It’s been a while since a new category debuted on this blog, and it occurred to me that I didn’t have a catch-all designation for random ne’er-do-well news. Alas, the inaugural entry for Ne’er-Do-Well News looks at three recent unrelated developments: The availability of remote access iPhone apps written by a programmer perhaps best known for developing crimeware; the return to prison of a young hacker who earned notoriety after simultaneously hacking Paris Hilton’s cell phone and data broker LexisNexis; and the release of Pavel Vrublevsky from a Russian prison more than a year before his sentence was to expire.
![ZeusTerm and Zeus Terminal are iPhone/iPad apps designed by the same guy who brought us the Styx-Crypt exploit kit.](https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/zeusterm-2-285x199.png)
ZeusTerm and Zeus Terminal are iPhone/iPad apps designed by the same guy who brought us the Styx-Crypt exploit kit.
A year ago, this blog featured a series of articles that sought to track down the developers of the Styx-Crypt exploit kit, a crimeware package being sold to help bad guys booby-trap compromised Web sites with malware. Earlier this week, I learned that a leading developer of Styx-Crypt — a Ukrainian man named Max Gavryuk — also is selling his own line of remote administration tools curiously called “Zeus Terminal,” available via the Apple iTunes store.
News of the app family came via a Twitter follower who asked to remain anonymous, but who said two of the apps by this author were recently pulled from Apple’s iTunes store, including Zeus Terminal and Zeus Terminal Lite. It’s unclear why the apps were yanked or by whom, but the developer appears to have two other remote access apps for sale on iTunes, including ZeusTerm and ZeusTerm HD.
Incidentally, the support page listed for these apps — zeus-terminal[dot]com — no longer appears to be active (if, indeed it ever was), but the developer lists as his other home page reality7solutions[dot]com, which as this blog has reported was intricately tied to the Styx-Crypt development team.
This wouldn’t be the first time a crimeware author segued into building apps for the iPhone and iPad: In January 2012, as part of my Pharma Wars series, I wrote about clues that strongly suggested the Srizbi/Reactor spam botnet was developed and sold by a guy who left the spam business to build OOO Gameprom, a company that has developed dozens of games available in the iTunes store.