Category: Interisle Consulting Group

One of the most notorious providers of abuse-friendly “bulletproof” web hosting for cybercriminals has started routing its operations through networks run by the Russian antivirus and security firm Kaspersky Lab, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Security experts say the Russia-based service provider Prospero OOO (the triple O is the Russian version of “LLC”) has long been a persistent source of malicious software, botnet controllers, and a torrent of phishing websites. Last year, the French security firm Intrinsec detailed Prospero’s connections to bulletproof services advertised on Russian cybercrime forums under the names Securehost and BEARHOST.

The bulletproof hosting provider BEARHOST. This screenshot has been machine-translated from Russian. Image: Ke-la.com.

Bulletproof hosts are so named when they earn or cultivate a reputation for ignoring legal demands and abuse complaints. And BEARHOST has been cultivating its reputation since at least 2019.

“If you need a server for a botnet, for malware, brute, scan, phishing, fakes and any other tasks, please contact us,” BEARHOST’s ad on one forum advises. “We completely ignore all abuses without exception, including SPAMHAUS and other organizations.”

Intrinsec found Prospero has courted some of Russia’s nastiest cybercrime groups, hosting control servers for multiple ransomware gangs over the past two years. Intrinsec said its analysis showed Prospero frequently hosts malware operations such as SocGholish and GootLoader, which are spread primarily via fake browser updates on hacked websites and often lay the groundwork for more serious cyber intrusions — including ransomware.

A fake browser update page pushing mobile malware. Image: Intrinsec.

BEARHOST prides itself on the ability to evade blocking by Spamhaus, an organization that many Internet service providers around the world rely on to help identify and block sources of malware and spam. Earlier this week, Spamhaus said it noticed that Prospero was suddenly connecting to the Internet by routing through networks operated by Kaspersky Lab in Moscow.

Kaspersky did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Kaspersky began selling antivirus and security software in the United States in 2005, and the company’s malware researchers have earned accolades from the security community for many important discoveries over the years. But in September 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) barred U.S. federal agencies from using Kaspersky software, mandating its removal within 90 days.

Cybersecurity reporter Kim Zetter notes that DHS didn’t cite any specific justification for its ban in 2017, but media reports quoting anonymous government officials referenced two incidents. Zetter wrote:

According to one story, an NSA contractor developing offensive hacking tools for the spy agency had Kaspersky software installed on his home computer where he was developing the tools, and the software detected the source code as malicious code and extracted it from his computer, as antivirus software is designed to do. A second story claimed that Israeli spies caught Russian government hackers using Kaspersky software to search customer systems for files containing U.S. secrets.

Kaspersky denied that anyone used its software to search for secret information on customer machines and said that the tools on the NSA worker’s machine were detected in the same way that all antivirus software detects files it deems suspicious and then quarantines or extracts them for analysis. Once Kaspersky discovered that the code its antivirus software detected on the NSA worker’s machine were not malicious programs but source code in development by the U.S. government for its hacking operations, CEO Eugene Kaspersky says he ordered workers to delete the code.

Last year, the U.S. Commerce Department banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the U.S. effective July 20, 2024. U.S. officials argued the ban was needed because Russian law requires domestic companies to cooperate in all official investigations, and thus the Russian government could force Kaspersky to secretly gather intelligence on its behalf.

Phishing data gathered last year by the Interisle Consulting Group ranked hosting networks by their size and concentration of spambot hosts, and found Prospero had a higher spam score than any other provider by far.

AS209030, owned by Kaspersky Lab, is providing connectivity to the bulletproof host Prospero (AS200593). Image: cidr-report.org.

It remains unclear why Kaspersky is providing transit to Prospero. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, said routing records show the relationship between Prospero and Kaspersky started at the beginning of December 2024.

Madory said Kaspersky’s network appears to be hosting several financial institutions, including Russia’s largest — Alfa-Bank. Kaspersky sells services to help protect customers from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and Madory said it could be that Prospero is simply purchasing that protection from Kaspersky.

But if that is the case, it doesn’t make the situation any better, said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at the security firm Silent Push.

“In some ways, providing DDoS protection to a well-known bulletproof hosting provider may be even worse than just allowing them to connect to the rest of the Internet over your infrastructure,” Edwards said.

The Chinese company in charge of handing out domain names ending in “.top” has been given until mid-August 2024 to show that it has put in place systems for managing phishing reports and suspending abusive domains, or else forfeit its license to sell domains. The warning comes amid the release of new findings that .top was the most common suffix in phishing websites over the past year, second only to domains ending in “.com.”

Image: Shutterstock.

On July 16, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sent a letter to the owners of the .top domain registry. ICANN has filed hundreds of enforcement actions against domain registrars over the years, but this is thought to be the first in which ICANN has singled out a domain registry responsible for maintaining an entire top-level domain (TLD).

Among other reasons, the missive chided the registry for failing to respond to reports about phishing attacks involving .top domains.

“Based on the information and records gathered through several weeks, it was determined that .TOP Registry does not have a process in place to promptly, comprehensively, and reasonably investigate and act on reports of DNS Abuse,” the ICANN letter reads (PDF).

ICANN’s warning redacted the name of the recipient, but records show the .top registry is operated by a Chinese entity called Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co. Ltd. Representatives for the company have not responded to requests for comment.

Domains ending in .top were represented prominently in a new phishing report released today by the Interisle Consulting Group, which sources phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus.

Interisle’s newest study examined nearly two million phishing attacks in the last year, and found that phishing sites accounted for more than four percent of all new .top domains between May 2023 and April 2024. Interisle said .top has roughly 2.76 million domains in its stable, and that more than 117,000 of those were phishing sites in the past year.

Source: Interisle Consulting Group.

ICANN said its review was based on information collected and studied about .top domains over the past few weeks. But the fact that high volumes of phishing sites are being registered through Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co Ltd. is hardly a new trend.

For example, more than 10 years ago the same Chinese registrar was the fourth most common source of phishing websites, as tracked by the APWG. Bear in mind that the APWG report excerpted below was published more than a year before Jiangsu Bangning received ICANN approval to introduce and administer the new .top registry.

Source: APWG phishing report from 2013, two years before .top came into being.

A fascinating new wrinkle in the phishing landscape is the growth in scam pages hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized data storage and delivery network that is based on peer-to-peer networking. According to Interisle, the use of IPFS to host and launch phishing attacks — which can make phishing sites more difficult to take down — increased a staggering 1,300 percent, to roughly 19,000 phishing sites reported in the last year.

Last year’s report from Interisle found that domain names ending in “.us” — the top-level domain for the United States — were among the most prevalent in phishing scams. While .us domains are not even on the Top 20 list of this year’s study, “.com” maintained its perennial #1 spot as the largest source of phishing domains overall.

A year ago, the phishiest domain registrar by far was Freenom, a now-defunct registrar that handed out free domains in several country-code TLDs, including .tk, .ml, .ga and .cf. Freenom went out of business after being sued by Meta, which alleged Freenom ignored abuse complaints while monetizing traffic to abusive domains.

Following Freenom’s demise, phishers quickly migrated to other new low-cost TLDs and to services that allow anonymous, free domain registrations — particularly subdomain services. For example, Interisle found phishing attacks involving websites created on Google’s blogspot.com skyrocketed last year more than 230 percent. Other subdomain services that saw a substantial growth in domains registered by phishers include weebly.com, github.io, wix.com, and ChangeIP, the report notes.

Source: Interisle Consulting.

Interisle Consulting partner Dave Piscitello said ICANN could easily send similar warning letters to at least a half-dozen other top-level domain registries, noting that spammers and phishers tend to cycle through the same TLDs periodically — including .xyz, .info, .support and .lol, all of which saw considerably more business from phishers after Freenom’s implosion.

Piscitello said domain registrars and registries could significantly reduce the number of phishing sites registered through their services just by flagging customers who try to register huge volumes of domains at once. Their study found that at least 27% of the domains used for phishing were registered in bulk — i.e. the same registrant paid for hundreds or thousands of domains in quick succession.

The report includes a case study in which a phisher this year registered 17,562 domains over the course of an eight-hour period — roughly 38 domains per minute — using .lol domains that were all composed of random letters.

ICANN tries to resolve contract disputes privately with the registry and registrar community, and experts say the nonprofit organization usually only publishes enforcement letters when the recipient is ignoring its private notices. Indeed, ICANN’s letter notes Jiangsu Bangning didn’t even open its emailed notifications. It also cited the registry for falling behind in its ICANN membership fees.

With that in mind, a review of ICANN’s public enforcement activity suggests two trends: One is that there have been far fewer public compliance and enforcement actions in recent years — even as the number of new TLDs has expanded dramatically.

The second is that in a majority of cases, the failure of a registry or registrar to pay its annual ICANN membership fees was cited as a reason for a warning letter. A review of nearly two dozen enforcement letters ICANN has sent to domain registrars since 2022 shows that failure to pay dues was cited as a reason (or the reason) for the violation at least 75 percent of the time.

Piscitello, a former ICANN board member, said nearly all breach notices sent out while he was at ICANN were because the registrar owed money.

“I think the rest is just lipstick to suggest that ICANN’s on top of DNS Abuse,” Piscitello said.

KrebsOnSecurity has sought comment from ICANN and will update this story if they respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NTIA has not yet responded to requests for comment.

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

The number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.

The volume of phishing websites registered through Freenom dropped considerably since the registrar was sued by Meta. Image: Interisle Consulting.

Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called “country code top level domains” (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau.

Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, but the registrar also reserves the right to take back free domains at any time, and to divert traffic to other sites — including adult websites. And there are countless reports from Freenom users who’ve seen free domains removed from their control and forwarded to other websites.

By the time Meta initially filed its lawsuit in December 2022, Freenom was the source of well more than half of all new phishing domains coming from country-code top-level domains. Meta initially asked a court to seal its case against Freenom, but that request was denied. Meta withdrew its December 2022 lawsuit and re-filed it in March 2023.

“The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers’ identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes,” Meta’s complaint charged. “Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers.”

Meta pointed to research from Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered in 2021 and again last year that the five ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up half of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.

Interisle partner Dave Piscitello said something remarkable has happened in the months since the Meta lawsuit.

“We’ve observed a significant decline in phishing domains reported in the Freenom commercialized ccTLDs in months surrounding the lawsuit,” Piscitello wrote on Mastodon. “Responsible for over 60% of phishing domains reported in November 2022, Freenom’s percentage has dropped to under 15%.”

Interisle collects data from 12 major blocklists for spam, malware, and phishing, and it receives phishing-specific data from Spamhaus, Phishtank, OpenPhish and the APWG Ecrime Exchange. The company publishes historical data sets quarterly, both on malware and phishing.

Piscitello said it’s too soon to tell the full impact of the Freenom lawsuit, noting that Interisle’s sources of spam and phishing data all have different policies about when domains are removed from their block lists.

“One of the things we don’t have visibility into is how each of the blocklists determine to remove a URL from their lists,” he said. “Some of them time out [listed domains] after 14 days, some do it after 30, and some keep them forever.”

Freenom did not respond to requests for comment.

This is the second time in as many years that a lawsuit by Meta against a domain registrar has disrupted the phishing industry. In March 2020, Meta sued domain registrar giant Namecheap, alleging cybersquatting and trademark infringement.

The two parties settled the matter in April 2022. While the terms of that settlement have not been disclosed, new phishing domains registered through Namecheap declined more than 50 percent the following quarter, Interisle found.

Phishing attacks using websites registered through Namecheap, before and after the registrar settled a lawsuit with Meta. Image: Interisle Consulting.

Unfortunately, the lawsuits have had little effect on the overall number of phishing attacks and phishing-related domains, which have steadily increased in volume over the years.  Piscitello said the phishers tend to gravitate toward registrars that offer the least resistance and lowest price per domain. And with new top-level domains constantly being introduced, there is rarely a shortage of super low-priced domains.

“The abuse of a new top-level domain is largely the result of one registrar’s portfolio,” Piscitello told KrebsOnSecurity. “Alibaba or Namecheap or another registrar will run a promotion for a cheap domain, and then we’ll see flocking and migration of the phishers to that TLD. It’s like strip mining, where they’ll buy hundreds or thousands of domains, use those in a campaign, exhaust that TLD and then move on to another provider.”

Piscitello said despite the steep drop in phishing domains coming out of Freenom, the alternatives available to phishers are many. After all, there are more than 2,000 accredited domain registrars, not to mention dozens of services that let anyone set up a website for free without even owning a domain.

“There is no evidence that the trend line is even going to level off,” he said. “I think what the Meta lawsuit tells us is that litigation is like giving someone a standing eight count. It temporarily disrupts a process. And in that sense, litigation appears to be working.”