Brazil Arrests ‘USDoD,’ Hacker in FBI Infragard Breach

October 18, 2024
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Brazilian authorities reportedly have arrested a 33-year-old man on suspicion of being “USDoD,” a prolific cybercriminal who rose to infamy in 2022 after infiltrating the FBI’s InfraGard program and leaking contact information for 80,000 members. More recently, USDoD was behind a breach at the consumer data broker National Public Data that led to the leak of Social Security numbers and other personal information for a significant portion of the U.S. population.

USDoD’s InfraGard sales thread on Breached.

The Brazilian news outlet TV Globo first reported the news of USDoD’s arrest, saying the Federal Police arrested a 33-year-old man from Belo Horizonte. According to TV Globo, USDoD is wanted domestically in connection with the theft of data on Brazilian Federal Police officers.

USDoD was known to use the hacker handles “Equation Corp” and “NetSec,” and according to the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 NetSec posted a thread on the now-defunct cybercrime community RaidForums on Feb. 22, 2022, in which they offered the email address and password for 659 members of the Brazilian Federal Police.

TV Globo didn’t name the man arrested, but the Portuguese tech news outlet Tecmundo published a report in August 2024 that named USDoD as 33-year-old Luan BG from Minas Gerais, Brazil. Techmundo said it learned the hacker’s real identity after being given a draft of a detailed, non-public report produced by the security firm CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike did not respond to a request for comment. But a week after Techmundo’s piece, the tech news publication hackread.com published a story in which USDoD reportedly admitted that CrowdStrike was accurate in identifying him. Hackread said USDoD shared a statement, which was partially addressed to CrowdStrike:

A recent statement by USDoD, after he was successfully doxed by CrowdStrike and other security firms. Image: Hackread.com.

In August 2024, a cybercriminal began selling Social Security numbers and other personal information stolen from National Public Data, a private data broker in Florida that collected and sold SSNs and contact data for a significant slice of the American population.

Additional reporting revealed National Public Data had inadvertently published its own passwords on the Internet. The company is now the target of multiple class-action lawsuits, and recently declared bankruptcy. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, USDoD acknowledged stealing the NPD data earlier this year, but claimed he was not involved in leaking or selling it. Continue reading →

Sudanese Brothers Arrested in ‘AnonSudan’ Takedown

October 17, 2024
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The U.S. government on Wednesday announced the arrest and charging of two Sudanese brothers accused of running Anonymous Sudan (a.k.a. AnonSudan), a cybercrime business known for launching powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a range of targets, including dozens of hospitals, news websites and cloud providers. The younger brother is facing charges that could land him life in prison for allegedly seeking to kill people with his attacks.

Image: FBI

Active since at least January 2023, AnonSudan has been described in media reports as a “hacktivist” group motivated by ideological causes. But in a criminal complaint, the FBI said those high-profile cyberattacks were effectively commercials for the hackers’ DDoS-for-hire service, which they sold to paying customers for as little as $150 a day — with up to 100 attacks allowed per day — or $700 for an entire week.

The complaint says despite reports suggesting Anonymous Sudan might be state-sponsored Russian actors pretending to be Sudanese hackers with Islamist motivations, AnonSudan was led by two brothers in Sudan — Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27.

AnonSudan claimed credit for successful DDoS attacks on numerous U.S. companies, causing a multi-day outage for Microsoft’s cloud services in June 2023. The group hit PayPal the following month, followed by Twitter/X (Aug. 2023), and OpenAI (Nov. 2023). An indictment in the Central District of California notes the duo even swamped the websites of the FBI and the Department of State.

Prosecutors say Anonymous Sudan offered a “Limited Internet Shutdown Package,” which would enable customers to shut down internet service providers in specified countries for $500 (USD) an hour. The two men also allegedly extorted some of their victims for money in exchange for calling off DDoS attacks.

The government isn’t saying where the Omer brothers are being held, only that they were arrested in March 2024 and have been in custody since. A statement by the U.S. Department of Justice says the government also seized control of AnonSudan’s DDoS infrastructure and servers after the two were arrested in March.

AnonSudan accepted orders over the instant messaging service Telegram, and marketed its DDoS service by several names, including “Skynet,” “InfraShutdown,” and the “Godzilla botnet.” However, the DDoS machine the Omer brothers allegedly built was not made up of hacked devices — as is typical with DDoS botnets.

Instead, the government alleges Skynet was more like a “distributed cloud attack tool,” with a command and control (C2) server, and an entire fleet of cloud-based servers that forwards C2 instructions to an array of open proxy resolvers run by unaffiliated third parties, which then transmit the DDoS attack data to the victims.

Amazon was among many companies credited with helping the government in the investigation, and said AnonSudan launched its attacks by finding hosting companies that would rent them small armies of servers.

“Where their potential impact becomes really significant is when they then acquire access to thousands of other machines — typically misconfigured web servers — through which almost anyone can funnel attack traffic,” Amazon explained in a blog post. “This extra layer of machines usually hides the true source of an attack from the targets.” Continue reading →

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Lamborghini Carjackers Lured by $243M Cyberheist

October 9, 2024
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The parents of a 19-year-old Connecticut honors student accused of taking part in a $243 million cryptocurrency heist in August were carjacked a week later — while out house-hunting in a brand new Lamborghini. Prosecutors say the couple was beaten and briefly kidnapped by six young men who traveled from Florida as part of a botched plan to hold the parents for ransom.

Image: ABC7NY.  youtube.com/watch?v=xoiaGzwrunY

Late in the afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024 in Danbury, Ct., a married couple in their 50s pulled up to a gated community in a new Lamborghini Urus (investigators say the sports car still had temporary tags) when they were intentionally rear-ended by a Honda Civic.

A witness told police they saw three men exit a van that was following the Honda, and said the men began assaulting the couple and forcing them into the van. Local police officers spotted the van speeding from the scene and pursued it, only to find the vehicle crashed and abandoned a short distance away.

Inside the disabled van the police found the couple with their hands and feet bound in duct tape, the man visibly bruised after being assaulted with a baseball bat. Danbury police soon reported arresting six suspects in the kidnapping, all men aged 18-26 from Florida. They also recovered the abandoned Lamborghini from a wooded area.

A criminal complaint (PDF) filed on Sept. 24 against the six men does not name the victims, referring to them only as a married couple from Danbury with the initials R.C. and S.C. But prosecutors in Connecticut said they were targeted “because the co-conspirators believed the victims’ son had access to significant amounts of digital currency.”

What made the Miami men so convinced R.C. and S.C.’s son was loaded with cryptocurrency? Approximately one week earlier, on Aug. 19, a group of cybercriminals that allegedly included the couple’s son executed a sophisticated phone-based social engineering attack in which they stole $243 million worth of cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C.

That’s according to ZachXBT, a frequently cited crypto crime investigator who published a lengthy thread that broke down how the theft was carried out and ultimately exposed by the perpetrators themselves.

ZachXBT’s post included a screen recording of a Discord chat session made by one of the participants to the $243 million robbery, noting that two of the people involved managed to leak the username of the Microsoft Windows PCs they were using to participate in the chat.

One of the usernames leaked during the chat was Veer Chetal. According to ZachXBT, that name corresponds to a 19-year-old from Danbury who allegedly goes by the nickname “Wiz,” although in the leaked video footage he allegedly used the handle “Swag.”  Swag was reportedly involved in executing the early stages of the crypto heist — gaining access to the victim’s Gmail and iCloud accounts.

A still shot from a video screenshare in which one of the participants on the Discord voice chat used the Windows username Veer Chetal. Image: x.com/zachxbt

The same day ZachXBT published his findings, a criminal indictment was issued in Washington D.C. charging two of the men he named as involved in the heist. Prosecutors allege Malone “Greavys” Lam, 20, of Miami and Los Angeles, and Jeandiel “Box” Serrano, 21, of Los Angeles conspired to steal and launder over $230 million in cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C. The indictment alleges Lam and Serrano were helped by other unnamed co-conspirators.

“Lam and Serrano then allegedly spent the laundered cryptocurrency proceeds on international travel, nightclubs, luxury automobiles, watches, jewelry, designer handbags, and rental homes in Los Angeles and Miami,” reads a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

By tracing the flow of funds stolen in the heist, ZachXBT concluded that Wiz received a large percentage from the theft, noting that “additional comfort [in naming him as involved] was gained as throughout multiple recordings accomplices refer to him as ‘Veer’ on audio and in chats.”

“A cluster of [cryptocurrency] addresses tied to both Box/Wiz received $41M+ from two exchanges over the past few weeks primarily flowing to luxury goods brokers to purchase cars, watches, jewelry, and designer clothes,” ZachXBT wrote.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Veer Chetal, and from his parents — Radhika Chetal and Suchil Chetal. This story will be updated in the event that anyone representing the Chetal family responds. Veer Chetal has not been publicly charged with any crime.

According to a news brief published by a private Catholic high school in Danbury that Veer Chetal attended, in 2022 he successfully completed Harvard’s Future Lawyers Program, a “unique pre-professional program where students, guided by qualified Harvard undergraduate instructors, learn how to read and build a case, how to write position papers, and how to navigate a path to law school.” A November 2022 story at patch.com quoted Veer Chetal (class of 2024) crediting the Harvard program with his decision to pursue a career in law.

It remains unclear which Chetal family member acquired the 2023 Lamborghini Urus, which has a starting price of around $233,000. Sushil Chetal’s LinkedIn profile says he is a vice president at the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

It is clear that other alleged co-conspirators to the $243 million heist displayed a conspicuous consumption of wealth following the date of the heist. ZachXBT’s post chronicled Malone’s flashy lifestyle, in which he allegedly used the stolen money to purchase more than 10 vehicles, rent palatial properties, travel with friends on chartered jets, and spend between $250,000 and $500,000 a night at clubs in Los Angeles and Miami. Continue reading →

Patch Tuesday, October 2024 Edition

October 8, 2024
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Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 117 security holes in Windows computers and other software, including two vulnerabilities that are already seeing active attacks. Also, Adobe plugged 52 security holes across a range of products, and Apple has addressed a bug in its new macOS 15 “Sequoia” update that broke many cybersecurity tools.

One of the zero-day flaws — CVE-2024-43573 — stems from a security weakness in MSHTML, the proprietary engine of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. If that sounds familiar it’s because this is the fourth MSHTML vulnerability found to be exploited in the wild so far in 2024.

Nikolas Cemerikic, a cybersecurity engineer at Immersive Labs, said the vulnerability allows an attacker to trick users into viewing malicious web content, which could appear legitimate thanks to the way Windows handles certain web elements.

“Once a user is deceived into interacting with this content (typically through phishing attacks), the attacker can potentially gain unauthorized access to sensitive information or manipulate web-based services,” he said.

Cemerikic noted that while Internet Explorer is being retired on many platforms, its underlying MSHTML technology remains active and vulnerable.

“This creates a risk for employees using these older systems as part of their everyday work, especially if they are accessing sensitive data or performing financial transactions online,” he said.

Probably the more serious zero-day this month is CVE-2024-43572, a code execution bug in the Microsoft Management Console, a component of Windows that gives system administrators a way to configure and monitor the system.

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, observed that the patch for CVE-2024-43572 arrived a few months after researchers at Elastic Security Labs disclosed an attack technique called GrimResource that leveraged an old cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability combined with a specially crafted Microsoft Saved Console (MSC) file to gain code execution privileges. Continue reading →

A Single Cloud Compromise Can Feed an Army of AI Sex Bots

October 3, 2024
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Organizations that get relieved of credentials to their cloud environments can quickly find themselves part of a disturbing new trend: Cybercriminals using stolen cloud credentials to operate and resell sexualized AI-powered chat services. Researchers say these illicit chat bots, which use custom jailbreaks to bypass content filtering, often veer into darker role-playing scenarios, including child sexual exploitation and rape.

Image: Shutterstock.

Researchers at security firm Permiso Security say attacks against generative artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure like Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS) have increased markedly over the last six months, particularly when someone in the organization accidentally exposes their cloud credentials or key online, such as in a code repository like GitHub.

Investigating the abuse of AWS accounts for several organizations, Permiso found attackers had seized on stolen AWS credentials to interact with the large language models (LLMs) available on Bedrock. But they also soon discovered none of these AWS users had enabled full logging of LLM activity (by default, logs don’t include model prompts and outputs), and thus they lacked any visibility into what attackers were doing with that access.

So Permiso researchers decided to leak their own test AWS key on GitHub, while turning on logging so that they could see exactly what an attacker might ask for, and what the responses might be.

Within minutes, their bait key was scooped up and used in a service that offers AI-powered sex chats online.

“After reviewing the prompts and responses it became clear that the attacker was hosting an AI roleplaying service that leverages common jailbreak techniques to get the models to accept and respond with content that would normally be blocked,” Permiso researchers wrote in a report released today.

“Almost all of the roleplaying was of a sexual nature, with some of the content straying into darker topics such as child sexual abuse,” they continued. “Over the course of two days we saw over 75,000 successful model invocations, almost all of a sexual nature.”

Ian Ahl, senior vice president of threat research at Permiso, said attackers in possession of a working cloud account traditionally have used that access for run-of-the-mill financial cybercrime, such as cryptocurrency mining or spam. But over the past six months, Ahl said, Bedrock has emerged as one of the top targeted cloud services.

“Bad guy hosts a chat service, and subscribers pay them money,” Ahl said of the business model for commandeering Bedrock access to power sex chat bots. “They don’t want to pay for all the prompting that their subscribers are doing, so instead they hijack someone else’s infrastructure.”

Ahl said much of the AI-powered chat conversations initiated by the users of their honeypot AWS key were harmless roleplaying of sexual behavior.

“But a percentage of it is also geared toward very illegal stuff, like child sexual assault fantasies and rapes being played out,” Ahl said. “And these are typically things the large language models won’t be able to talk about.”

AWS’s Bedrock uses large language models from Anthropic, which incorporates a number of technical restrictions aimed at placing certain ethical guardrails on the use of their LLMs. But attackers can evade or “jailbreak” their way out of these restricted settings, usually by asking the AI to imagine itself in an elaborate hypothetical situation under which its normal restrictions might be relaxed or discarded altogether.

“A typical jailbreak will pose a very specific scenario, like you’re a writer who’s doing research for a book, and everyone involved is a consenting adult, even though they often end up chatting about nonconsensual things,” Ahl said.

In June 2024, security experts at Sysdig documented a new attack that leveraged stolen cloud credentials to target ten cloud-hosted LLMs. The attackers Sysdig wrote about gathered cloud credentials through a known security vulnerability, but the researchers also found the attackers sold LLM access to other cybercriminals while sticking the cloud account owner with an astronomical bill.

“Once initial access was obtained, they exfiltrated cloud credentials and gained access to the cloud environment, where they attempted to access local LLM models hosted by cloud providers: in this instance, a local Claude (v2/v3) LLM model from Anthropic was targeted,” Sysdig researchers wrote. “If undiscovered, this type of attack could result in over $46,000 of LLM consumption costs per day for the victim.” Continue reading →

Crooked Cops, Stolen Laptops & the Ghost of UGNazi

September 30, 2024
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A California man accused of failing to pay taxes on tens of millions of dollars allegedly earned from cybercrime also paid local police officers hundreds of thousands of dollars to help him extort, intimidate and silence rivals and former business partners, the government alleges. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that many of the man’s alleged targets were members of UGNazi, a hacker group behind multiple high-profile breaches and cyberattacks back in 2012.

A photo released by the government allegedly showing Iza posing with several LASD officers on his payroll.

A federal complaint (PDF) filed last week said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been investigating Los Angeles resident Adam Iza. Also known as “Assad Faiq” and “The Godfather,” Iza is the founder of a cryptocurrency investment platform called Zort that advertised the ability to make smart trades based on artificial intelligence technology.

But the feds say investors in Zort soon lost their shorts, after Iza and his girlfriend began spending those investments on Lamborghinis, expensive jewelry, vacations, a $28 million home in Bel Air, even cosmetic surgery to extend the length of his legs.

The complaint states the FBI started looking at Iza after receiving multiple reports that he had on his payroll several active deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD). Iza’s attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The complaint cites a letter from an attorney for a victim referenced only as “E.Z.,” who was seeking help related to an extortion and robbery allegedly committed by Iza. The government says that in March 2022, three men showed up at E.Z.’s home, and tried to steal his laptop in an effort to gain access to E.Z. cryptocurrency holdings online. A police report referenced in the complaint says three intruders were scared off when E.Z. fired several handgun rounds in the direction of his assailants.

The FBI later obtained a copy of a search warrant executed by LASD deputies in January 2022 for GPS location information on a phone belonging to E.Z., which shows an LASD deputy unlawfully added E.Z.’s mobile number to a list of those associated with an unrelated firearms investigation.

“Damn my guy actually filed the warrant,” Iza allegedly texted someone after the location warrant was entered. “That’s some serious shit to do for someone….risking a 24 years career. I pay him 280k a month for complete resources. They’re active-duty.”

The FBI alleges LASD officers had on several previous occasions tried to kidnap and extort E.Z. at Iza’s behest. The complaint references a November 2021 incident wherein Iza and E.Z. were in a car together when Iza asked to stop and get snacks at a convenience store. While they were still standing next to the car, a van with several armed LASD deputies showed up and tried to force E.Z. to hand over his phone. E.Z. escaped unharmed, and alerted 911.

E.Z. appears to be short for Enzo Zelocchi, a self-described “actor” who was featured in an ABC News story about a home invasion in Los Angeles around that same time as the March 2022 home invasion, in which Zelocchi is quoted as saying at least two men tried to rob him at gunpoint (we’ll revisit Zelocchi’s acting credits in a moment).

One of many self portraits published on the Instagram account of Enzo Zelocchi.

The criminal complaint makes frequent references to a co-conspirator of Iza (“CC-1”) — his girlfriend at the time — who allegedly helped Iza run his businesses and spend the millions plunked down by Zort investors. We know what E.Z. stands for because Iza’s girlfriend then was a woman named Iris Au, and in November 2022 she sued Zelocchi for allegedly stealing Iza’s laptop.

The complaint says Iza also harassed a man identified only as T.W., and refers to T.W. as one of two Americans currently incarcerated in the Philippines for murder. In December 2018, a then 21-year-old Troy Woody Jr. was arrested in Manila after he was spotted dumping the body of his dead girlfriend Tomi Masters into a local river.

Woody is accused of murdering Masters with the help of his best friend and roommate at the time: Mir Islam, a.k.a. “JoshTheGod,” referred to in the Iza complaint as “M.I.” Islam and Woody were both core members of UGNazi, a hacker collective that sprang up in 2012 and claimed credit for hacking and attacking a number of high-profile websites.

In June 2016, Islam was sentenced to a year in prison for an impressive array of crimes, including stalking people online and posting their personal data on the Internet. Islam also pleaded guilty to reporting dozens of phony bomb threats and fake hostage situations at the homes of celebrities and public officials (Islam participated in a swatting attack against this author in 2013).

Troy Woody Jr. (left) and Mir Islam, are currently in prison in the Philippines for murder.

In December 2022, Troy Woody Jr. sued Iza, Zelocchi and Zort, alleging (PDF) Iza and Zelocchi were involved in a 2018 home invasion at his residence, wherein Woody claimed his assailants stole laptops and phones containing more than $200 million in cryptocurrencies.

Woody’s complaint states that Masters also was present during his 2018 home invasion, as was another core UGNazi member: Eric “CosmoTheGod” Taylor. CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which published the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information of public figures, including the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.

Exposed was built with the help of identity information obtained and/or stolen from ssndob dot ru.

In 2017, Taylor was sentenced to three years probation for participating in multiple swatting attacks, including the one against my home in 2013.

The complaint against Iza says the FBI interviewed Woody in Manila where he is currently incarcerated, and learned that Iza has been harassing him about passwords that would unlock access to cryptocurrencies. The FBI’s complaint leaves open the question of how Woody and Islam got the phones in the first place, but the implication is that Iza may have instigated the harassment by having mobile phones smuggled to the prisoners. Continue reading →

U.S. Indicts 2 Top Russian Hackers, Sanctions Cryptex

September 26, 2024
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The United States today unveiled sanctions and indictments against the alleged proprietor of Joker’s Stash, a now-defunct cybercrime store that peddled tens of millions of payment cards stolen in some of the largest data breaches of the past decade. The government also indicted and sanctioned a top Russian cybercriminal known as Taleon, whose cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex has evolved into one of Russia’s most active money laundering networks.

A 2016 screen shot of the Joker’s Stash homepage. The links have been redacted.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today unsealed an indictment against a 38-year-old man from Novosibirsk, Russia for allegedly operating Joker’s Stash, an extremely successful carding shop that came online in late 2014. Joker’s sold cards stolen in a steady drip of breaches at U.S. retailers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Bebe Stores, Hilton Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Wawa, Sonic Drive-In, the Hy-Vee supermarket chain, Buca Di Beppo, and Dickey’s BBQ.

The government believes the brains behind Joker’s Stash is Timur Kamilevich Shakhmametov, an individual who is listed in Russian incorporation documents as the owner of Arpa Plus, a Novosibirsk company that makes mobile games.

Early in his career (circa 2000) Shakhmametov was known as “v1pee” and was the founder of the Russian hacker group nerf[.]ru, which periodically published hacking tools and exploits for software vulnerabilities.

The Russian hacker group Nerf as described in a March 2006 article in the Russian hacker magazine xakep.ru.

By 2004, v1pee had adopted the moniker “Vega” on the exclusive Russian language hacking forum Mazafaka, where this user became one of the more reliable vendors of stolen payment cards.

In the years that followed, Vega would cement his reputation as a top carder on other forums, including Verified, DirectConnection, and Carder[.]pro.

Vega also became known as someone who had the inside track on “unlimited cashouts,” a globally coordinated cybercrime scheme in which crooks hack a bank or payment card processor and use cloned cards at cash machines to rapidly withdraw millions of dollars in just a few hours.

“Hi, there is work on d+p, unlimited,” Vega wrote in a private message to another user on Verified in Dec. 2012, referring to “dumps and PINs,” the slang term for stolen debit cards with the corresponding PINs that would allow ATM withdrawals.

This batch of some five million cards put up for sale Sept. 26, 2017 on the now-defunct carding site Joker’s Stash has been tied to a breach at Sonic Drive-In.

Joker’s Stash came online in the wake of several enormous card breaches at retailers like Target and Home Depot, and the resulting glut of inventory had depressed prices for stolen cards. But Joker’s would distinguish itself by catering to high-roller customers — essentially street gangs in the United States that would purchase thousands of stolen payment cards in one go.

Faced with a buyer’s market, Joker’s Stash set themselves apart by focusing on loyalty programs, frequent buyer discounts, money-back guarantees, and just plain good customer service. Big spenders were given access to the most freshly hacked payment cards, and were offered the ability to get free replacement cards if any turned out to be duds.

Joker’s Stash also was unique because it claimed to sell only payment cards that its own hackers had stolen directly from merchants. At the time, card shops typically resold payment cards that were stolen and supplied by many third-party hackers of unknown reliability or reputation.

In January 2021, Joker’s Stash announced it was closing up shop, after European authorities seized a number of servers for the fraud store, and its proprietor came down with the Coronavirus.

A DOJ statement credits the U.S. Secret Service for leading the years-long investigations (the Service’s original mandate was not protecting the president; it was pursuing counterfeiters, and modern-day carders definitely qualify as that). Prosecutors allege Joker’s Stash earned revenues of at least $280 million, but possibly more than $1 billion (the broad range is a consequence of several variables, including the rapid fluctuation in the price of bitcoin and the stolen goods they were peddling).

TALEON

The proprietors of Joker’s Stash may have sold tens of millions of stolen payment cards, but Taleon is by far the bigger fish in this law enforcement action because his various cryptocurrency and cash exchanges have allegedly helped to move billions of dollars into and out of Russia over the past 20 years.

An indictment unsealed today names Taleon as Sergey Sergeevich Ivanov, 44, of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The government says Ivanov, who likely changed his surname from Omelnitskii at some point, laundered money for Joker’s Stash, among many other cybercrime stores.

In a statement today, the Treasury Department said Ivanov has laundered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of virtual currency for ransomware actors, initial access brokers, darknet marketplace vendors, and other criminal actors for approximately the last 20 years.

First appearing on Mazafaka in the early 2000s, Taleon was known on the forums as someone who could reliably move large amounts of physical cash. Sources familiar with the investigation said Taleon’s service emerged as one of the few remaining domestic cash delivery services still operating after Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022.

Taleon set up his service to facilitate transfers between Moscow, St. Petersburg and financial institutions in the West. Taleon’s private messages on some hacker forums have been leaked over the years and indexed by the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471. Those messages indicate Taleon worked on many of the same ATM cashouts as Vegas, so it’s clear the two had an established business relationship well before Joker’s Stash came into being.

Sometime around 2013, Taleon launched a partnership with a money transfer business called pm2btc[.]me. PM2BTC allowed customers to convert funds from the virtual currency Perfect Money (PM) into bitcoin, and then have the balance (minus a processing fee) available on a physical debit card that could be used at ATMs, for shopping online, or at retail stores.

A screenshot of a website reviewing PM2BTC.

The U.S. government itself set things in motion for Taleon’s nascent cryptocurrency exchange business in 2013 after the DOJ levied money laundering charges against the proprietors of Liberty Reserve, one of the largest virtual currencies in operation at the time.  Liberty Reserve was heavily used by cybercriminals of all stripes. The government said the service had more than a million users worldwide, and laundered in excess of $6 billion in suspected criminal proceeds.

In the days following the takedown of Liberty Reserve, KrebsOnSecurity ran a story that examined discussions across multiple top Russian cybercrime forums about where crooks could feel safe parking their stolen funds. The answer involved Bitcoin, but also Taleon’s new service.

UAPS

Part of the appeal of Taleon’s exchange was that it gave its vetted customers an “application programming interface” or API that made it simple for dodgy online shops selling stolen goods and cybercrime services to accept cryptocurrency deposits from their customers, and to manage payouts to any suppliers and affiliates.

This API is synonymous with a service Taleon and friends operate in the background called UAPS, short for “Universal Anonymous Payment System.” UAPS has gone by several other names including “Pinpays,” and in October 2014 it landed Joker’s Stash as its first big client.

A source with knowledge of the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Taleon is a pilot who owns and flies around in his own helicopter.

Ivanov appears to have little to no social media presence, but the 40-year-old woman he lives with in St. Petersburg does, and she has a photo on her Vktontake page that shows the two of them in 2019 flying over Lake Ladoga, a large body of water directly north of St. Petersburg.

Sergey “Taleon” Ivanov (right) in 2019 in his helicopter with the woman he lives with, flying over a lake north of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Continue reading →

Timeshare Owner? The Mexican Drug Cartels Want You

September 25, 2024
11 Comments

The FBI is warning timeshare owners to be wary of a prevalent telemarketing scam involving a violent Mexican drug cartel that tries to trick people into believing someone wants to buy their property. This is the story of a couple who recently lost more than $50,000 to an ongoing timeshare scam that spans at least two dozen phony escrow, title and realty firms.

One of the phony real estate companies trying to scam people out of money over fake offers to buy their timeshares.

One evening in late 2022, someone phoned Mr. & Mrs. Dimitruk, a retired couple from Ontario, Canada and asked whether they’d ever considered selling their timeshare in Florida. The person on the phone referenced their timeshare address and said they had an interested buyer in Mexico. Would they possibly be interested in selling it?

The Dimitruks had purchased the timeshare years ago, but it wasn’t fully paid off — they still owed roughly $5,000 before they could legally sell it. That wouldn’t be an issue for this buyer, the man on the phone assured them.

With a few days, their contact at an escrow company in New York called ecurrencyescrow[.]llc faxed them forms to fill out and send back to start the process of selling their timeshare to the potential buyer, who had offered an amount that was above what the property was likely worth.

After certain forms were signed and faxed, the Dimitruks were asked to send a small wire transfer of more than $3,000 to handle “administrative” and “processing” fees, supposedly so that the sale would not be held up by any bureaucratic red tape down in Mexico.

These document exchanges went on for almost a year, during which time the real estate brokers made additional financial demands, such as tax payments on the sale, and various administrative fees. Mrs. Dimitruk even sent them a $5,000 wire to pay off her remaining balance on the timeshare they thought they were selling.

In a phone interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Mr. Dimitruk said they lost over $50,000.

“They kept calling me after that saying, ‘Hey your money is waiting for you here’,” said William Dimitruk, a 73-year-old retired long-haul truck driver. “They said ‘We’re going to get in trouble if the money isn’t returned to you,’ and gave me a toll-free number to call them at.”

In the last call he had with the scammers, the man on the other end of the line confessed that some bad people had worked for them previously, but that those employees had been fired.

“Near the end of the call he said, ‘You’ve been dealing with some bad people and we fired all those bad guys,'” Dimitruk recalled. “So they were like, yeah it’s all good. You can go ahead and pay us more and we’ll send you your money.”

According to the FBI, there are indeed some very bad people behind these scams. The FBI warns the timeshare fraud schemes have been linked to the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel in Mexico.

In July 2024, the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) warned the Jalisco cartel is running boiler room-like call centers that target people who own timeshares:

“Mexico-based [transnational criminal organizations] such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are increasingly targeting U.S. owners of timeshares in Mexico through complex and often yearslong telemarketing, impersonation, and advance fee schemes. They use the illicit proceeds to diversify their revenue streams and finance other criminal activities, including the manufacturing and trafficking of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs into the United States.”

A July 2024 CBS News story about these scams notes that U.S. and Mexican officials last year confirmed that as many as eight young workers were confirmed dead after they apparently tried to quit jobs at a call center operated by the Jalisco cartel.

Source: US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The phony escrow company the Dimitruks dealt with — ecurrencyescrow[.]llc — is no longer online. But the documents sent by their contact there referenced a few other still-active domains, including realestateassetsllc[.]com

The original registration records of both of these domains reference another domain — datasur[.]host — that is associated with dozens of other real estate and escrow-themed domains going back at least four years. Some of these domains are no longer active, while others have been previously suspended at different hosting providers. Continue reading →

This Windows PowerShell Phish Has Scary Potential

September 19, 2024
60 Comments

Many GitHub users this week received a novel phishing email warning of critical security holes in their code. Those who clicked the link for details were asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download password-stealing malware. While it’s unlikely that many programmers fell for this scam, it’s notable because less targeted versions of it are likely to be far more successful against the average Windows user.

A reader named Chris shared an email he received this week that spoofed GitHub’s security team and warned: “Hey there! We have detected a security vulnerability in your repository. Please contact us at https://github-scanner[.]com to get more information on how to fix this issue.”

Visiting that link generates a web page that asks the visitor to “Verify You Are Human” by solving an unusual CAPTCHA.

This malware attack pretends to be a CAPTCHA intended to separate humans from bots.

Clicking the “I’m not a robot” button generates a pop-up message asking the user to take three sequential steps to prove their humanity. Step 1 involves simultaneously pressing the keyboard key with the Windows icon and the letter “R,” which opens a Windows “Run” prompt that will execute any specified program that is already installed on the system.

Executing this series of keypresses prompts the built-in Windows Powershell to download password-stealing malware.

Step 2 asks the user to press the “CTRL” key and the letter “V” at the same time, which pastes malicious code from the site’s virtual clipboard.

Step 3 — pressing the “Enter” key — causes Windows to launch a PowerShell command, and then fetch and execute a malicious file from github-scanner[.]com called “l6e.exe.” Continue reading →

Scam ‘Funeral Streaming’ Groups Thrive on Facebook

September 18, 2024
25 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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