Krebs on Security

NC Fuel Distributor Hit by $800,000 Cyberheist

May 23, 2013

A fuel distribution firm in North Carolina lost more than $800,000 in a cyberheist earlier this month. Had the victim company or its bank detected the unauthorized activity sooner, the loss would have been far less. But both parties failed to notice the attackers coming and going for five days before being notified by a reporter.

Organized cyber thieves began siphoning cash from Mooresville, N.C. based J.T. Alexander & Son Inc. on the morning of May 1, sending money in sub-$5,000 and sub-$10,000 chunks to about a dozen “money mules,” people hired through work-at-home job scams to help the crooks launder the stolen money. The mules were paid via automated clearing house (ACH) payment batches that were deducted from J.T. Alexander’s payroll account.

The attackers would repeat this process five more times, sending stolen funds via ACH to more than 60 money mules. Some of those mules were recruited by an Eastern European crime gang in Ukraine and Russia that I like to call the “Backoffice Group.” This same group has been involved in nearly every other cyberheist I have written about over the past four years, including last month’s $1.03 million theft from a nonprofit hospital in Washington state.

David Alexander, J.T. Alexander & Son’s president, called the loss “pretty substantial” and “painful,” and said his firm was evaluating its options for recouping some of the loss. The company has just 15 employees that get paid by ACH payroll transactions every two weeks. At most, J.T. Alexander’s usual payroll batch is around $30,000. But in just five days, the thieves managed to steal more than a year’s worth of employee salaries.

The company may be able to recoup some of the loss through insurance: J.T. Alexander & Son Inc.’s policy with Employer’s Mutual Casualty Company (EMC) includes a component that covers cyber fraud losses, but the coverage amount is far less than what the victim firm lost.

Continue reading →

Krebs, KrebsOnSecurity, As Malware Memes

May 22, 2013

43 Comments

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear from some malware researcher or reader who’s discovered what appears to be a new sample of malicious software or nasty link that invokes this author’s name or the name of this blog. I’ve compiled this post to document a few of these examples, some of which are quite funny.

Source: Exposedbotnets.com

Take, for example, the login panel for “Betabot“: Attempt to log in to this malware control panel with credentials that don’t work and you’ll be greeted with a picture of this author, accompanied by the following warning: “Enter the correct password or I will write a 3-part article on this failed login attempt.”

The coders behind Betabot evidently have several versions of this login panel warning: According to a threat intelligence report being released tomorrow by RSA, the latest iteration of this kit uses the mugshot from my accounts at Twtter (follow me!) and Facebook (like it!).

As first detailed by Sophos’s award-winning Naked Security blog, the code inside recent versions of the Redkit exploit kit includes what appears to be a message blaming me for…well, something. The message reads: “Crebs, its [sic] your fault.”

Text string inside of the Redkit exploit kit. Source: Sophos

The one I probably hear about most from researchers is a text string that is built into Citadel (PDF), an offshoot of the ZeuS banking trojan botnet kit that includes the following reference: “Coded by BRIAN KREBS for personal use only. I love my job and my wife.”

A text string within the code of the Citadel trojan. Source: AhnLab

Those are just the most visible examples. More commonly, if Yours Truly is invoked in the name of cybercrime, it tends to show up in malicious links that lead to malware. Here are a few just from the past couple of weeks:

Continue reading →

Conversations with a Bulletproof Hoster

May 20, 2013

48 Comments

Criminal commerce on the Internet would mostly grind to a halt were it not for the protection offered by so-called “bulletproof hosting” providers — the online equivalent of offshore havens where shady dealings go ignored. Last month I had an opportunity to interview a provider of bulletproof services for one of the Web’s most notorious cybercrime forums, and who appears to have been at least partly responsible for launching what’s been called the largest cyber attack the Internet has ever seen.

Off-Sho.re’s intro post to Darkode

Earlier this year, the closely-guarded English-language crime forum darkode.com was compromised and came under a series of heavy distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at keeping it offline. Around that same time, darkode.com welcomed a new member — a bulletproof hosting broker aptly named “Off-sho.re” — who promised to defend the site from future DDoS attacks.

Off-sho.re also said he could offer more robust and crime-friendly hosting services than darkode’s previous provider — Santrex, literally an offshore hosting facility located in the Seychelles, a 115-island country that spans an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Off-sho.re’s timing was perfect: Darkode desperately needed both, and Off-sho.re seemed to know his stuff, so he was admitted to the forum and given stewardship of the site’s defense and hosting.

Off-sho.re recruits Stophaus members on darkode.

STOPHAUS V. SPAMHAUS

Of course, to successfully defend a network against DDoS attacks one must know a great deal about how to launch such assaults. Indeed, Off-sho.re was an integral member of Stophaus, an upstart group of bulletproof hosters that banded together in March to launch a massive Internet attack against anti-spam group Spamhaus.org.

Hundreds of ISPs route or deny traffic based in part on Spamhaus’s blacklists of known, cybercrime-friendly ISPs, and Stophaus formed in response to Spamhaus’s listing of bulletproof hosting provider in particular: A network known alternatively as CB3ROB, a.k.a. “Cyberbunker” because it operated from a heavily fortified NATO bunker in The Netherlands.

Off-sho.re is moderator of the Stophaus forum, and not long after joining darkode.com, he was recruiting fellow darkode members for the Stophaus cause. Stophaus’s records show that another core member was “0ptik,” a competing bulletproof hosting provider. Spamhaus had listed dozens of Optik’s domains, as well as virtually all of the IP address ranges Off-sho.re had rented at abuse-friendly Romanian hosting provider Voxility. It was payback time.

In late March, Spamhaus became the target of what experts called one of the largest computer attacks on the Internet. The method of attack — a DNS amplification attack — was similar to that first seen used in attacks more than a decade ago that targeted the heart of the Internet’s routing system, except that it was by most accounts much larger.

Off-sho.re calls Spamhaus assault “our prank.”

“DNS amplification attacks can bring up to 140 Gbps to a single resource from a single controller,” Off-sho.re wrote in a darkode.com posting less than 24 hours after the attack on Spamhaus began. “The beauty of it [is] that the ‘bots’ are just open DNS resolvers in the world.” Linking to a writeup from Cloudflare.com about the attack, Off-sho.re stated that “Some BP hosters were lately united, check out our latest prank.”

Last month, authorities in Spain arrested Sven Kamphuis, a 35-year-old Dutch man, thought to be responsible for coordinating the unprecedented attack on Spamhaus. According to Spamhaus, Kamphuis made claims about being his own independent country in the Republic of Cyberbunker. But according to Off-Sho.re, Kamphuis was just the public face of the movement. “Sven didn’t attack anyone,” Off-Sho.re wrote in an online chat with KrebsOnSecurity.

If Kamphuis was just a mouthpiece, who was responsible for the attack? What is interesting about the Stophaus movement is that Off-sho.re very well may have prompted Spamhaus to finally place CB3ROB/Cyberbunker at the top of its World’s Worst Spam-Support ISPs list, a move that helped to precipitate this conflict.

According to Spamhaus, while Cyberbunker and Spamhaus certainly have a bit of a history together, Cyberbunker wasn’t really a focus of Spamhaus’s blocking efforts until the fall of 2012. That’s when Spamhaus began noticing a large number of malware and botnet control servers being stood up inside of Cyberbunker’s Internet address ranges.

“We didn’t really notice these guys at CB3ROB much until last fall, when they started hosting botnet controllers, malware droppers and a lot of pharma spam stuff,” said a Spamhaus member who would only give his name as “Barry.” “Before that, it was mainly routing for some Chinese guys — Vincent Chan — fake Chinese products.”

Off-sho.re selling BP hosting out of Cyberbunker

Oddly enough, this coincides with Off-sho.re’s entrance on the bulletproof hosting scene (at least as advertised on crime forums). In his introduction post to Darkode, Off-sho.re referenced his bulletproof hosting sales threads at two Russian-language forums — expoit.in and damagelab.org. In these threads, which began in Sept. 2012, Off-sho.re advertised the ability to host ZeuS and SpyEye botnet command and control networks for between $99 and $199 per month, and bulletproof domain registration from $30 per month. More importantly, Off-sho.re proudly announced that he was offering a premiere BP hosting service for $400 a month that was housed in an old NATO bunker in Holland and that used IP addresses assigned to CB3ROB (see screenshot to left).

Continue reading →

Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

May 16, 2013

62 Comments

On Monday, I profiled asylumbooter.com, one of several increasingly public DDoS-for-hire services posing as Web site “stress testing” services. Today, we’ll look at ragebooter.net, yet another attack service except for one secret feature which sets it apart from the competition: According the site’s proprietor, ragebooter.net includes a hidden backdoor that lets the FBI monitor customer activity.

Ddos-for-hire site ragebooter.net

This bizarre story began about a week ago, when I first started trying to learn who was responsible for running RageBooter. In late March, someone hacked and leaked the users table for ragebooter.net. The database showed that the very first user registered on the site picked the username “Justin,” and signed up with the email address “primalpoland@gmail.com.”

That email address is tied to a now-defunct Facebook account for 22-year-old Justin Poland from Memphis, Tenn. Poland’s personal Facebook account used the alias “PRIMALRAGE,” and was connected to a Facebook page for an entity called Rage Productions. Shortly after an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Poland’s personal Facebook page was deleted, and his name was removed from the Rage Productions page.

Ragebooter.net’s registration records are hidden behind WHOIS privacy protection services. But according to a historic WHOIS lookup at domaintools.com, that veil of secrecy briefly fell away when the site was moved behind Cloudflare.com, a content distribution network that also protects sites against DDoS attacks like the ones Ragebooter and its ilk help to create (as I noted in Monday’s story, some of the biggest targets of booter services are in fact other booter services). For a brief period in Oct. 2012, the WHOIS records showed that ragebooter.net was registered by a Justin Poland in Memphis.

I “friended” Poland on Facebook and said I wanted to interview him. He accepted my request and sent me a chat to ask why I wanted to speak with him. I said I was eager to learn more about his business, and in particular why he thought it was okay to run a DDoS-for-hire service. While we were chatting, I took the liberty of perusing his profile pictures, which included several of a large tattoo he’d had inked across the top of his back — “Primal Rage” in a typeface fashioned after the text used in the Transformers movie series.

Poland is serious about his business.

“Since it is a public service on a public connection to other public servers this is not illegal,” Poland explained, saying that he’d even consulted with an attorney about the legality of his business. When I asked whether launching reflected DNS attacks was okay, Poland said his service merely took advantage of the default settings of some DNS servers.

“Nor is spoofing the sender address [illegal],” he wrote. “If the root user of the server does not want that used they can simple disable recursive DNS. My service is a legal testing service. How individuals use it is at there [sic] own risk and responsibilitys [sic]. I do not advertise this service anywhere nor do I entice or encourage illegal usage of the product. How the user uses it is at their own risk. I provide logs to any legal law enforcement and keep logs for up to 7 days.”

The conversation got interesting when I asked the logical follow-up question: Had the police or federal authorities ever asked for information about his customers?

That was when Poland dropped the bomb, informing me that he was actually working for the FBI.

“I also work for the FBI on Tuesdays at 1pm in memphis, tn,” Poland wrote. “They allow me to continue this business and have full access. The FBI also use the site so that they can moniter [sic] the activitys [sic] of online users.. They even added a nice IP logger that logs the users IP when they login.”

When I asked Poland to provide more information that I might use to verify his claims that he was working for the FBI, the conversation turned combative, and he informed me that I wasn’t allowed to use any of the information he’d already shared with me. I replied that I hadn’t and wouldn’t agree that any of our discussion was to be off the record, and he in turn promised to sue me if I ran this story. That was more or less the end of that conversation.

As to the relative legality of booter services, I consulted Mark Rasch, a security expert and former attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. Rasch said companies hire stress testing services all the time, but usually as part of a more inclusive penetration testing engagement. In such engagements, Rasch said, it is common for the parties conducting the tests to insist upon and obtain beforehand a “get out of jail free card,” essentially a notarized letter from the customer stating that the testing firm was hired to break into and otherwise probe the security and stability of the targeted Web site.

“This is also why locksmiths generally force you to show ID that proves your address before they’ll break into a house for you,” Rasch said. “The standard in the security industry is not only to require proof that you own the sites that are going to be shut down or attacked, but also an indemnification provision.”

On Monday, I pinged Mr. Poland once more, again using Facebook’s chat function. I wanted to hear more about his claim that he was working for the feds. To my surprise, he gave me the number of a Memphis man he referred to as his FBI contact, a man Poland said he knew only as “Agent Lies.”

The man who answered at the phone number supplied by Poland declined to verify his name, seemed peeved that I’d called, and demanded to know who gave me his phone number. When I told him that I was referred to him by Mr. Poland, the person on the other end of the line informed me that he was not authorized to to speak with the press directly. He rattled off the name and number of the press officer in the FBI’s Memphis field office, and hung up.

Just minutes after I spoke with “Agent Lies,” Justin dropped me a line to say that he could not be my ‘friend’ any longer. “I have been asked to block you. Have a nice day,” Poland wrote in a Facebook chat, without elaborating. His personal Facebook page disappeared moments later.

Not long after that, I heard back from Joel Siskovic, spokesman for the Memphis FBI field office, who said he could neither confirm nor deny Poland’s claims. Siskovic also declined to verify whether the FBI had an Agent Lies.

“People come forward all the time and make claims they are working with us, and sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not,” Siskovic said. “But it wouldn’t be prudent for us to confirm that we have individuals helping us or assisting us, either because they’re being good citizens or because they’re somehow compelled to.”

Update, June 1: A little Googling shows that there is in fact an FBI Agent Lies in the Memphis area. Many of the public cases that Agent Lies has testified in appear to be child-exploitation related, such as this one (PDF).

Continue reading →

Microsoft, Adobe Push Critical Security Updates

May 14, 2013

27 Comments

Microsoft and Adobe today each released updates to fix critical security holes in their software. Microsoft’s patch batch tackles at least 33 vulnerabilities in Windows and other products, including a fix for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that attackers have been exploiting. Separately, Adobe pushed security updates for Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Acrobat and Adobe AIR.

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday bundle includes two separate updates for Internet Explorer; the first (MS13-037) is a cumulative update for Internet Explorer. The second is a fix (MS13-038) specifically for a critical bug in IE 8 that miscreants and malware have been using to break into Windows computers. Other, slightly less severe holes were fixed in Microsoft Publisher, Word, Visio and Windows Essentials.

Last week, Microsoft released a stopgap “Fix-it” tool to help blunt the threat from the IE8 zero-day flaw. If you installed that interim fix, Microsoft recommends taking a moment to disable it before applying today’s patches.

<soapbox>On a side note..Dear Microsoft: Please stop asking people to install Silverlight every time they visit a Microsoft.com property. I realize that Silverlight is a Microsoft product, but it really is not needed to view information about security updates. In keeping with the principle of reducing the attack surface of an operating system, you should not be foisting additional software on visitors who are coming to you for information on how to fix bugs and vulnerabilities in Microsoft products that they already have installed. </soapbox>

Silverlight required? C’mon, Microsoft!

As it usually does on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, Adobe used the occasion to push its own security updates. A new version of Flash (v. 11.7.700.202 for Mac and Windows systems) fixes 13 vulnerabilities. IE 10 and Google Chrome automatically update themselves to fix Flash flaws. This link should tell you which version of Flash your browser has installed. If your version of Chrome is not yet updated to v. 11.7.700.202, you may need to just restart the browser.

Continue reading →

DDoS Services Advertise Openly, Take PayPal

May 13, 2013

36 Comments

The past few years have brought a proliferation of online services that can be hired to knock Web sites and individual Internet users offline. Once only found advertised in shadowy underground forums, many of today’s so-called “booter” or “stresser” services are operated by U.S. citizens who openly advertise their services while hiding behind legally dubious disclaimers. Oh, and they nearly all rely on Paypal to receive payments.

Asylum’s attack options.

Many of these booter sites are based on the same source code, meaning that any vulnerabilities in that code can be used to siphon data from the back-end databases of multiple, competing services. This happened in March to booter.tw, a service that was used to launch a volley of attacks against this blog, among others.

Today we’ll be taking a closer look at another booter service whose customer database was recently leaked: asylumstresser.com (a.k.a. asylumbooter.com/net/us). Like other booter services, asylumstresser.com isn’t designed to take down large Web sites that are accustomed to dealing with massive attacks from Internet extortionists. But these services can and are used to sideline medium-sized sites, although their most common targets are online gaming servers.

Asylum says it deletes records of attacked sites after one month, and the leaked database confirms that. But the database also shows the sheer volume of online attacks that are channeled through these services: Between the week of Mar. 17, 2013 and Mar. 23, 2013, asylumstresser.com was used to launch more than 10,000 online attacks.

According to the leaked database for Asylum, the administrator and first registrant on the site uses the address chandlerdowns1995@gmail.com. That same email address was the beneficiary of more than $35,000 in Paypal payments made by customers of the service. Overall, more than 33,000 user accounts were created on the site.

That chanderdowns1995@gmail.com address also is tied to a Facebook account for a 17-year-old honor roll student named Chandler Downs from suburban Chicago. A reverse WHOIS report (PDF) ordered from domaintools.com shows other interesting sites registered with that same email address.

In a brief interview conducted over Gmail chat, Downs maintained that the service is intended only for “stress testing” one’s own site, not for attacking others. And yet, asylumstresser.com includes a Skype resolver service that lets users locate the Internet address of anyone using Skype. Asylum’s resolver wouldn’t let me look up Downs’ own Skype address — “hugocub1.” But another Skype resolver service shows that that Skype username traces back to a Comcast Internet address outside of Chicago.

Asylumstresser.com also features a youtube.com ad that highlights the service’s ability to “take down your competitors’ servers or Web site.”

“Do you get annoyed all the time because of skids on xBox Live? Do you want to take down your competitors’ servers or Web site?,” reads the site’s ad, apparently recorded by this paid actor at Fiverr.com. “Well, boy, do we have the product for you! Now, with asylumstresser, you can take your enemies offline for just 30 cents for a 10 minute time period. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it gets even better: For only $18 per month, you can have an unlimited number of attacks with an increased boot time. We also offer Skype and tiny chat IP resolvers.”

Downs said he was not the owner of the site – just the administrator. He shrugged off the ad’s message, and said Asylum wasn’t responsible for what customers did with the service.

“You are able to block any of the ‘attacks’ as you say with rather basic networking knowledge,” Downs said. “If you’re unable to do such a thing you probably shouldn’t be running a website in the first place. No one would spend money to stress a site without a reason. If you’re giving someone a reason, that’s your own fault.”

Not so fast, said Mark Rasch, a computer security expert and former U.S. Justice Department attorney.

“If they’ve got their fingers on the trigger and they launch the attacks when they’re paid to, then I would say they’re criminally and civilly liable for it,” Rasch said.

Continue reading →

A Stopgap Fix for the IE8 Zero-Day Flaw

May 8, 2013

21 Comments

Microsoft has released an stopgap solution to help Internet Explorer 8 users blunt the threat from attacks against a zero-day flaw in the browser that is actively being exploited in the wild.

Microsoft is working on an official fix for the IE8 bug. In the meantime affected users should take advantage of the interim fix that the company released today. It is a one-click fix-it tool that does not require a system restart to take effect.

To do that, visit this link with IE8 and click the fix-it icon under the “Enable” heading. If you need to remove this workaround for any reason, just head back to that page and click the fix-it image beneath the “Disable” heading.

Trade Sanctions Cited in Hundreds of Syrian Domain Seizures

May 8, 2013

15 Comments

In apparent observation of international trade sanctions against Syria, a U.S. firm that ranks as the world’s fourth-largest domain name registrar has seized hundreds of domains belonging to various Syrian entities, including a prominent Syrian hacker group and sites associated with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian Electron Army complains about its domain seizures, saying Network Solutions cited trade sanctions against Syria. Source: HP

Network Solutions LLC. and its parent firm — Jacksonville, Fla. based Web.com — have assumed control over more than 700 domains that were being used mostly for sites hosted in Damascus. The seizures all occurred within a three- to four-day period in mid-April.

The apparently coordinated action ended with each of the site’s registration records being changed to include Web.com’s Florida address, as well as the notation “OFAC Holding.”

OFAC is short for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an office of the U.S. Treasury Department‘s Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. OFAC administers and enforces U.S. economic trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries, including Syria.

Web.com declined to say whether it had coordinated the seizures or why it may have done so. “We do not comment publicly about specific accounts so we cannot provide details about the websites or domains mentioned in your inquiry,” the company said in an emailed statement. “However, you should know that we cooperate with law enforcement and regulators in order to prevent illegal activity online and take the necessary steps to be in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.”

Under a series of executive orders, U.S. businesses are prohibited from selling goods and services into Syria. While there are a number of exceptions — referred to as “general licenses” in OFAC-speak — domain hosting and registration services are not among them. Although the general licenses permit services that are designed for personal communications, the provision of Web hosting and domain name registration is specifically called out in Treasury regulations (PDF) as not authorized under general licenses.

A spokesman for the Treasury Department said OFAC had not contacted either Web.com or Network Solutions regarding these Web sites.

“OFAC has offered a general license authorizing the export of certain services for the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, such as instant messaging, chat and email, so that these sanctions don’t have the inadvertent effect of cutting the Syrian people off from the rest of the world,” said John Sullivan, spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Terrorism and Financial Intelligence division. “But the [general license] that allows for that does not authorize the exportation of Web hosting or registration services, so those could be subject to enforcement actions under our Syrian sanctions program.”

The domain seizures came to my attention after reading a report produced last month by HP‘s security and research team, which noted that individuals associated with a pro-Assad hacker group known as Syrian Electronic Army were complaining that NetworkSolutions had seized their domains, including syrian-es.com, syrian-es.net and syrian-es.org.

A reverse WHOIS report ordered from domaintools.com produced this list (PDF) of some 708 Syrian domains recently shuttered and assigned an “OFAC” designation by Web.com. According to historic Web hosting records also maintained by domaintools.com, the vast majority of the 700+ domains were hosted at Internet addresses assigned to the Syrian Computer Society (SCS). Interestingly, prior to assuming the presidency, Syria’s Assad was president of the SCS, a group now widely believed to have been a precursor to the Syrian Electronic Army.

Continue reading →

Zero-Day Exploit Published for IE8

May 6, 2013

50 Comments

Security experts are warning that a newly discovered vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 is being actively exploited to break into Microsoft Windows systems. Complicating matters further, computer code that can be used to reliably exploit the flaw is now publicly available online.

In an advisory released May 3, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of a vulnerability in IE8, and that it was aware of attacks that attempt to exploit this bug. The company stresses that other versions of IE — including IE6, 7, 9 and 10 are not affected by the vulnerability. However, all versions of IE8 are vulnerable, including copies running on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Meanwhile, a new module that exploits this IE8 bug is now available for the Metasploit Framework, a free penetration testing tool. I would expect this exploit or some version of it will soon be rolled into commercial exploit kits that are sold in the cybercrime underground (assuming this has not already happened).

Update, May 9, 9:00 a.m. ET: Microsoft has released a fix-it tool to blunt attacks on this bug. See this story for more information.

Original post:

The security hole has already been leveraged in at least one high-profile attack. Over the weekend, several security vendors reported that the U.S. Department of Labor Web site had been hacked and seeded with code designed to exploit the flaw and download malicious software.

The attack on the Labor Department site is seen as a watering hole attack, which involves the targeted compromise of legitimate websites thought to be of interest to or frequented by end users who belong to organizations that attackers wish to infiltrate. Previous watering hole attacks have targeted the Web site for the Council on Foreign Relations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the National Democratic Institute.

According to CrowdStrike, the server used to control this latest attack on the Labor Department site was microsoftupdate.ns1.name. The company said analysis of the logs from the attacker’s infrastructure revealed that visitors from 37 different countries browsed the site during the time it was compromised with the malicious code. AlienVault, Invincea and Cisco Systems have published additional details on this attack. AlienVault also said it has since spotted the same exploit used on at least nine other hacked Web sites, including several non-profit groups and a large European company.

Continue reading →

Alleged SpyEye Seller ‘Bx1’ Extradited to U.S.

May 3, 2013

27 Comments

A 24-year-old Algerian man arrested in Thailand earlier this year on suspicion of co-developing and selling the infamous SpyEye banking trojan was extradited this week to the United States, where he faces criminal charges for allegedly hijacking bank accounts at more than 200 financial institutions.

Bx1’s profile page on darkode.com

Hamza Bendelladj, who authorities say used the nickname “Bx1” online, is accused of operating a botnet powered by SpyEye, a complex banking trojan that he also allegedly sold and helped develop. Bendelladj was arraigned on May 2, 2013 in Atlanta, where he is accused of leasing a server from a local Internet company to help manage his SpyEye botnet.

A redacted copy of the indictment (PDF) against Bendelladj was unsealed this week; the document says Bendelladj developed and customized components of SpyEye that helped customers steal online banking credentials and funds from specific banks.

The government alleges that as Bx1, Bendelladj was an active member of darkode.com, an underground fraud forum that I’ve covered in numerous posts on this blog. Bx1’s core focus in the community was selling “web injects” — custom add-ons for SpyEye that can change the appearance and function of banking Web sites as displayed in a victim’s Web browser. More specifically, Bx1 sold a type of web inject called an automated transfer system or ATS; this type of malware component was used extensively with SpyEye — and with its close cousin the ZeuS Trojan — to silently and invisibly automate the execution of bank transfers just seconds after the owners of infected PCs logged into their bank accounts.

“Zeus/SpyEYE/Ice9 ATS for Sale,” Bx1 announced in a post on darkode.com thread dated Jan. 16, 2012:

“Hey all. I’m selling private ATS’s. Working and Tested.

We got IT / DE / AT / UK / US / CO / NL / FR / AU

Contact me for bank.

can develop bank ATS from your choice.”

The government alleges that Bx1/Bendelladj made millions selling SpyEye, SpyEye components and harvesting financial data from victims in his own SpyEye botnet. But Bx1 customers and associates on darkode.com expressed strong doubts about this claim, noting that someone who was making that kind of money would not blab or be as open about his activities as Bx1 apparently was.

Darkode discusses Symlink’s arrest

In my previous post on Bx1, I noted that he reached out to me on several occasions to brag about his botnet and to share information about his illicit activities. In one case, he even related a story about breaking into the networks of a rival ATS/web inject developer named Symlink. Bx1 said he told Symlink to expect a visit from the local cops if he didn’t pay Bx1 to keep his mouth shut. It’s not clear whether that story is true or if Symlink ever paid the money; in any case, Symlink was arrested on cybercrime charges in Oct. 2012 by authorities in Moldova.

The redacted portions of the government indictment of Bendelladj are all references to Bx1’s partner — the author of the SpyEye Trojan and a malware developer known in the underground alternatively as “Gribodemon” and “Harderman.” In a conference call with reporters today, U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said the real name of the principal author of SpyEye was redacted from the indictment because he had not yet been arrested.

Continue reading →

Last »