mid-2017. Cerber thrived because it emerged as an early mover in the market for ransomware-as-a-service offerings.

In February 2024, the FBI seized LockBit’s cybercrime infrastructure on the dark web, following an apparently lengthy infiltration of the group’s operations. The United States has already indicted and sanctioned at least five other alleged LockBit ringleaders or affiliates, so presumably the feds have been able to draw additional resources from those investigations.

Also, it seems likely that the three national intelligence agencies involved in bringing these charges are not showing all of their cards. For example, the Treasury documents on Khoroshev mention a single cryptocurrency address, and yet experts interviewed for this story say there are no obvious clues connecting this address to Khoroshev or Putinkrab.

But given that LockBitSupp has been actively involved in Lockbit ransomware attacks against organizations for four years now, the government almost certainly has an extensive list of the LockBit leader’s various cryptocurrency addresses — and probably even his bank accounts in Russia. And no doubt the money trail from some of those transactions was traceable to its ultimate beneficiary (or close enough).

Not long after Khoroshev was charged as the leader of LockBit, a number of open-source intelligence accounts on Telegram began extending the information released by the Treasury Department. Within hours, these sleuths had unearthed more than a dozen credit card accounts used by Khoroshev over the past decade, as well as his various bank account numbers in Russia.

The point is, this post is based on data that’s available to and verifiable by KrebsOnSecurity. Woodward & Bernstein’s source in the Watergate investigation — Deep Throat — famously told the two reporters to “follow the money.” This is always excellent advice. But these days, that can be a lot easier said than done — especially with people who a) do not wish to be found, and b) don’t exactly file annual reports.

For nearly a dozen years, residents of South Carolina have been kept in the dark by state and federal investigators over who was responsible for hacking into the state’s revenue department in 2012 and stealing tax and bank account information for 3.6 million people. The answer may no longer be a mystery: KrebsOnSecurity found compelling clues suggesting the intrusion was carried out by the same Russian hacking crew that stole of millions of payment card records from big box retailers like Home Depot and Target in the years that followed.

Questions about who stole tax and financial data on roughly three quarters of all South Carolina residents came to the fore last week at the confirmation hearing of Mark Keel, who was appointed in 2011 by Gov. Nikki Haley to head the state’s law enforcement division. If approved, this would Keel’s third six-year term in that role.

The Associated Press reports that Keel was careful not to release many details about the breach at his hearing, telling lawmakers he knows who did it but that he wasn’t ready to name anyone.

“I think the fact that we didn’t come up with a whole lot of people’s information that got breached is a testament to the work that people have done on this case,” Keel asserted.

A ten-year retrospective published in 2022 by The Post and Courier in Columbia, S.C. said investigators determined the breach began on Aug. 13, 2012, after a state IT contractor clicked a malicious link in an email. State officials said they found out about the hack from federal law enforcement on October 10, 2012.

KrebsOnSecurity examined posts across dozens of cybercrime forums around that time, and found only one instance of someone selling large volumes of tax data in the year surrounding the breach date.

On Oct. 7, 2012 — three days before South Carolina officials say they first learned of the intrusion — a notorious cybercriminal who goes by the handle “Rescator” advertised the sale of “a database of the tax department of one of the states.”

“Bank account information, SSN and all other information,” Rescator’s sales thread on the Russian-language crime forum Embargo read. “If you purchase the entire database, I will give you access to it.”

A week later, Rescator posted a similar offer on the exclusive Russian forum Mazafaka, saying he was selling information from a U.S. state tax database, without naming the state. Rescator said the data exposed included employer, name, address, phone, taxable income, tax refund amount, and bank account number.

“There is a lot of information, I am ready to sell the entire database, with access to the database, and in parts,” Rescator told Mazafaka members. “There is also information on corporate taxpayers.”

On Oct. 26, 2012, the state announced the breach publicly. State officials said they were working with investigators from the U.S. Secret Service and digital forensics experts from Mandiant, which produced an incident report (PDF) that was later published by South Carolina Dept. of Revenue. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Secret Service, South Carolina prosecutors, and Mr. Keel’s office. This story will be updated if any of them respond.

On Nov. 18, 2012, Rescator told fellow denizens of the forum Verified he was selling a database of 65,000 records with bank account information from several smaller, regional financial institutions. Rescator’s sales thread on Verified listed more than a dozen database fields, including account number, name, address, phone, tax ID, date of birth, employer and occupation.

Asked to provide more context about the database for sale, Rescator told forum members the database included financial records related to tax filings of a U.S. state. Rescator added that there was a second database of around 80,000 corporations that included social security numbers, names and addresses, but no financial information.

The AP says South Carolina paid $12 million to Experian for identity theft protection and credit monitoring for its residents after the breach.

“At the time, it was one of the largest breaches in U.S. history but has since been surpassed greatly by hacks to Equifax, Yahoo, Home Depot, Target and PlayStation,” the AP’s Jeffrey Collins wrote.

As it happens, Rescator’s criminal hacking crew was directly responsible for the 2013 breach at Target and the 2014 hack of Home Depot. The Target intrusion saw Rescator’s cybercrime shops selling roughly 40 million stolen payment cards, and 56 million cards from Home Depot customers.

Who is Rescator? On Dec. 14, 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published the results of a 10-year investigation into the identity of Rescator, a.k.a. Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, a 36-year-old who lives in Moscow and who recently changed his last name to Lenin.

Mr. Keel’s assertion that somehow the efforts of South Carolina officials following the breach may have lessened its impact on citizens seems unlikely. The stolen tax and financial data appears to have been sold openly on cybercrime forums by one of the Russian underground’s most aggressive and successful hacking crews.

While there are no indications from reviewing forum posts that Rescator ever sold the data, his sales threads came at a time when the incidence of tax refund fraud was skyrocketing.

Tax-related identity theft occurs when someone uses a stolen identity and Social Security number (SSN) to file a tax return in that person’s name claiming a fraudulent refund. Victims usually first learn of the crime after having their returns rejected because scammers beat them to it. Even those who are not required to file a return can be victims of refund fraud, as can those who are not actually owed a refund from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

According to a 2013 report from the Treasury Inspector General’s office, the IRS issued nearly $4 billion in bogus tax refunds in 2012, and more than $5.8 billion in 2013. The money largely was sent to people who stole SSNs and other information on U.S. citizens, and then filed fraudulent tax returns on those individuals claiming a large refund but at a different address.

It remains unclear why Shefel has never been officially implicated in the breaches at Target, Home Depot, or in South Carolina. It may be that Shefel has been indicted, and that those indictments remain sealed for some reason. Perhaps prosecutors were hoping Shefel would decide to leave Russia, at which point it would be easier to apprehend him if he believed no one was looking for him.

But all signs are that Shefel is deeply rooted in Russia, and has no plans to leave. In January 2024, authorities in Australia, the United States and the U.K. levied financial sanctions against 33-year-old Russian man Aleksandr Ermakov for allegedly stealing data on 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank.

A week after those sanctions were put in place, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Ermakov, which found that he co-ran a Moscow-based IT security consulting business along with Mikhail Shefel called Shtazi-IT.

A Google-translated version of Shtazi dot ru. Image: Archive.org.