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  • Pharma Wars


    21
    Nov 11

    DDoS Attack on KrebsOnSecurity.com

    Last week, not long after I published the latest installment in my Pharma Wars series, KrebsOnSecurity.com was the target of a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that caused the site to be unavailable for some readers between Nov. 17 and 18. What follows are some details about that attack, and how it compares to previous intimidation attempts.

    The DDoS was caused by incessant, garbage requests from more than 20,000+ PCs around the globe infected with malware  that allows criminals to control them remotely for nefarious purposes. If you’ve noticed that a few of the features on this site haven’t worked as usual these past few days, now you know why. Thanks for your patience.

    I shared the log files of the attack with Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks. Stewart discovered that the botnet responsible for hitting my site appears to have been created with Russkill, a commercial crimeware kit that is sold for a few hundred bucks on the hacker underground. Russkill, sometimes called Dirt Jumper, does its dirty work by forcing infected systems to rapidly request the targeted site’s homepage.

    Stewart said he suspects — but can’t prove – that the control center for this botnet is noteye.biz, based on traffic analysis of Internet addresses in the logs I shared with him.

    “I did not already have [noteye.biz] under monitoring so it is impossible to say for sure what targets were hit in the past,” Stewart wrote in an email. He noted that the same attacker also apparently runs a Dirt Jumper botnet at xzrw1q.com, which also is currently attacking Ukrainian news site genshtab.censor.net.ua, and kidala.info (“kidala” is Russian slang for “criminal,” and kidala.info is a well-known Russian crime forum).

    “According to my logs this botnet did attack your site back in April, so this is some additional circumstantial evidence that suggests the noteye.biz [control network] may have been involved in the recent attack on your site,” Stewart wrote.

    As Stewart notes, this is not the first time my site has been pilloried, although it was arguably the most disruptive. In October 2010, a botnet typically used to spread spam for rogue Internet pharmacies attacked krebsonsecurity.com, using a hacked Linux server at a research lab at Microsoft, of all places.

    I’ve spoken at more than a dozen events this year, and the same question nearly always comes up: Do you ever get threatened or attacked? For the most part, the majority of the threats or intimidation attempts have been light-hearted.

    Yes, occasionally crooks in the underground will get a bit carried away – as in these related threads from an exclusive crime forum, where I am declared the “enemy of carding;” or in the love I received from the guys at Crutop.nu, a major Russian adult Webmaster forum (the site now lives at Crutop.eu).

    Continue reading →


    17
    Nov 11

    Pharma Wars: The Price of (in)Justice

    I spoke this week at Govcert 2011, a security conference in Rotterdam.  The talk drew heavily on material from my Pharma Wars series, about the alleged proprietors of two competing rogue Internet pharmacies who sought to destroy the others’ reputation and business and ended up succeeding on both counts. Here is the latest installment.

    For those who haven’t been following along, I’ve put together a cheat sheet on the main players, the back story and the conflict. Click here to skip this section.

    Actors

    Pavel Vrublevsky: Co-founder and Former chief executive officer of ChronoPay, until recently a major processor of electronic payments in Russia. Vrublevsky has been accused of running an illegal business, a rogue Internet pharmacy affiliate program called Rx-Promotion, and is currently in prison awaiting trial on unrelated cybercrime charges. Known to business partners as “Red” or “RedEye.”

    Igor Gusev: Co-founded ChronoPay with Vrublevsky in 2003. Had a falling out with Vrublevsky in 2005, left ChronoPay and started the Internet pharmacy affiliate programs GlavMed and SpamIt. The latter was closed in Sept. 2010, and Gusev has been charged with running an illegal business. He is still at large.

    Dmitry Stupin: Gusev’s right-hand man. Helped to build SpamIt and GlavMed. The logs below are from a set of logs leaked to several download sites that contain thousands of conversations between Stupin and Gusev. The logs were obtained shortly after the police detained Stupin as part of the criminal investigation into Gusev.

    Conflict: Two former business partners-turned-competitors try to sabotage each others’ business and to get the other arrested.

    The Conversation

    The conversation below takes place between Feb. 21 and 23, 2010, and is a chat log between Gusev and Stupin. Gusev already knows there are plans to file criminal charges against him, which indeed come just seven months after this conversation was recorded. The two are discussing plans to pay more than $1.5 million to politicians and law enforcement to obtain a criminal prosecution of Vrublevsky.

    Several attendees at Govcert 2011 asked about the likelihood of Vrublevsky serving time, if convicted. This chat may provide a clue. In the middle of the following conversation, Gusev says he has secured promises that if arrested, Vrublevsky “would remain in prison and would not be able to pay his way out,” Gusev wrote. “He is going to lose a large portion of his business and will be left with no money to fight the war.”

    Continue reading →


    10
    Nov 11

    Rove Digital Was Core ChronoPay Shareholder

    Rove Digital, the company run by six men who were arrested in Estonia this week for allegedly infecting four million PCs worldwide with malware, was an early investor in ChronoPay, a major Russian payment processing firm whose principal founder Pavel Vrublevsky also is now in prison and awaiting trial on cyber crime charges, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

    Estonian authorities on Tuesday arrested Rove Digital founder Vladimir Tsastsin, 31, along with five other Estonian nationals indicted on charges of running a sophisticated click fraud scheme. Yesterday’s blog post details Tsastsin’s criminal history, and his stewardship over Rove and a sister firm, EstDomains.. Today’s post will reveal how Tsastsin and his company were closely allied with and early investors in ChronoPay, and how that relationship unraveled over the years.

    In my Pharma War series, I’ve published incorporation documents showing that Igor Gusev, a man currently wanted in Russia on criminal charges of running an illegal business in the notorious pharmacy spam affiliate programs GlavMed and SpamIt, was a co-founder of ChronoPay back in 2003. That series also details how Gusev sold his shares in ChronoPay, and that Vrublevsky later started a competing rogue pharmacy/spam operation called Rx-Promotion.

    A spreadsheet showing front companies tied to ChronoPay.

    It turns out that ChronoPay also had two other major and early investors: Rove Digital and a mysterious entity called Crossfront Limited. This information was included in the massive trove of internal ChronoPay emails and documents that was briefly published online last year and shared with select journalists and law enforcement agencies. Among those documents is a spreadsheet (XLS) listing all of the various shadowy companies allegedly owned and managed by ChronoPay founder Pavel Vrublevsky and associates. It lists ChronoPay B.V., the legal entity in The Netherlands that formed the initial basis of the company, as jointly owned by Gusev’s firm DPNet B.V., Red & Partners (Vrublevsky’s adult Webmaster provider) and Rove Digital OU.

    When I met with Vrublevsky at his offices in Moscow in February of this year, he confirmed that Tsastsin was an old friend and that Rove Digital had been a key shareholder in the company. Further evidence of the connection between ChronoPay and Rove Digital is provided in a series of internal ChronoPay emails from May 2010.

    At that time, ChronoPay was under investigation by Dutch banking regulators who suspected that the company’s intricate network of front companies and financial channels were acting in violation of the country’s anti-money laundering laws. In a tersely-worded email exchange, the Dutch bank  demanded a slew of additional accounting and administrative records, including “all documents that show the structure of ChronoPay BV, such as statutes, incorporation documents, names and addresses of director(s) and shareholders.”

    Continue reading →


    1
    Nov 11

    Jailed ChronoPay Co-Founder Denied Bail

    A Moscow court on Monday denied bail for Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who was charged earlier this year with hiring hackers to launch costly online attacks against his rivals. The denial came even after Vrublevsky apparently admitted his role in the attacks, according to Russian news outlets.

    Vrublevsky in 2004

    Vrublevsky, 32, is probably best known as the co-founder of ChronoPay, a large online payment processor in Russia. He was arrested in June after Russian investigators secured the confession of a man who said he was hired by Vrublevsky to launch a debilitating cyber attack against Assist, a top ChronoPay competitor. The former ChronoPay executive reportedly wanted to sideline rival payment processing firms who were competing for a lucrative contract to process payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline. Aeroflot’s processing systems faltered for several days in the face of the attack, an outage that Aeroflot says cost the company about a million dollars a day.

    Vrublevsky’s lawyers asked the court to release him pending a trial in December — offering to pay 30 million rubles (~ USD $1 million) — but the court denied the request.

    Vrublevsky co-founded ChronoPay in 2003 along with Igor Gusev, another Russian businessman who is facing criminal charges in Russia stemming from his alleged leadership role at GlavMed and SpamIt, sister programs that until recently were the world’s largest rogue online pharmacy affiliate networks. Huge volumes of internal documents leaked from ChronoPay last year indicate Vrublevsky co-ran a competing rogue Internet pharmacy — Rx-Promotion — although Vrublevsky publicly denies this.

    Vrublevsky and Gusev have been locked in an increasingly heated and public battle to ruin the others’ business, a saga that I have chronicled in an ongoing series: Pharma Wars.

    Continue reading →


    12
    Sep 11

    Pharma Wars: Paying for Prosecution

    In June 2011, Russian authorities arrested Pavel Vrublevsky, co-founder of ChronoPay, Russia’s largest processor of online payments, for allegedly hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals. New evidence suggests that Vrublevsky’s arrest was the product of a bribe paid by Igor Gusev, the other co-founder of ChronoPay and a man wanted by Russian police as a spam kingpin.

    Igor Gusev, in an undated photo taken at a family birthday celebration.

    Two years after forming ChronoPay in 2003, Gusev and Vrublevsky parted ways. Not long after that breakup, Gusev would launch Glavmed and its sister program SpamIt, affiliate operations that paid the world’s most notorious spammers millions of dollars to promote rogue Internet pharmacies. Not to be outdone, Vrublevsky started his own rogue pharmacy program, Rx-Promotion, in 2007, contracting with some of the same spammers who were working at Gusev’s businesses.

    By 2009, the former partners were actively trying to scuttle each others’ businesses. Vrublevsky allegedly paid hackers to break into and leak the contact and earnings data from GlavMed/SpamIt. He also reportedly paid a man named Igor “Engel” Artimovich to launch a volley of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against SpamIt.

    Gusev told me he long suspected Artimovich was involved in the attacks, and that he had information that Vrublevsky hired Artimovich to attack ChronoPay’s rivals while they were locked in a competition for a lucrative contract to process online payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s biggest airline.

    Last month, hundreds of chat conversations apparently between Gusev and his right-hand man, Dmitry Stupin, were leaked online. They indicate that Gusev may have caused Vrublevsky’s arrest by paying Russian law enforcement investigators to go after Artimovich.

    Over the past year, Gusev has insisted in numerous phone interviews that the increasingly public conflict between him and Vrublevsky was not a “war,” but more of a personal spat. But if the chat below is accurate, Gusev most certainly viewed the conflict as a war all along.

    The following is from a leaked chat, allegedly between Gusev and Stupin, dated Sept. 26, 2010. The two men had already decided to close SpamIt, and were considering whether to do the same with GlavMed. “Red,” mentioned twice in the discussion below, is a reference to Vrublevsky, also known as “RedEye.”

    Gusev: $2k from HzMedia to China – it’s mine. We also need to send additional money for salaries plus double bonus to Misha (Michael). I have already paid $50k for Engel’s case (20к – forensics, $30к – to speed up the starting of the criminal case)

    Stupin: Why have you paid for Engel’s case ? I was even against paying for the Red’s case. Why pay for Engel’s?  What is the point?

    Gusev: To my mind, you do not fully understand what’s been going on for the last year. Paul has a plan to either throw me into jail or end me. His intentions are totally clear. There are only two choices: 1 – do nothing, and pay nothing to nobody, and at the end either go to jail or keep hiding until all the resources are exhausted; 2 – do the same thing, as he is doing, with the same goal.

    Continue reading →


    30
    Aug 11

    Pharma Wars: Purchasing Protection

    Leaked online chats between the co-owners of the world’s largest pharmacy spam operation reveal the extent to which illicit organizations in Russia purchase political protection, and bribe public officials into initiating or stalling law enforcement investigations.

    Last month, there was a leak of more than four years of chat logs seized by Russian police who had arrested and interrogated Dmitry Stupin, allegedly the co-owner of GlavMed and the now-defunct SpamIt, organizations that paid spammers millions of dollars each month to promote fly-by-night online pharmacies.

    In the the Jan. 9, 2010 chat between Stupin and Igor Gusev, the alleged other owner of GlavMed and SpamIt, Gusev has just learned that he and his operation are under investigation by Russian authorities (Gusev would be formally charged with illegal business activities in October 2010, forcing the closure of SpamIt). Gusev says he may be able to purchase shelter from the charges by funneling money to key Russian politicians who have influence over investigators.

    Specifically, Gusev suggests purchasing a sponsorship of the Volleyball Federation of Russia. The price tag for this is an official sponsorship fee of 10 million rubles (about $350,000 USD), plus $150,000 in cash. The official head of the federation, Nikolai Patrushev, is a powerful man in Russian law enforcement. Patrushev was director of the Russian FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, from 1999 to 2008; he has been secretary of the Security Council of Russia since 2008.

    Sources say it is typical for Russian sport leagues and charities to be used as vehicles for funneling money into the pockets of policymakers. One example comes from a book by Lennart Dahlgren, former head of the Russian division of Swedish furniture maker IKEA. In Despite Absurdity: How I Conquered Russia While It Conquered Me, Dahlgren writes of having to pay bribes of 30 million Rubles ($1 million USD) to Russian charities that helped funnel money to bureaucrats and top officials.

    In this chat, translated from Russian into English, Gusev mentions that a close friend of his family is a director general of the Volleyball Federation;

    Gusev: We have big problems. Register fake mailbox somewhere. I will send you something very important.

    Gusev: Let’s move Jabber to a new server and encrypt it. We’ll have a trusted communication channel. Everything is very bad :(

    Gusev: asdas12334@mail.ru / mgadjadtwa2009. check the e-mail.

    Gusev: Are you reading?

    Stupin: Yes. Do not know what to say.

    Gusev: There is nothing to say. We have only two ways: find someone from law enforcement, pay up and be under protection [or] be placed in jail for 7-9 years and do self-analysis. I have one more way out, but I could not decide regarding it in December, because it was very expensive. It is about 10 million rubles officially and 150K under the table.

    Continue reading →


    22
    Aug 11

    Flashy Cars Got Spam Kingpin Mugged

    A Russian spammer suspected of maintaining the infamous Rustock spam botnet earned millions of dollars blasting junk email for counterfeit Internet pharmacies. Those ill-gotten riches let him buy flashy sports cars, but new information suggests that this attracted the attention of common street thugs who targeted and ultimately mugged the spammer, stealing two of his prized rides.

    BMW 530xi

    In March, I published a story linking the Rustock botnet to a spammer who used the nickname Cosma2k. This individual was consistently one of the top five moneymakers for SpamIt, which, until its closure last fall, paid spammers millions of dollars a year and was the world’s largest distributor of junk mail.

    Earlier this month, someone leaked thousands of online chat logs taken from Dmitry “SaintD” Stupin, a Russian who allegedly ran the day-to-day operations of SpamIt. Those records include numerous chat conversations allegedly between Stupin and a SpamIt affiliate named Cosma.

    In several chats, Cosma muses on what he should do with tens of thousands of compromised but otherwise idle PCs under his control. Throughout the discussions between Stupin and Cosma, it is clear Cosma had access to internal SpamIt resources that other spammers did not, and that he had at least some say in the direction of the business.

    Porsche Cayenne

    In one conversation, dated Oct. 14, 2008, Cosma allegedly tells Stupin that he’s dialed back his public image a few notches, after attracting unwanted attention from other crooks. The conversation below, translated from Russian into English, begins with a request from Cosma to withdraw funds from a SpamIt operating account.

    Cosma: Hey. May I withdraw some money from the account?

    Stupin: Surely you may.

    Stupin: Sorry, I was picking up my car from the service shop.

    Cosma: What got broken?

    Stupin: Someone threw a stone, when the car was parked near home.

    Cosma: Damn. What kind of car?

    Stupin: Volvo.

    Cosma: Fond of safety?

    Stupin: Yes, and I am at ease when I am driving it. It’s a huge difference after Honda :)

    Cosma: I also had enough of expensive rigs. =) They are getting stolen all the time and everyone is looking at you, estimating the score, and then rob you =) I have had such experience =)

    Continue reading →


    19
    Aug 11

    Pharma Wars, Part II

    Earlier this year, Russian police arrested Dmitry Stupin, a man known in hacker circles as “SaintD.” Stupin was long rumored to be the right-hand man of Igor Gusev, the alleged proprietor of GlavMed and SpamIt, two shadowy sister organizations that until this time last year were the largest sources of spam touting rogue Internet pharmacies.

    According to several sources who are familiar with the matter, Russian police pulled Stupin off of a plane before it left Moscow. The police also reportedly took Stupin’s MacBook and copied its contents. The police detained Stupin as part of an investigation into Gusev launched nearly a year ago. Gusev fled his native Moscow last year and has not returned.

    Sometime in the past few days, more than four years’ worth of chat conversations — apparently between Stupin, Gusev and dozens of other GlavMed employees — were leaked. Those conversations offer a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day operations one of the world’s largest cyber criminal organizations.

    The chat logs also catalog the long-running turf battle between Gusev and his former business partner, Pavel Vrublevsky. The two men were co-founders of ChronoPay, one of Russia’s largest online payments processor. Vrublevsky is now in jail awaiting trial on charges of hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals. He also has been identified as a co-owner of a competing rogue pharmacy program, the now-defunct Rx-Promotion.

    I have had numerous interviews with both Gusev and Vrublevsky, both of whom accuse one another of bribing Russian law enforcement officials and politicians to initiate criminal proceedings against each other.

    While there is no direct evidence Vrublevsky paid for a prosecution of Gusev, documents stolen from ChronoPay last year by hackers indicate that the company arranged to pay the salaries of several people on the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC). Those same documents show that Vrublevsky and RAEC members were closely involved in the investigation into Gusev the months and weeks leading up to the official charges against him.

    The chat records between Stupin and Gusev, a tiny sliver of which is translated here from Russian into English, suggest that the two men paid authorities for protection. Contacted via email, Gusev declined to say whether the chats logs were legitimate or comment further, explaining that he was still reviewing the documents.

    “If at least some of these logs are legit, then it means that I was telling the truth about paid criminal case against me initiated by Pavel and his constant connection with investigators,” Gusev said. “I know for sure that Pavel had access to evidences which were gathered by the investigators while he shouldn’t have such access. Before I just didn’t have any proof for this. Now I have.”

    The latest leaked archive contains more than 166 megabytes of chat logs, allegedly between Stupin, Gusev and others. The following chat log is dated Aug. 28, 2010, just days after Vrublevsky leaked the SpamIt and GlavMed affiliate and customer data to U.S. law enforcement agencies. In this conversation, Stupin and Gusev allegedly discuss whether to close SpamIt (SpamIt would be closed a month later). “Red” in the first sentence is a reference to Vrublevsky, well known to use the hacker alias “RedEye.”

    Gusev: It looks like I am in deep shit.  Red gave our database to Americans.

    Dmitriy Stupin

    Stupin: To which Americans?

    Gusev: I can’t tell exactly, yet. Probably to FBI or Secret Service. Have you read on Krebs’ blog about meeting at White House regarding illegal pharmacy problems on the Internet?

    Stupin: No.

    Gusev: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/08/white-house-calls-meeting-on-rogue-online-pharmacies

    Stupin: Maybe you return back to Russia?

    Gusev: I am planning to do that. I am really worried now :(

    Stupin: What about Red? For that money. May be let’s close down everything?

    Gusev: In any case, he will be squished to the end. Everything is done pretty properly. Chronology: – He got thrown out from major banks (Masterbank, Bank Standard and almost from UCS. Too many clients left him. Investigations have been made on data regarding processing. Major issue now – close down the channel via Azerbaijan  (the only place where he can do his own processing and processing for his clients). We need him have an acute issue with money, otherwise he is going to slow down the investigation as much as he can.

    Gusev: Do you think “closing down” will help? Just realize: they have our ENTIRE database… there are 900,000 records. What are we going to do with those? For conviction and 5-year jail time it is only necessary to prove 1 transaction! What is the worst? They combine the sentences and it is possible to get 5 life sentences.

    Stupin: I think yes, we will receive lower priority.

    Gusev: And who is considered a high priority? I am trying to figure out how he gave us up, and do the same for him. There will be 2 cases instead of one.

    Continue reading →


    24
    Jun 11

    ChronoPay Co-Founder Arrested

    Russian authorities on Thursday arrested Pavel Vrublevsky, co-founder of ChronoPay, the country’s largest processor of online payments, for allegedly hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals.

    An undated photo of Vrublevsky

    Vrublevsky, 32, is probably best known as the co-owner of the Rx-Promotion rogue online pharmacy program. His company also consistently has been involved in credit card processing for — and in many cases setting up companies on behalf of — rogue anti-virus or “scareware” scams that use misleading PC security alerts in a bid to frighten people into purchasing worthless security software.

    Russian state-run news organizations are reporting that Vrublevsky was arrested on June 23. Financial Times reporter Joe Menn writes that Vrublevsky was ordered held without bail and a hearing was set for a month’s time.

    Continue reading →


    23
    Jun 11

    Financial Mogul Linked to DDoS Attacks

    Pavel Vrublevsky, the embattled co-founder of ChronoPay — Russia’s largest online payments processor — has reportedly fled the country after the arrest of a suspect who confessed that he was hired by Vrublevsky to launch a debilitating cyber attack against a top ChronoPay competitor.

    KrebsOnSecurity has featured many stories on Vrublevsky’s role as co-founder of the infamous rogue online pharmacy Rx-Promotion, and on his efforts to situate ChronoPay as a major processor for purveyors of “scareware,” software that uses misleading computer virus infection alerts to frighten users into paying for worthless security software.  But these activities have largely gone overlooked by Russian law enforcement officials, possibly because the consequences have not impacted Russian citizens.

    In the summer of 2010, rumors began flying in the Russian blogosphere that Vrublevsky had hired a hacker to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Assist, the company that was processing payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline. Aeroflot had opened its contract for processing payments to competitive bidding, and ChronoPay was competing against Assist and several other processors. The attack on Assist occurred just weeks before Aeroflot was to decide which company would win the contract; it so greatly affected Assist’s operations that the company was unable to process payments for extended periods of time. Citing the downtime in processing as a factor in its decision, Aeroflot ultimately awarded the contract to neither ChronoPay nor Assist, but instead to Alfa-Bank, the largest private bank in Russia.

    According to documents leaked to several Russian security blogs, investigators with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) this month arrested a St. Petersburg man named Igor Artimovich in connection with the attacks. The documents indicate that Artimovich — known in hacker circles by the handle “Engel” — confessed to having used his botnet to attack Assist after receiving instructions and payment from Vrublevsky. The same blogs say Vrublevsky has fled the country. Sources close to the investigation say he is currently in the Maldives. Vrublevsky did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

    "Topol Mailer" botnet interface allegedly used by Artimovich.

    The allegations against Artimovich and Vrublevsky were supported by evidence collected by Russian computer forensics firm Group-IB, which said it assisted the FSB with the investigation. Group-IB presented detailed information on the malware and control servers used to control more than 10,000 infected PCs, and shared with investigators screen shots of the botnet control panel (pictured at left) allegedly used to coordinate the DDoS attack against Assist. Group-IB said Artimovich’s botnet also was used to attack several rogue pharmacy programs that were competing with Rx-Promotion, including Glavmed and Spamit (these attacks also were observed by security firm SecureWorks in February).

    This DDoS saga is the latest chapter in a fascinating drama playing out between the two largest rogue Internet pharmacies: Vrublevsky’s Rx-Promotion and Glavmed (a.k.a. “Spamit”), a huge pharma affiliate program run by Igor Gusev, the man who co-founded ChronoPay with Vrublevsky in 2003. Continue reading →