‘Spam Nation’ Villain Vrublevsky Charged With Fraud

March 22, 2022

Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the Russian payment technology firm ChronoPay and the antagonist in my 2014 book “Spam Nation,” was arrested in Moscow this month and charged with fraud. Russian authorities allege Vrublevsky operated several fraudulent SMS-based payment schemes, and facilitated money laundering for Hydra, the largest Russian darknet market. But according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, it is equally likely Vrublevsky was arrested thanks to his propensity for carefully documenting the links between Russia’s state security services and the cybercriminal underground.

An undated photo of Vrublevsky at his ChronoPay office in Moscow.

ChronoPay specializes in providing access to the global credit card networks for “high risk” merchants — businesses involved in selling services online that tend to generate an unusually large number of chargebacks and reports of fraud, and hence have a higher risk of failure.

When I first began writing about Vrublevsky in 2009 as a reporter for The Washington Post, ChronoPay and its sister firm Red & Partners (RNP) were earning millions setting up payment infrastructure for fake antivirus peddlers and spammers pimping male enhancement drugs.

Using the hacker alias “RedEye,” the ChronoPay CEO oversaw a burgeoning pharmacy spam affiliate program called Rx-Promotion, which paid some of Russia’s most talented spammers and virus writers to bombard the world with junk email promoting Rx-Promotion’s pill shops. RedEye also was the administrator of Crutop, a Russian language forum and affiliate program that catered to thousands of adult webmasters.

In 2013, Vrublevsky was sentenced to 2.5 years in a Russian penal colony for convincing one of his top affiliates to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a competitor that shut down the ticketing system for the state-owned Aeroflot airline.

Following his release from jail, Vrublevsky began working on a new digital payments platform based in Hong Kong called HPay Ltd (a.k.a. Hong Kong Processing Corporation). HPay appears to have had a great number of clients that were running schemes which bamboozled people with fake lotteries and prize contests.

According to Russian prosecutors, the scam went like this: Consumers would receive an SMS with links to sites that falsely claimed a number of well-known companies were sponsoring drawings and lotteries for people who enrolled or agreed to answer surveys. All who responded were told they were winners, but also that they had to pay a commission to pick up the prize. That scheme allegedly stole 500 million rubles (~ USD $4.5 million) from over 100,000 consumers.

There are scant public records that show a connection between ChronoPay and HPay, apart from the fact that the latter’s website — hpay[.]io — was originally hosted on the same server (185.180.196.74) along with a handful of other domains, including Vrublevsky’s personal website rnp[.]com.

But then earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity received a large amount of information that was stolen from ChronoPay recently when hackers managed to compromise the company’s Confluence server. Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki platform, and ChronoPay used their Confluence installation to document in exquisite detail how it creatively distributes the risk associated with high-risk processing by routing transactions through a myriad of shell companies and third-party processors.

A Google-translated snippet of the hacked ChronoPay Confluence installation. Click to enlarge.

Incredibly, Vrublevsky himself appears to have used ChronoPay’s Confluence wiki to document his entire 20+ years of personal and professional history in the high-risk payments space, including the company’s most recent forays with HPay. The latest document in the hacked archive is dated April 2021.

These diary entries, interspersed between highly technical how-tos, are all written in Russian and in the third person. But they are unmistakably Vrublevsky’s words: Some of the elaborate stories in the wiki were identical to theories that Vrublevsky himself espoused to me throughout hundreds of hours of phone interviews. Also, in some of the entries the narrator switches from “he” to “I” when describing the actions of Vrublevsky.

Vrublevsky’s memoire/wiki invokes the nicknames and real names of Russian hackers who worked with the protection of corrupt officials in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the Soviet KGB. In several diary entries, Vrublevsky writes about various cybercriminals and Russian law enforcement officials involved in processing credit card payments tied to online gambling sites.

Russian banks are prohibited from processing payments for online gambling, and as a result many online gaming sites catering to Russian speakers have chosen to process credit card payments through Ukrainian financial institutions.

That’s according to Vladislav “BadB” Horohorin, the convicted cybercriminal who shared the ChronoPay Confluence data with KrebsOnSecurity. In February 2017, Horohorin was released after serving four years in a U.S. prison for his role in the 2009 theft of more than $9 million from RBS Worldpay.

Horohorin said Vrublevsky has been using his knowledge of the card processing networks to extort people in the online gambling industry who may run afoul of Russian laws.

“Russia has strict regulations against processing for the gambling business,” Horohorin said. “While Russian banks can’t do it, Ukrainian ones can, so we have Ukrainian banks processing gambling and casinos, which mostly Russian gamblers use. What Pavel does is he blackmails those Ukrainian banks using his connections and knowledge. Some pay, some don’t. But some people are not very tolerant of that kind of abuse.” Continue reading

Pro-Ukraine ‘Protestware’ Pushes Antiwar Ads, Geo-Targeted Malware

March 17, 2022

Researchers are tracking a number of open-source “protestware” projects on GitHub that have recently altered their code to display “Stand with Ukraine” messages for users, or basic facts about the carnage in Ukraine. The group also is tracking several code packages that were recently modified to erase files on computers that appear to be coming from Russian or Belarusian Internet addresses.

The upstart tracking effort is being crowdsourced via Telegram, but the output of the Russian research group is centralized in a Google Spreadsheet that is open to the public. Most of the GitHub code repositories tracked by this group include relatively harmless components that will either display a simple message in support of Ukraine, or show statistics about the war in Ukraine — such as casualty numbers — and links to more information on the Deep Web.

For example, the popular library ES5-ext hadn’t updated its code in nearly two years. But on March 7, the code project added a component “postinstall.js,” which checks to see if the user’s computer is tied to a Russian Internet address. If so, the code broadcasts a “Call for peace:”

A message that appears for Russian users of the popular es5-ext code library on GitHub. The message has been Google-Translated from Russian to English.

A more concerning example can be found at the GitHub page for “vue-cli,” a popular Javascript framework for building web-based user interfaces. On March 15, users discovered a new component had been added that was designed to wipe all files from any systems visiting from a Russian or Belarusian Internet address (the malicious code has since been removed):

Readers complaining that an update to the popular Vue-Cli package sought to wipe files if the user was coming from a Russian IP address.

“Man, I love politics in my APIs,” GitHub user “MSchleckser” commented wryly on Mar. 15. Continue reading

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Lawmakers Probe Early Release of Top RU Cybercrook

March 15, 2022

Aleksei Burkov, seated second from right, attends a hearing in Jerusalem in 2015. Image: Andrei Shirokov / Tass via Getty Images.

Aleksei Burkov, a cybercriminal who long operated two of Russia’s most exclusive underground hacking forums, was arrested in 2015 by Israeli authorities. The Russian government fought Burkov’s extradition to the U.S. for four years — even arresting and jailing an Israeli woman to force a prisoner swap. That effort failed: Burkov was sent to America, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to nine years in prison. But a little more than a year later, he was quietly released and deported back to Russia. Now some Republican lawmakers are asking why a Russian hacker once described as “an asset of supreme importance” was allowed to shorten his stay.

A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, Burkov admitted to running CardPlanet, a site that sold more than 150,000 stolen credit card accounts, and to being a founder of DirectConnection — a closely guarded online community that attracted some of the world’s most-wanted Russian hackers.

But Burkov’s cybercriminal activities spanned far beyond mere credit card fraud. A 2019 deep dive into Burkov’s hacker alias “K0pa” revealed he also was co-administrator of the secretive Russian cybercrime forum “Mazafaka.” Like DirectConnection, Mazafaka’s member roster was a veritable “Who’s Who?” of the Russian hacker underground, and K0pa played a key role in vetting new members and settling disputes for both communities.

K0pa’s elevated status in the Russian cybercrime community made him one of the most connected malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities. As I wrote at the time of Burkov’s extradition, the Kremlin was probably concerned that he simply knew too much about Russia’s propensity to outsource certain activities to its criminal hacker community.

“To my knowledge, no one has accused Burkov of being some kind of cybercrime fixer or virtual badguy Rolodex for the Russian government,” KrebsOnSecurity wrote in 2019. “On the other hand, from his onetime lofty perch atop some of the most exclusive Russian cybercrime forums, K0pa certainly would have fit that role nicely.”

Burkov was arrested in December 2015 on an international warrant while visiting Israel, and over the ensuing four years the Russian government aggressively sought to keep him from being extradited to the United States.

When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians imprisoned Israeli citizen Naama Issachar on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. Nevertheless, Burkov was extradited to the United States in November 2019.

And if there were any doubts Issachar was jailed for use as a political pawn, Russian President Vladimir Putin erased those by pardoning her in January 2020, just hours after Burkov pleaded guilty in the United States.

In June 2020, Burkov was sentenced to nine years in prison. But a little more than a year later — Aug. 25, 2021 — Burkov was released and deported back to Russia. According to a letter (PDF) sent Monday by four Republican House lawmakers to White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials escorted Burkov onto a plane destined for Moscow shortly after his release. Continue reading

Report: Recent 10x Increase in Cyberattacks on Ukraine

March 11, 2022

As their cities suffered more intense bombardment by Russian military forces this week, Ukrainian Internet users came under renewed cyberattacks, with one Internet company providing service there saying they blocked ten times the normal number of phishing and malware attacks targeting Ukrainians.

John Todd is general manager of Quad9, a free “anycast” DNS platform. DNS stands for Domain Name System, which is like a globally distributed phone book for the Internet that maps human-friendly website names (example.com) to numeric Internet addresses (8.8.4.4.) that are easier for computers to manage. Your computer or mobile device generates DNS lookups each time you send or receive an email, or browse to a webpage.

With anycast, one Internet address can apply to many servers, meaning that any one of a number of DNS servers can respond to DNS queries, and usually the one that is geographically closest to the customer making the request will provide the response.

Quad9 insulates its users from a range of cyberattacks by blocking DNS requests for known-bad domain names, i.e., those confirmed to be hosting malicious software, phishing websites, stalkerware and other threats. And normally, the ratio of DNS queries coming from Ukraine that are allowed versus blocked by Quad9 is fairly constant.

But Todd says that on March 9, Quad9’s systems blocked 10 times the normal number of DNS requests coming from Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Poland.

Todd said Quad9 saw a significant drop in traffic reaching its Kyiv POP [point of presence] during the hostilities, presumably due to fiber cuts or power outages. Some of that traffic then shifted to Warsaw, which for much of Ukraine’s networking is the next closest significant interconnect site.

Quad9’s view of a spike in malicious traffic targeting Ukrainian users this week. Click to enlarge.

“While our overall traffic dropped in Kyiv — and slightly increased in Warsaw due to infrastructure outages inside of .ua — the ratio of (good queries):(blocked queries) has spiked in both cities,” he continued. “The spike in that blocking ratio [Wednesday] afternoon in Kyiv was around 10x the normal level when comparing against other cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Frankfurt.) While Ukraine always is slightly higher (20%-ish) than Western Europe, this order-of-magnitude jump is unprecedented.” Continue reading

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2022 Edition

March 9, 2022

Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to plug at least 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software. For the second month running, there are no scary zero-day threats looming for Windows users, and relatively few “critical” fixes. And yet we know from experience that attackers are already trying to work out how to turn these patches into a roadmap for exploiting the flaws they fix. Here’s a look at the security weaknesses Microsoft says are most likely to be targeted first.

Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, notes that three vulnerabilities fixed this month have been previously disclosed, potentially giving attackers a head start in working out how to exploit them. Those include remote code execution bugs CVE-2022-24512, affecting .NET and Visual Studio, and CVE-2022-21990, affecting Remote Desktop Client. CVE-2022-24459 is a vulnerability in the Windows Fax and Scan service. All three publicly disclosed vulnerabilities are rated “Important” by Microsoft.

Just three of the fixes this month earned Microsoft’s most-dire “Critical” rating, which Redmond assigns to bugs that can be exploited to remotely compromise a Windows PC with little to no help from users. Two of those critical flaws involve Windows video codecs. Perhaps the most concerning critical bug quashed this month is CVE-2022-23277, a  remote code execution flaw affecting Microsoft Exchange Server.

“Thankfully, this is a post-authentication vulnerability, meaning attackers need credentials to exploit it,” Wiseman said. “Although passwords can be obtained via phishing and other means, this one shouldn’t be as rampantly exploited as the deluge of Exchange vulnerabilities we saw throughout 2021. Exchange administrators should still patch as soon as reasonably possible.”

CVE-2022-24508 is a remote code execution bug affecting Windows SMBv3, the technology that handles file sharing in Windows environments.

“This has potential for widespread exploitation, assuming an attacker can put together a suitable exploit,” Wiseman said. “Luckily, like this month’s Exchange vulnerabilities, this, too, requires authentication.” Continue reading

Internet Backbone Giant Lumen Shuns .RU

March 8, 2022

Lumen Technologies, an American company that operates one of the largest Internet backbones and carries a significant percentage of the world’s Internet traffic, said today it will stop routing traffic for organizations based in Russia. Lumen’s decision comes just days after a similar exit by backbone provider Cogent, and amid a news media crackdown in Russia that has already left millions of Russians in the dark about what is really going on with their president’s war in Ukraine.

Monroe, La. based Lumen [NYSE: LUMN] (formerly CenturyLink) initially said it would halt all new business with organizations based in Russia, leaving open the possibility of continuing to serve existing clients there. But on Tuesday the company said it could no longer justify that stance.

“Life has taken a turn in Russia and Lumen is unable to continue to operate in this market,” Lumen said in a published statement. “The business services we provide are extremely small and very limited as is our physical presence. However, we are taking steps to immediately stop business in the region.”

“We decided to disconnect the network due to increased security risk inside Russia,” the statement continues. “We have not yet experienced network disruptions but given the increasingly uncertain environment and the heightened risk of state action, we took this move to ensure the security of our and our customers’ networks, as well as the ongoing integrity of the global Internet.”

According to Internet infrastructure monitoring firm Kentik, Lumen is the top international transit provider to Russia, with customers including Russian telecom giants Rostelecom and TTK, as well as all three major mobile operators (MTS, Megafon and VEON).

“A backbone carrier disconnecting its customers in a country the size of Russia is without precedent in the history of the internet and reflects the intense global reaction that the world has had over the invasion of Ukraine,” wrote Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of Internet analysis.

It’s not clear whether any other Internet backbone providers — some of which are based outside of the United States — will follow the lead of Lumen and Cogent. But Madory notes that as economic sanctions continue to exact a toll on Russia’s economy, its own telecommunications firms may have difficulty paying foreign transit providers for service.

Ukrainian leaders petitioned the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the nonprofit organization charged with overseeing the global domain name system — to disconnect Russia’s top-level domain (.ru) from the Internet. ICANN respectfully declined that request, but many technology giants, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, have moved on their own to suspend new business in the country.

Meanwhile, Russia recently cracked down on the last remaining vestiges of a free press within its borders, passing a new law that threatens up to 15 years in jail for anyone who publishes content that refers to the conflict in Ukraine as a “war” or “invasion.” Continue reading

Conti Ransomware Group Diaries, Part IV: Cryptocrime

March 7, 2022

Three stories here last week pored over several years’ worth of internal chat records stolen from the Conti ransomware group, the most profitable ransomware gang in operation today. The candid messages revealed how Conti evaded law enforcement and intelligence agencies, what it was like on a typical day at the Conti office, and how Conti secured the digital weaponry used in their attacks. This final post on the Conti conversations explores different schemes that Conti pursued to invest in and steal cryptocurrencies.

When you’re perhaps the most successful ransomware group around — Conti made $180 million last year in extortion payments, well more than any other crime group, according to Chainalysis — you tend to have a lot digital currency like Bitcoin.

This wealth allowed Conti to do things that regular investors couldn’t — such as moving the price of cryptocurrencies in one direction or the other. Or building a cryptocurrency platform and seeding it with loads of ill-gotten crypto from phantom investors.

One Conti top manager — aptly-named “Stern” because he incessantly needled Conti underlings to complete their assigned tasks — was obsessed with the idea of creating his own crypto scheme for cross-platform blockchain applications.

“I’m addicted right now, I’m interested in trading, defi, blockchain, new projects,” Stern told “Bloodrush” on Nov. 3, 2021. “Big companies have too many secrets that they hold on to, thinking that this is their main value, these patents and data.”

In a discussion thread that spanned many months in Conti’s internal chat room, Stern said the plan was to create their own crypto universe.

“Like Netherium, Polkadot and Binance smart chain, etc.,” Stern wrote. “Does anyone know more about this? Study the above systems, code, principles of work. To build our own, where it will already be possible to plug in NFT, DEFI, DEX and all the new trends that are and will be. For others to create their own coins, exchanges and projects on our system.”

It appears that Stern has been paying multiple developers to pursue the notion of building a peer-to-peer (P2P) based system for “smart contracts” — programs stored on a blockchain that run whenever predetermined conditions are met.

It’s unclear under what context the Conti gang was interested in smart contracts, but the idea of a ransomware group insisting on payments via smart contracts is not entirely new. In 2020, researchers from Athens University School of Information Sciences and Technology in Greece showed (PDF) how ransomware-as-a-service offerings might one day be executed through smart contracts.

Before that, Jeffrey Ladish, an information security consultant based in Oakland, Calif., penned a two-part analysis on why smart contracts will make ransomware more profitable.

“By using a smart contract, an operator can trustlessly sell their victims a decryption key for money,” Ladish wrote. “That is, a victim can send some money to a smart contract with a guarantee that they will either receive the decryption key to their data or get their money back. The victim does not have to trust the person who hacked their computer because they can verify that the smart contract will fairly handle the exchange.”

The Conti employee “Van” appears to have taken the lead on the P2P crypto platform, which he said was being developed using the Rust programming language.

“I am trying to make a p2p network in Rust,” Van told “Demon” on Feb. 19, 2022 [Demon appears to be one of Stern’s aliases]. “I’m sorting it out and have already started writing code.”

“It’s cool you like Rust,” Demon replied. “I think it will help us with smart contracts.”

Stern apparently believed in his crypto dreams so much that he sponsored a $100,000 article writing contest on the Russian language cybercrime forum Exploit, asking interested applicants to put forth various ideas for crypto platforms. Such contests are an easy way to buy intellectual property for ongoing projects, and they’re also effective recruiting tools for cybercriminal organizations.

“Cryptocurrency article contest! [100.000$],” wrote mid-level Conti manager “Mango,” to boss Stern, copying the title of the post on the Exploit forum. “What the hell are you doing there…”

A few days later Mango reports to Stern that he has “prepared everything for both the social network and articles for crypto contests.” Continue reading

Conti Ransomware Group Diaries, Part III: Weaponry

March 4, 2022

Part I of this series examined newly-leaked internal chats from the Conti ransomware group, and how the crime gang dealt with its own internal breaches. Part II explored what it’s like to be an employee of Conti’s sprawling organization. Today’s Part III looks at how Conti abused popular commercial security services to undermine the security of their targets, as well as how the team’s leaders strategized for the upper hand in ransom negotiations with victims.

Conti is by far the most aggressive and profitable ransomware group in operation today. Image: Chainalysis

Conti is by far the most successful ransomware group in operation today, routinely pulling in multi-million dollar payments from victim organizations. That’s because more than perhaps any other ransomware outfit, Conti has chosen to focus its considerable staff and talents on targeting companies with more than $100 million in annual revenues.

As it happens, Conti itself recently joined the $100 million club. According to the latest Crypto Crime Report (PDF) published by virtual currency tracking firm Chainalysis, Conti generated at least $180 million in revenue last year.

On Feb. 27, a Ukrainian cybersecurity researcher who is currently in Ukraine leaked almost two years’ worth of internal chat records from Conti, which had just posted a press release to its victim shaming blog saying it fully supported Russia’s invasion of his country. Conti warned it would use its cyber prowess to strike back at anyone who interfered in the conflict.

The leaked chats show that the Conti group — which fluctuated in size from 65 to more than 100 employees — budgeted several thousand dollars each month to pay for a slew of security and antivirus tools. Conti sought out these tools both for continuous testing (to see how many products detected their malware as bad), but also for their own internal security.

A chat between Conti upper manager “Reshaev” and subordinate “Pin” on Aug. 8, 2021 shows Reshaev ordering Pin to quietly check on the activity of the Conti network administrators once a week — to ensure they’re not doing anything to undermine the integrity or security of the group’s operation. Reshaev tells Pin to install endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools on every administrator’s computer.

“Check admins’ activity on servers each week,” Reshaev said. “Install EDR on every computer (for example, Sentinel, Cylance, CrowdStrike); set up more complex storage system; protect LSAS dump on all computers; have only 1 active accounts; install latest security updates; install firewall on all network.”

Conti managers were hyper aware that their employees handled incredibly sensitive and invaluable data stolen from companies, information that would sell like hotcakes on the underground cybercrime forums. But in a company run by crooks, trust doesn’t come easily.

“You check on me all the time, don’t you trust me?,” asked mid-level Conti member “Bio” of “Tramp” (a.k.a. “Trump“), a top Conti overlord. Bio was handling a large bitcoin transfer from a victim ransom payment, and Bio detected that Trump was monitoring him.

“When that kind of money and people from the street come in who have never seen that kind of money, how can you trust them 1,000%?” Trump replied. “I’ve been working here for more than 15 years and haven’t seen anything else.” Continue reading

Conti Ransomware Group Diaries, Part II: The Office

March 2, 2022

Earlier this week, a Ukrainian security researcher leaked almost two years’ worth of internal chat logs from Conti, one of the more rapacious and ruthless ransomware gangs in operation today. Tuesday’s story examined how Conti dealt with its own internal breaches and attacks from private security firms and governments. In Part II of this series we’ll explore what it’s like to work for Conti, as described by the Conti employees themselves.

The Conti group’s chats reveal a great deal about its internal structure and hierarchy. Conti maintains many of the same business units as a legitimate, small- to medium-sized enterprise, including a Human Resources department that is in charge of constantly interviewing potential new hires.

Other Conti departments with their own distinct budgets, staff schedules, and senior leadership include:

Coders: Programmers hired to write malicious code, integrate disparate technologies
Testers: Workers in charge of testing Conti malware against security tools and obfuscating it
Administrators: Workers tasked with setting up, tearing down servers, other attack infrastructure
Reverse Engineers: Those who can disassemble computer code, study it, find vulnerabilities or weaknesses
Penetration Testers/Hackers: Those on the front lines battling against corporate security teams to steal data, and plant ransomware.

Conti appears to have contracted out much of its spamming operations, or at least there was no mention of “Spammers” as direct employees. Conti’s leaders seem to have set strict budgets for each of its organizational units, although it occasionally borrowed funds allocated for one department to address the pressing cashflow needs of another.

A great many of the more revealing chats concerning Conti’s structure are between “Mango” — a mid-level Conti manager to whom many other Conti employees report each day — and “Stern,” a sort of cantankerous taskmaster who can be seen constantly needling the staff for reports on their work.

In July 2021, Mango told Stern that the group was placing ads on several Russian-language cybercrime forums to hire more workers. “The salary is $2k in the announcement, but there are a lot of comments that we are recruiting galley slaves,” Mango wrote. “Of course, we dispute that and say those who work and bring results can earn more, but there are examples of coders who work normally and earn $5-$10k salary.”

The Conti chats show the gang primarily kept tabs on the victim bots infected with their malware via both the Trickbot and Emotet crimeware-as-a-service platforms, and that it employed dozens of people to continuously test, maintain and expand this infrastructure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Conti members referred to Emotet as “Booz” or “Buza,” and it is evident from reading these chat logs that Buza had its own stable of more than 50 coders, and likely much of the same organizational structure as Conti.

According to Mango, as of July 18, 2021 the Conti gang employed 62 people, mostly low-level malware coders and software testers. However, Conti’s employee roster appears to have fluctuated wildly from one month to the next. For example, on multiple occasions the organization was forced to fire many employees as a security precaution in the wake of its own internal security breaches.

In May 2021, Stern told Mango he wanted his underlings to hire 100 more “encoders” to work with the group’s malware before the bulk of the gang returns from their summer vacations in Crimea. Most of these new hires, Stern says, will join the penetration testing/hacking teams headed by Conti leaders “Hof” and “Reverse.” Both Hof and Reverse appear to have direct access to the Emotet crimeware platform.

On July 30, 2021, Mango tells stern the payroll has increased to 87 salaried employees, with more hires on the way. But trying to accurately gauge the size of the Conti organization is problematic, in part because cybersecurity experts have long held that Conti is merely a rebrand of another ransomware strain and affiliate program known as Ryuk.

First spotted in 2018, Ryuk was just as ruthless and mercenary as Conti, and the FBI says that in the first year of its operation Ryuk earned more than $61 million in ransom payouts.

“Conti is a Targeted version of Ryuk, which comes from Trickbot and Emotet which we’ve been monitoring for some time,” researchers at Palo Alto Networks wrote about Ryuk last year. “A heavy focus was put on hospital systems, likely due to the necessity for uptime, as these systems were overwhelmed with handling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We observed initial Ryuk ransom requests ranging from US$600,000 to $10 million across multiple industries.”

On May 14, 2021, Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) suffered a major ransomware attack at the hands of Conti. The attack would disrupt services at several Irish hospitals, and resulted in the near complete shutdown of the HSE’s national and local networks, forcing the cancellation of many outpatient clinics and healthcare services. It took the HSE until Sept. 21, 2021 to fully restore all of its systems from the attack, at an estimated cost of more than $600 million.

It remains unclear from reading these chats how many of Conti’s staff understood how much of the organization’s operations overlapped with that of Ryuk. Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer pointed to an October 2020 Conti chat in which the Emotet representative “Buza” posts a link to a security firm’s analysis of Ryuk’s return.

Professor,” the nickname chosen by one of Conti’s most senior generals, replies that indeed Ryuk’s tools, techniques and procedures are nearly identical to Conti’s.

“adf.bat — this is my fucking batch file,” Professor writes, evidently surprised at having read the analysis and spotting his own code being re-used in high-profile ransomware attacks by Ryuk.

“Feels like [the] same managers were running both Ryuk and Conti, with a slow migration to Conti in June 2020,” Abrams wrote on Twitter. “However, based on chats, some affiliates didn’t know that Ryuk and Conti were run by the same people.” Continue reading

Conti Ransomware Group Diaries, Part I: Evasion

March 1, 2022

A Ukrainian security researcher this week leaked several years of internal chat logs and other sensitive data tied to Conti, an aggressive and ruthless Russian cybercrime group that focuses on deploying its ransomware to companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The chat logs offer a fascinating glimpse into the challenges of running a sprawling criminal enterprise with more than 100 salaried employees. The records also provide insight into how Conti has dealt with its own internal breaches and attacks from private security firms and foreign governments.

Conti’s threatening message this week regarding international interference in Ukraine.

Conti makes international news headlines each week when it publishes to its dark web blog new information stolen from ransomware victims who refuse to pay an extortion demand. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Conti published a statement announcing its “full support.”

“If anybody will decide to organize a cyberattack or any war activities against Russia, we are going to use all our possible resources to strike back at the critical infrastructures of an enemy,” the Conti blog post read.

On Sunday, Feb. 27, a new Twitter account “Contileaks” posted links to an archive of chat messages taken from Conti’s private communications infrastructure, dating from January 29, 2021 to the present day. Shouting “Glory for Ukraine,” the Contileaks account has since published additional Conti employee conversations from June 22, 2020 to Nov. 16, 2020.

The Contileaks account did not respond to requests for comment. But Alex Holden, the Ukrainian-born founder of the Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, said the person who leaked the information is not a former Conti affiliate — as many on Twitter have assumed. Rather, he said, the leaker is a Ukrainian security researcher who has chosen to stay in his country and fight.

“The person releasing this is a Ukrainian and a patriot,” Holden said. “He’s seeing that Conti is supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and this is his way to stop them in his mind at least.”

GAP #1

The temporal gaps in these chat records roughly correspond to times when Conti’s IT infrastructure was dismantled and/or infiltrated by security researchers, private companies, law enforcement, and national intelligence agencies. The holes in the chat logs also match up with periods of relative quiescence from the group, as it sought to re-establish its network of infected systems and dismiss its low-level staff as a security precaution.

On Sept. 22, 2020, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) began a weeks-long operation in which it seized control over the Trickbot botnet, a malware crime machine that has infected millions of computers and is often used to spread ransomware. Conti is one of several cybercrime groups that has regularly used Trickbot to deploy malware.

Once in control over Trickbot, the NSA’s hackers sent all infected systems a command telling them to disconnect themselves from the Internet servers the Trickbot overlords used to control compromised Microsoft Windows computers. On top of that, the NSA stuffed millions of bogus records about new victims into the Trickbot database.

News of the Trickbot compromise was first published here on Oct. 2, 2020, but the leaked Conti chats show that the group’s core leadership detected something was seriously wrong with their crime machine just a few hours after the initial compromise of Trickbot’s infrastructure on Sept. 22.

“The one who made this garbage did it very well,” wrote “Hof,” the handle chosen by a top Conti leader, commenting on the Trickbot malware implant that was supplied by the NSA and quickly spread to the rest of the botnet. “He knew how the bot works, i.e. he probably saw the source code, or reversed it. Plus, he somehow encrypted the config, i.e. he had an encoder and a private key, plus uploaded it all to the admin panel. It’s just some kind of sabotage.”

“Moreover, the bots have been flooded with such a config that they will simply work idle,” Hof explained to his team on Sept. 23, 2020. Hof noted that the intruder even kneecapped Trickbot’s built-in failsafe recovery mechanism. Trickbot was configured so that if none of the botnet’s control servers were reachable, the bots could still be recaptured and controlled by registering a pre-computed domain name on EmerDNS, a decentralized domain name system based on the Emercoin virtual currency.

“After a while they will download a new config via emercoin, but they will not be able to apply this config, because this saboteur has uploaded the config with the maximum [version] number, and the bot is checking that the new config [version number] should be larger than the old one,” Hof wrote. “Sorry, but this is fucked up. I don’t know how to get them back.”

It would take the Conti gang several weeks to rebuild its malware infrastructure, and infect tens of thousands of new Microsoft Windows systems. By late October 2020, Conti’s network of infected systems had grown to include 428 medical facilities throughout the United States. The gang’s leaders saw an opportunity to create widespread panic — if not also chaos — by deploying their ransomware simultaneously to hundreds of American healthcare organizations already struggling amid a worldwide pandemic.

“Fuck the clinics in the USA this week,” wrote Conti manager “Target” on Oct. 26, 2020. “There will be panic. 428 hospitals.”

On October 28, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hastily assembled a conference call with healthcare industry executives warning about an “imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.”

Follow-up reporting confirmed that at least a dozen healthcare organizations were hit with ransomware that week, but the carnage apparently was not much worse than a typical week in the healthcare sector. One information security leader in the healthcare industry told KrebsOnSecurity at the time that it wasn’t uncommon for the industry to see at least one hospital or health care facility hit with ransomware each day. Continue reading