Notorious Malware, Spam Host “Prospero” Moves to Kaspersky Lab

February 28, 2025
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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.

Update, March 1, 9:43 a.m. ET: In a written statement, Kaspersky said it is aware of the public claim about the company allegedly providing services to a “bulletproof” web hosting provider. Here is their full statement:

“Kaspersky denies these claims as the company does not work and has never worked with the service provider in question. The routing through networks operated by Kaspersky doesn’t by default mean provision of the company’s services, as Kaspersky’s automatic system (AS) path might appear as a technical prefix in the network of telecom providers the company works with and provides its DDoS services.”

“Kaspersky pays great attention to conducting business ethically and ensuring that its solutions are used for their original purpose of providing cybersecurity protection. The company is currently investigating the situation to inform the company whose network could have served as a transit for a “bulletproof” web hosting provider so that the former takes the necessary measures.”

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. Continue reading →

U.S. Soldier Charged in AT&T Hack Searched “Can Hacking Be Treason”

February 26, 2025
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A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty last week to leaking phone records for high-ranking U.S. government officials searched online for non-extradition countries and for an answer to the question “can hacking be treason?” prosecutors in the case said Wednesday. The government disclosed the details in a court motion to keep the defendant in custody until he is discharged from the military.

One of several selfies on the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.

Cameron John Wagenius, 21, was arrested near the Army base in Fort Cavazos, Texas on Dec. 20, and charged with two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records. Wagenius was a communications specialist at a U.S. Army base in South Korea, who secretly went by the nickname Kiberphant0m and was part of a trio of criminal hackers that extorted dozens of companies last year over stolen data.

At the end of 2023, malicious hackers learned that many companies had uploaded sensitive customer records to accounts at the cloud data storage service Snowflake that were protected with little more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication needed). After scouring darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, the hackers began raiding the data storage repositories used by some of the world’s largest corporations.

Among those 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 of its customers. AT&T reportedly paid a hacker $370,000 to delete stolen phone records. More than 160 other Snowflake customers were relieved of data, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.

In several posts to an English-language cybercrime forum in November, Kiberphant0m leaked some of the phone records and threatened to leak them all unless paid a ransom. Prosecutors said that in addition to his public posts on the forum, Wagenius had engaged in multiple direct attempts to extort “Victim-1,” which appears to be a reference to AT&T. The government states that Kiberphant0m privately demanded $500,000 from Victim-1, threatening to release all of the stolen phone records unless he was paid.

On Feb. 19, Wagenius pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully transferring confidential phone records, but he did so without the benefit of a plea agreement. In entering the plea, Wagenius’s attorneys had asked the court to allow him to stay with his father pending his sentencing.

But in a response filed today (PDF), prosecutors in Seattle said Wagenius was a flight risk, partly because prior to his arrest he was searching online for how to defect to countries that do not extradite to the United States. According to the government, while Kiberphant0m was extorting AT&T, Wagenius’s searches included:

-“where can i defect the u.s government military which country will not hand me over”
-“U.S. military personnel defecting to Russia”
-“Embassy of Russia – Washington, D.C.”

“As discussed in the government’s sealed filing, the government has uncovered evidence suggesting that the charged conduct was only a small part of Wagenius’ malicious activity,” the government memo states. “On top of this, for more than two weeks in November 2024, Wagenius communicated with an email address he believed belonged to Country-1’s military intelligence service in an attempt to sell stolen information. Days after he apparently finished communicating with Country-1’s military intelligence service, Wagenius Googled, ‘can hacking be treason.'” Continue reading →

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Trump 2.0 Brings Cuts to Cyber, Consumer Protections

February 23, 2025
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One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and data.

Image: Shutterstock. Greg Meland.

The Trump administration has fired at least 130 employees at the federal government’s foremost cybersecurity body — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Those dismissals reportedly included CISA staff dedicated to securing U.S. elections, and fighting misinformation and foreign influence operations.

Earlier this week, technologists with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at CISA and gained access to the agency’s email and networked files. Those DOGE staffers include Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former denizen of the “Com,” an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.

The investigative journalist Jacob Silverman writes that Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a KGB double agent who spied for the United States. Silverman recounted how Martynov’s wife Natalya Martynova moved to the United States with her two children after her husband’s death.

“Her son became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father,” Silverman wrote. “Her daughter became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”

Another member of DOGE is Christopher Stanley, formerly senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at Musk’s SpaceX. Stanley, 33, had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.

My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.

“A NATIONAL CYBERATTACK”

DOGE has been steadily gaining sensitive network access to federal agencies that hold a staggering amount of personal and financial information on Americans, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury Department.

Most recently, DOGE has sought broad access to systems at the Internal Revenue Service that contain the personal tax information on millions of Americans, including how much individuals earn and owe, property information, and even details related to child custody agreements. The New York Times reported Friday that the IRS had reached an agreement whereby a single DOGE employee — 25-year-old Gavin Kliger — will be allowed to see only anonymized taxpayer information.

The rapidity with which DOGE has rifled through one federal database after another in the name of unearthing “massive fraud” by government agencies has alarmed many security experts, who warned that DOGE’s actions bypassed essential safeguards and security measures.

“The most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, referring to DOGE as a national cyberattack. “It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.”

Jacob Williams is a former hacker with the U.S. National Security Agency who now works as managing director of the cybersecurity firm Hunter Labs. Williams kicked a virtual hornet’s nest last week when he posted on LinkedIn that the network incursions by DOGE were “a bigger threat to U.S. federal government information systems than China.”

Williams said while he doesn’t believe anyone at DOGE would intentionally harm the integrity and availability of these systems, it’s widely reported (and not denied) that DOGE introduced code changes into multiple federal IT systems. These code changes, he maintained, are not following the normal process for vetting and review given to federal government IT systems.

“For those thinking ‘I’m glad they aren’t following the normal federal government IT processes, those are too burdensome’ I get where you’re coming from,” Williams wrote. “But another name for ‘red tape’ are ‘controls.’ If you’re comfortable bypassing controls for the advancement of your agenda, I have questions – mostly about whether you do this in your day job too. Please tag your employer letting them know your position when you comment that controls aren’t important (doubly so if you work in cybersecurity). All satire aside, if you’re comfortable abandoning controls for expediency, I implore you to decide where the line is that you won’t cross in that regard.”

The DOGE website’s “wall of receipts” boasts that Musk and his team have saved the federal government more than $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts. But a team of reporters at The New York Times found the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.

For example, DOGE claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract, when the total amount was actually $8 million, The Times found.

“Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted,” reads a Times story with six bylines. “Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”

So far, the DOGE website does not inspire confidence: We learned last week that the doge.gov administrators somehow left their database wide open, allowing someone to publish messages that ridiculed the site’s insecurity.

A screenshot of the DOGE website after it was defaced with the message: “These ‘experts’ left their database open – roro”

APPOINTMENTS

Trump’s efforts to grab federal agencies by their data has seen him replace career civil servants who refused to allow DOGE access to agency networks. CNN reports that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, was shown the door after she denied DOGE access to sensitive information.

King was replaced by Leland Dudek, formerly a senior advisor in the SSA’s Office of Program Integrity. This week, Dudek posted a now-deleted message on LinkedIn acknowledging he had been placed on administrative leave for cooperating with DOGE.

“I confess,” Dudek wrote. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

Dudek’s message on LinkedIn.

According to Wired, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was also bracing this week for roughly 500 staffers to be fired, which could have serious impacts on NIST’s cybersecurity standards and software vulnerability tracking work.

“And cuts last week at the US Digital Service included the cybersecurity lead for the central Veterans Affairs portal, VA.gov, potentially leaving VA systems and data more vulnerable without someone in his role,” Wired’s Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman wrote.

NextGov reports that Trump named the Department of Defense’s new chief information security officer: Katie Arrington, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who helped steer Pentagon cybersecurity contracting policy before being put on leave amid accusations that she disclosed classified data from a military intelligence agency.

NextGov notes that the National Security Agency suspended her clearance in 2021, although the exact reasons that led to the suspension and her subsequent leave were classified. Arrington argued that the suspension was a politically motivated effort to silence her.

Trump also appointed the former chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee as the new head of the Office of National Cyber Director. Sean Cairncross, who has no formal experience in technology or security, will be responsible for coordinating national cybersecurity policy, advising the president on cyber threats, and ensuring a unified federal response to emerging cyber-risks, Politico writes.

DarkReading reports that Cairncross would share responsibility for advising the president on cyber matters, along with the director of cyber at the White House National Security Council (NSC) — a group that advises the president on all matters security related, and not just cyber.

CONSUMER PROTECTION?

The president also ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws.

The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The CFPB’s homepage has featured a “404: Page not found” error for weeks now.

Trump has appointed Russell Vought, the architect of the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, to be the CFPB’s acting director. Vought has publicly favored abolishing the agency, as has Elon Musk, whose efforts to remake X into a payments platform would otherwise be regulated by the CFPB.

The New York Times recently published a useful graphic showing all of the government staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, affecting agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk’s companies. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also have released a comprehensive account (PDF) of Musk’s various conflicts of interest.

Image: nytimes.com

As the Times notes, Musk and his companies have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, and these failures have prompted at least three federal reviews. Those include an inquiry launched last year by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. Four days after taking office, Trump fired the DoD inspector general along with 17 other inspectors general.

The Trump administration also shifted the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from prosecuting misconduct in the cryptocurrency sector, reassigning lawyers and renaming the unit to focus more on “cyber and emerging technologies.”

Reuters reports that the former SEC chair Gary Gensler made fighting misconduct in a sector he termed the “wild west” a priority for the agency, targeting not only cryptocurrency fraudsters but also the large firms that facilitate trading such as Coinbase.

On Friday, Coinbase said the SEC planned to withdraw its lawsuit against the crypto exchange. Also on Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced on X that a cybersecurity breach led to the theft of more than $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — making it the largest crypto heist ever. Continue reading →

How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets

February 18, 2025
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Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers. Happily, the broad deployment of more secure chip-based payment cards in the United States has weakened the carding market. But a flurry of innovation from cybercrime groups in China is breathing new life into the carding industry, by turning phished card data into mobile wallets that can be used online and at main street stores.

An image from one Chinese phishing group’s Telegram channel shows various toll road phish kits available.

If you own a mobile phone, the chances are excellent that at some point in the past two years it has received at least one phishing message that spoofs the U.S. Postal Service to supposedly collect some outstanding delivery fee, or an SMS that pretends to be a local toll road operator warning of a delinquent toll fee.

These messages are being sent through sophisticated phishing kits sold by several cybercriminals based in mainland China. And they are not traditional SMS phishing or “smishing” messages, as they bypass the mobile networks entirely. Rather, the missives are sent through the Apple iMessage service and through RCS, the functionally equivalent technology on Google phones.

People who enter their payment card data at one of these sites will be told their financial institution needs to verify the small transaction by sending a one-time passcode to the customer’s mobile device. In reality, that code will be sent by the victim’s financial institution to verify that the user indeed wishes to link their card information to a mobile wallet.

If the victim then provides that one-time code, the phishers will link the card data to a new mobile wallet from Apple or Google, loading the wallet onto a mobile phone that the scammers control.

CARDING REINVENTED

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill has been studying the evolution of several China-based smishing gangs, and found that most of them feature helpful and informative video tutorials in their sales accounts on Telegram. Those videos show the thieves are loading multiple stolen digital wallets on a single mobile device, and then selling those phones in bulk for hundreds of dollars apiece.

“Who says carding is dead?,” said Merrill, who presented about his findings at the M3AAWG security conference in Lisbon earlier today. “This is the best mag stripe cloning device ever. This threat actor is saying you need to buy at least 10 phones, and they’ll air ship them to you.”

One promotional video shows stacks of milk crates stuffed full of phones for sale. A closer inspection reveals that each phone is affixed with a handwritten notation that typically references the date its mobile wallets were added, the number of wallets on the device, and the initials of the seller.

An image from the Telegram channel for a popular Chinese smishing kit vendor shows 10 mobile phones for sale, each loaded with 4-6 digital wallets from different UK financial institutions.

Merrill said one common way criminal groups in China are cashing out with these stolen mobile wallets involves setting up fake e-commerce businesses on Stripe or Zelle and running transactions through those entities — often for amounts totaling between $100 and $500.

Merrill said that when these phishing groups first began operating in earnest two years ago, they would wait between 60 to 90 days before selling the phones or using them for fraud. But these days that waiting period is more like just seven to ten days, he said.

“When they first installed this, the actors were very patient,” he said. “Nowadays, they only wait like 10 days before [the wallets] are hit hard and fast.” Continue reading →

Nearly a Year Later, Mozilla is Still Promoting OneRep

February 13, 2025
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In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it to Firefox users.

Mozilla offers Onerep to Firefox users on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.

The ink on that partnership agreement had barely dried before KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. This seemed to contradict Onerep’s stated motto, “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

Shelest released a lengthy statement (PDF) wherein he acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 — around the same time he started Onerep.

Onerep.com CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest, as pictured on the “about” page of onerep.com.

Shelest maintained that Nuwber has “zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep,” and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.”

When asked to comment on the findings, Mozilla said then that although customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO did not align with their values.

“We’re working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first,” Mozilla said.

In October 2024, Mozilla published a statement saying the search for a different provider was taking longer than anticipated.

“While we continue to evaluate vendors, finding a technically excellent and values-aligned partner takes time,” Mozilla wrote. “While we continue this search, Onerep will remain the backend provider, ensuring that we can maintain uninterrupted services while we continue evaluating new potential partners that align more closely with Mozilla’s values and user expectations. We are conducting thorough diligence to find the right vendor.”

Asked for an update, Mozilla said the search for a replacement partner continues.

“The work’s ongoing but we haven’t found the right alternative yet,” Mozilla said in an emailed statement. “Our customers’ data remains safe, and since the product provides a lot of value to our subscribers, we’ll continue to offer it during this process.”

It’s a win-win for Mozilla that they’ve received accolades for their principled response while continuing to partner with Onerep almost a year later. But if it takes so long to find a suitable replacement, what does that say about the personal data removal industry itself? Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, February 2025 Edition

February 11, 2025
19 Comments

Microsoft today issued security updates to fix at least 56 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including two zero-day flaws that are being actively exploited.

All supported Windows operating systems will receive an update this month for a buffer overflow vulnerability that carries the catchy name CVE-2025-21418. This patch should be a priority for enterprises, as Microsoft says it is being exploited, has low attack complexity, and no requirements for user interaction.

Tenable senior staff research engineer Satnam Narang noted that since 2022, there have been nine elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in this same Windows component — three each year — including one in 2024 that was exploited in the wild as a zero day (CVE-2024-38193).

“CVE-2024-38193 was exploited by the North Korean APT group known as Lazarus Group to implant a new version of the FudModule rootkit in order to maintain persistence and stealth on compromised systems,” Narang said. “At this time, it is unclear if CVE-2025-21418 was also exploited by Lazarus Group.”

The other zero-day, CVE-2025-21391, is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows Storage that could be used to delete files on a targeted system. Microsoft’s advisory on this bug references something called “CWE-59: Improper Link Resolution Before File Access,” says no user interaction is required, and that the attack complexity is low.

Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said although the advisory provides scant detail, and even offers some vague reassurance that ‘an attacker would only be able to delete targeted files on a system,’ it would be a mistake to assume that the impact of deleting arbitrary files would be limited to data loss or denial of service.

“As long ago as 2022, ZDI researchers set out how a motivated attacker could parlay arbitrary file deletion into full SYSTEM access using techniques which also involve creative misuse of symbolic links,”Barnett wrote. Continue reading →

Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

February 7, 2025
169 Comments

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.

Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.

“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”

Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.

A profile photo from Coristine’s WhatsApp account.

Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.

DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”

From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.

Rivage made that request in the cybercrime channel “Dstat,” a core Com hub where users could buy and sell attack services. Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized in 2024 as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.

Coristine’s LinkedIn profile said that in 2022 he worked at an anti-DDoS company called Path Networks, which Wired generously described as a “network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.” Wired wrote:

“At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn résumé. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company.”

The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.

Less than 24 hours after that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept this site offline for nearly 4 days.

The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”

CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which “doxed” dozens of public officials and celebrities by publishing the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information on the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general, among others. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.

Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.

According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.

A snippet of text from an internal Path chat room, wherein members discuss the reason for Coristine’s termination: Allegedly, leaking internal company information. Source: Pathtruths.com.

Continue reading →

Experts Flag Security, Privacy Risks in DeepSeek AI App

February 6, 2025
35 Comments

New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending unencrypted user and device data to Chinese companies — introduce a number of glaring security and privacy risks.

Public interest in the DeepSeek AI chat apps swelled following widespread media reports that the upstart Chinese AI firm had managed to match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading AI companies rely on. As of this writing, DeepSeek is the third most-downloaded “free” app on the Apple store, and #1 on Google Play.

DeepSeek’s rapid rise caught the attention of the mobile security firm NowSecure, a Chicago-based company that helps clients screen mobile apps for security and privacy threats. In a teardown of the DeepSeek app published today, NowSecure urged organizations to remove the DeepSeek iOS mobile app from their environments, citing security concerns.

NowSecure founder Andrew Hoog said they haven’t yet concluded an in-depth analysis of the DeepSeek app for Android devices, but that there is little reason to believe its basic design would be functionally much different.

Hoog told KrebsOnSecurity there were a number of qualities about the DeepSeek iOS app that suggest the presence of deep-seated security and privacy risks. For starters, he said, the app collects an awful lot of data about the user’s device.

“They are doing some very interesting things that are on the edge of advanced device fingerprinting,” Hoog said, noting that one property of the app tracks the device’s name — which for many iOS devices defaults to the customer’s name followed by the type of iOS device.

The device information shared, combined with the user’s Internet address and data gathered from mobile advertising companies, could be used to deanonymize users of the DeepSeek iOS app, NowSecure warned. The report notes that DeepSeek communicates with Volcengine, a cloud platform developed by ByteDance (the makers of TikTok), although NowSecure said it wasn’t clear if the data is just leveraging ByteDance’s digital transformation cloud service or if the declared information share extends further between the two companies.

Image: NowSecure.

Perhaps more concerning, NowSecure said the iOS app transmits device information “in the clear,” without any encryption to encapsulate the data. This means the data being handled by the app could be intercepted, read, and even modified by anyone who has access to any of the networks that carry the app’s traffic.

“The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels,” the report observed. “Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over the internet.” Continue reading →

Who’s Behind the Seized Forums ‘Cracked’ & ‘Nulled’?

February 4, 2025
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The FBI joined authorities across Europe last week in seizing domain names for Cracked and Nulled, English-language cybercrime forums with millions of users that trafficked in stolen data, hacking tools and malware. An investigation into the history of these communities shows their apparent co-founders quite openly operate an Internet service provider and a pair of e-commerce platforms catering to buyers and sellers on both forums.

In this 2019 post from Cracked, a forum moderator told the author of the post (Buddie) that the owner of the RDP service was the founder of Nulled, a.k.a. “Finndev.” Image: Ke-la.com.

On Jan. 30, the U.S. Department of Justice said it seized eight domain names that were used to operate Cracked, a cybercrime forum that sprang up in 2018 and attracted more than four million users. The DOJ said the law enforcement action, dubbed Operation Talent, also seized domains tied to Sellix, Cracked’s payment processor.

In addition, the government seized the domain names for two popular anonymity services that were heavily advertised on Cracked and Nulled and allowed customers to rent virtual servers: StarkRDP[.]io, and rdp[.]sh.

Those archived webpages show both RDP services were owned by an entity called 1337 Services Gmbh. According to corporate records compiled by Northdata.com, 1337 Services GmbH is also known as AS210558 and is incorporated in Hamburg, Germany.

The Cracked forum administrator went by the nicknames “FlorainN” and “StarkRDP” on multiple cybercrime forums. Meanwhile, a LinkedIn profile for a Florian M. from Germany refers to this person as the co-founder of Sellix and founder of 1337 Services GmbH.

Northdata’s business profile for 1337 Services GmbH shows the company is controlled by two individuals: 32-year-old Florian Marzahl and Finn Alexander Grimpe, 28.

An organization chart showing the owners of 1337 Services GmbH as Florian Marzahl and Finn Grimpe. Image: Northdata.com.

Neither Marzahl nor Grimpe responded to requests for comment. But Grimpe’s first name is interesting because it corresponds to the nickname chosen by the founder of Nulled, who goes by the monikers “Finn” and “Finndev.” NorthData reveals that Grimpe was the founder of a German entity called DreamDrive GmbH, which rented out high-end sports cars and motorcycles.

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, a user named Finndev registered on multiple cybercrime forums, including Raidforums [seized by the FBI in 2022], Void[.]to, and vDOS, a DDoS-for-hire service that was shut down in 2016 after its founders were arrested.

The email address used for those accounts was f.grimpe@gmail.com. DomainTools.com reports f.grimpe@gmail.com was used to register at least nine domain names, including nulled[.]lol and nulled[.]it. Neither of these domains were among those seized in Operation Talent.

Intel471 finds the user FlorainN registered across multiple cybercrime forums using the email address olivia.messla@outlook.de. The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence says this email address used the same password (and slight variations of it) across many accounts online — including at hacker forums — and that the same password was used in connection with dozens of other email addresses, such as florianmarzahl@hotmail.de, and fmarzahl137@gmail.com. Continue reading →

FBI, Dutch Police Disrupt ‘Manipulaters’ Phishing Gang

January 31, 2025
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The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized dozens of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname “The Manipulaters,” have been the subject of three stories published here since 2015. The FBI said the main clientele are organized crime groups that try to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party.

One of several current Fudtools sites run by the principals of The Manipulators.

On January 29, the FBI and the Dutch national police seized the technical infrastructure for a cybercrime service marketed under the brands Heartsender, Fudpage and Fudtools (and many other “fud” variations). The “fud” bit stands for “Fully Un-Detectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.

The Dutch authorities said 39 servers and domains abroad were seized, and that the servers contained millions of records from victims worldwide — including at least 100,000 records pertaining to Dutch citizens.

A statement from the U.S. Department of Justice refers to the cybercrime group as Saim Raza, after a pseudonym The Manipulaters communally used to promote their spam, malware and phishing services on social media.

“The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages and email extractors often used to build and maintain fraud operations,” the DOJ explained.

The core Manipulaters product is Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me, to name a few.

The government says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.

“Those payments would instead be redirected to a financial account the perpetrators controlled, resulting in significant losses to victims,” the DOJ wrote. “These tools were also used to acquire victim user credentials and utilize those credentials to further these fraudulent schemes. The seizure of these domains is intended to disrupt the ongoing activity of these groups and stop the proliferation of these tools within the cybercriminal community.”

Manipulaters advertisement for “Office 365 Private Page with Antibot” phishing kit sold via Heartsender. “Antibot” refers to functionality that attempts to evade automated detection techniques, keeping a phish deployed and accessible as long as possible. Image: DomainTools.

KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about The Manipulaters in May 2015, mainly because their ads at the time were blanketing a number of popular cybercrime forums, and because they were fairly open and brazen about what they were doing — even who they were in real life.

We caught up with The Manipulaters again in 2021, with a story that found the core employees had started a web coding company in Lahore called WeCodeSolutions — presumably as a way to account for their considerable Heartsender income. That piece examined how WeCodeSolutions employees had all doxed themselves on Facebook by posting pictures from company parties each year featuring a large cake with the words FudCo written in icing. Continue reading →