The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

October 22, 2020
106 Comments

Some of the world’s largest Internet firms have taken steps to crack down on disinformation spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists and the hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan. But according to a California-based security researcher, those seeking to de-platform these communities may have overlooked a simple legal solution to that end: Both the Nevada-based web hosting company owned by 8chan’s current figurehead and the California firm that provides its sole connection to the Internet are defunct businesses in the eyes of their respective state regulators.

In practical terms, what this means is that the legal contracts which granted these companies temporary control over large swaths of Internet address space are now null and void, and American Internet regulators would be well within their rights to cancel those contracts and reclaim the space.

The IP address ranges in the upper-left portion of this map of QAnon and 8kun-related sites — some 21,000 IP addresses beginning in “206.” and “207.” — are assigned to N.T. Technology Inc. Image source: twitter.com/Redrum_of_Crows

That idea was floated by Ron Guilmette, a longtime anti-spam crusader who recently turned his attention to disrupting the online presence of QAnon and 8chan (recently renamed “8kun”).

On Sunday, 8chan and a host of other sites related to QAnon conspiracy theories were briefly knocked offline after Guilmette called 8chan’s anti-DDoS provider and convinced them to stop protecting the site from crippling online attacks (8Chan is now protected by an anti-DDoS provider in St. Petersburg, Russia).

The public face of 8chan is Jim Watkins, a pig farmer in the Philippines who many experts believe is also the person behind the shadowy persona of “Q” at the center of the conspiracy theory movement.

Watkin owns and operates a Reno, Nev.-based hosting firm called N.T. Technology Inc. That company has a legal contract with the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the non-profit which administers IP addresses for entities based in North America.

ARIN’s contract with N.T. Technology gives the latter the right to use more than 21,500 IP addresses. But as Guilmette discovered recently, N.T. Technology is listed in Nevada Secretary of State records as under an “administrative hold,” which according to Nevada statute is a “terminated” status indicator meaning the company no longer has the right to transact business in the state.

N.T. Technology’s listing in the Nevada Secretary of State records. Click to Enlarge.

The same is true for Centauri Communications, a Freemont, Calif.-based Internet Service Provider that serves as N.T. Technology’s colocation provider and sole connection to the larger Internet. Centauri was granted more than 4,000 IPv4 addresses by ARIN more than a decade ago.

According to the California Secretary of State, Centauri’s status as a business in the state is “suspended.” It appears that Centauri hasn’t filed any business records with the state since 2009, and the state subsequently suspended the company’s license to do business in Aug. 2012. Separately, the California State Franchise Tax Board (FTB) suspended this company as of April 1, 2014.

Centauri Communications’ listing with the California Secretary of State’s office.

Neither Centauri Communications nor N.T. Technology responded to repeated requests for comment. Continue reading →

QAnon/8Chan Sites Briefly Knocked Offline

October 19, 2020
167 Comments

A phone call to an Internet provider in Oregon on Sunday evening was all it took to briefly sideline multiple websites related to 8chan/8kun — a controversial online image board linked to several mass shootings — and QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory which holds that a cabal of Satanic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump. Following a brief disruption, the sites have come back online with the help of an Internet company based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The IP address range in the upper-right portion of this map of QAnon and 8kun-related sites — 203.28.246.0/24 — is assigned to VanwaTech and briefly went offline this evening. Source: twitter.com/Redrum_of_Crows.

A large number of 8kun and QAnon-related sites (see map above) are connected to the Web via a single Internet provider in Vancouver, Wash. called VanwaTech (a.k.a. “OrcaTech“). Previous appeals to VanwaTech to disconnect these sites have fallen on deaf ears, as the company’s owner Nick Lim reportedly has been working with 8kun’s administrators to keep the sites online in the name of protecting free speech.

But VanwaTech also had a single point of failure on its end: The swath of Internet addresses serving the various 8kun/QAnon sites were being protected from otherwise crippling and incessant distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by Hillsboro, Ore. based CNServers LLC.

On Sunday evening, security researcher Ron Guilmette placed a phone call to CNServers’ owner, who professed to be shocked by revelations that his company was helping QAnon and 8kun keep the lights on.

Within minutes of that call, CNServers told its customer — Spartan Host Ltd., which is registered in Belfast, Northern Ireland — that it would no longer be providing DDoS protection for the set of 254 Internet addresses that Spartan Host was routing on behalf of VanwaTech.

Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, the person who answered the phone at CNServers asked not to be named in this story for fear of possible reprisals from the 8kun/QAnon crowd. But they confirmed that CNServers had indeed terminated its service with Spartan Host. That person added they weren’t a fan of either 8kun or QAnon, and said they would not self-describe as a Trump supporter.

CNServers said that shortly after it withdrew its DDoS protection services, Spartan Host changed its settings so that VanwaTech’s Internet addresses were protected from attacks by ddos-guard[.]net, a company based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Spartan Host’s founder, 25-year-old Ryan McCully, confirmed CNServers’ report. McCully declined to say for how long VanwaTech had been a customer, or whether Spartan Host had experienced any attacks as a result of CNServers’ action. Continue reading →

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Breach at Dickey’s BBQ Smokes 3M Cards

October 15, 2020
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One of the digital underground’s most popular stores for peddling stolen credit card information began selling a batch of more than three million new card records this week. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the data was stolen in a lengthy data breach at more than 100 Dickey’s Barbeque Restaurant locations around the country.

An ad on the popular carding site Joker’s Stash for “BlazingSun,” which fraud experts have traced back to a card breach at Dickey’s BBQ.

On Monday, the carding bazaar Joker’s Stash debuted “BlazingSun,” a new batch of more than three million stolen card records, advertising “valid rates” of between 90-100 percent. This is typically an indicator that the breached merchant is either unaware of the compromise or has only just begun responding to it.

Multiple companies that track the sale in stolen payment card data say they have confirmed with card-issuing financial institutions that the accounts for sale in the BlazingSun batch have one common theme: All were used at various Dickey’s BBQ locations over the past 13-15 months.

KrebsOnSecurity first contacted Dallas-based Dickey’s on Oct. 13. Today, the company shared a statement saying it was aware of a possible payment card security incident at some of its eateries:

“We received a report indicating that a payment card security incident may have occurred. We are taking this incident very seriously and immediately initiated our response protocol and an investigation is underway. We are currently focused on determining the locations affected and time frames involved. We are utilizing the experience of third parties who have helped other restaurants address similar issues and also working with the FBI and payment card networks. We understand that payment card network rules generally provide that individuals who timely report unauthorized charges to the bank that issued their card are not responsible for those charges.”

The confirmations came from Miami-based Q6 Cyber and Gemini Advisory in New York City.

Q6Cyber CEO Eli Dominitz said the breach appears to extend from May 2019 through September 2020.

“The financial institutions we’ve been working with have already seen a significant amount of fraud related to these cards,” Dominitz said.

Gemini says its data indicated some 156 Dickey’s locations across 30 states likely had payment systems compromised by card-stealing malware, with the highest exposure in California and Arizona. Gemini puts the exposure window between July 2019 and August 2020.

“Low-and-slow” aptly describes the card breach at Dickie’s, which persisted for at least 13 months.

With the threat from ransomware attacks grabbing all the headlines, it may be tempting to assume plain old credit card thieves have moved on to more lucrative endeavors. Alas, cybercrime bazaars like Joker’s Stash have continued plying their trade, undeterred by a push from the credit card associations to encourage more merchants to install credit card readers that require more secure chip-based payment cards.

That’s because there are countless restaurants — usually franchise locations of an established eatery chain — that are left to decide for themselves whether and how quickly they should make the upgrades necessary to dip the chip versus swipe the stripe.

“Dickey’s operates on a franchise model, which often allows each location to dictate the type of point-of-sale (POS) device and processors that they utilize,” Gemini wrote in a blog post about the incident. “However, given the widespread nature of the breach, the exposure may be linked to a breach of the single central processor, which was leveraged by over a quarter of all Dickey’s locations.” Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, October 2020 Edition

October 13, 2020
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It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month! In keeping with that theme, if you (ab)use Microsoft Windows computers you should be aware the company shipped a bevy of software updates today to fix at least 87 security problems in Windows and programs that run on top of the operating system. That means it’s once again time to backup and patch up.

Eleven of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, which means bad guys or malware could use them to gain complete control over an unpatched system with little or no help from users.

Worst in terms of outright scariness is probably CVE-2020-16898, which is a nasty bug in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 that could be abused to install malware just by sending a malformed packet of data at a vulnerable system. CVE-2020-16898 earned a CVSS Score of 9.8 (10 is the most awful).

Security vendor McAfee has dubbed the flaw “Bad Neighbor,” and in a blog post about it said a proof-of-concept exploit shared by Microsoft with its partners appears to be “both extremely simple and perfectly reliable,” noting that this sucker is imminently “wormable” — i.e. capable of being weaponized into a threat that spreads very quickly within networks.

“It results in an immediate BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), but more so, indicates the likelihood of exploitation for those who can manage to bypass Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 mitigations,” McAfee’s Steve Povolny wrote. “The effects of an exploit that would grant remote code execution would be widespread and highly impactful, as this type of bug could be made wormable.”

Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) calls special attention to another critical bug quashed in this month’s patch batch: CVE-2020-16947, which is a problem with Microsoft Outlook that could result in malware being loaded onto a system just by previewing a malicious email in Outlook.

“The Preview Pane is an attack vector here, so you don’t even need to open the mail to be impacted,” said ZDI’s Dustin Childs.

While there don’t appear to be any zero-day flaws in October’s release from Microsoft, Todd Schell from Ivanti points out that a half-dozen of these flaws were publicly disclosed prior to today, meaning bad guys have had a jump start on being able to research and engineer working exploits. Continue reading →

Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet

October 12, 2020
49 Comments

Microsoft Corp. has executed a coordinated legal sneak attack in a bid to disrupt the malware-as-a-service botnet Trickbot, a global menace that has infected millions of computers and is used to spread ransomware. A court in Virginia granted Microsoft control over many Internet servers Trickbot uses to plunder infected systems, based on novel claims that the crime machine abused the software giant’s trademarks. However, it appears the operation has not completely disabled the botnet.

A spam email containing a Trickbot-infected attachment that was sent earlier this year. Image: Microsoft.

“We disrupted Trickbot through a court order we obtained as well as technical action we executed in partnership with telecommunications providers around the world,” wrote Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, in a blog post this morning about the legal maneuver. “We have now cut off key infrastructure so those operating Trickbot will no longer be able to initiate new infections or activate ransomware already dropped into computer systems.”

Microsoft’s action comes just days after the U.S. military’s Cyber Command carried out its own attack that sent all infected Trickbot systems a command telling them to disconnect themselves from the Internet servers the Trickbot overlords used to control them. The roughly 10-day operation by Cyber Command also stuffed millions of bogus records about new victims into the Trickbot database in a bid to confuse the botnet’s operators.

In legal filings, Microsoft argued that Trickbot irreparably harms the company “by damaging its reputation, brands, and customer goodwill. Defendants physically alter and corrupt Microsoft products such as the Microsoft Windows products. Once infected, altered and controlled by Trickbot, the Windows operating system ceases to operate normally and becomes tools for Defendants to conduct their theft.”

From the civil complaint Microsoft filed on October 6 with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia:

“However, they still bear the Microsoft and Windows trademarks. This is obviously meant to and does mislead Microsoft’s customers, and it causes extreme damage to Microsoft’s brands and trademarks.”

“Users subject to the negative effects of these malicious applications incorrectly believe that Microsoft and Windows are the source of their computing device problems. There is great risk that users may attribute this problem to Microsoft and associate these problems with Microsoft’s Windows products, thereby diluting and tarnishing the value of the Microsoft and Windows trademarks and brands.”

Microsoft said it will leverage the seized Trickbot servers to identify and assist Windows users impacted by the Trickbot malware in cleaning the malware off of their systems.

Trickbot has been used to steal passwords from millions of infected computers, and reportedly to hijack access to well more than 250 million email accounts from which new copies of the malware are sent to the victim’s contacts.

Trickbot’s malware-as-a-service feature has made it a reliable vehicle for deploying various strains of ransomware, locking up infected systems on a corporate network unless and until the company agrees to make an extortion payment.

A particularly destructive ransomware strain that is closely associated with Trickbot — known as “Ryuk” or “Conti” — has been responsible for costly attacks on countless organizations over the past year, including healthcare providers, medical research centers and hospitals.

One recent Ryuk victim is Universal Health Services (UHS), a Fortune 500 hospital and healthcare services provider that operates more than 400 facilities in the U.S. and U.K. Continue reading →

Report: U.S. Cyber Command Behind Trickbot Tricks

October 10, 2020
55 Comments

A week ago, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that someone was attempting to disrupt the Trickbot botnet, a malware crime machine that has infected millions of computers and is often used to spread ransomware. A new report Friday says the coordinated attack was part of an operation carried out by the U.S. military’s Cyber Command.

Image: Shutterstock.

On October 2, KrebsOnSecurity reported that twice in the preceding ten days, an unknown entity that had inside access to the Trickbot botnet 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, someone had stuffed millions of bogus records about new victims into the Trickbot database — apparently to confuse or stymie the botnet’s operators.

In a story published Oct. 9, The Washington Post reported that four U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Trickbot disruption was the work of U.S. Cyber Command, a branch of the Department of Defense headed by the director of the National Security Agency (NSA).

The Post report suggested the action was a bid to prevent Trickbot from being used to somehow interfere with the upcoming presidential election, noting that Cyber Command was instrumental in disrupting the Internet access of Russian online troll farms during the 2018 midterm elections.

The Post said U.S. officials recognized their operation would not permanently dismantle Trickbot, describing it rather as “one way to distract them for at least a while as they seek to restore their operations.” Continue reading →

Amid an Embarrassment of Riches, Ransom Gangs Increasingly Outsource Their Work

October 8, 2020
29 Comments

There’s an old adage in information security: “Every company gets penetration tested, whether or not they pay someone for the pleasure.” Many organizations that do hire professionals to test their network security posture unfortunately tend to focus on fixing vulnerabilities hackers could use to break in. But judging from the proliferation of help-wanted ads for offensive pentesters in the cybercrime underground, today’s attackers have exactly zero trouble gaining that initial intrusion: The real challenge seems to be hiring enough people to help everyone profit from the access already gained.

One of the most common ways such access is monetized these days is through ransomware, which holds a victim’s data and/or computers hostage unless and until an extortion payment is made. But in most cases, there is a yawning gap of days, weeks or months between the initial intrusion and the deployment of ransomware within a victim organization.

That’s because it usually takes time and a good deal of effort for intruders to get from a single infected PC to seizing control over enough resources within the victim organization where it makes sense to launch the ransomware.

This includes pivoting from or converting a single compromised Microsoft Windows user account to an administrator account with greater privileges on the target network; the ability to sidestep and/or disable any security software; and gaining the access needed to disrupt or corrupt any data backup systems the victim firm may have.

Each day, millions of malware-laced emails are blasted out containing booby-trapped attachments. If the attachment is opened, the malicious document proceeds to quietly download additional malware and hacking tools to the victim machine (here’s one video example of a malicious Microsoft Office attachment from the malware sandbox service any.run). From there, the infected system will report home to a malware control server operated by the spammers who sent the missive.

At that point, control over the victim machine may be transferred or sold multiple times between different cybercriminals who specialize in exploiting such access. These folks are very often contractors who work with established ransomware groups, and who are paid a set percentage of any eventual ransom payments made by a victim company.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

Enter subcontractors like “Dr. Samuil,” a cybercriminal who has maintained a presence on more than a dozen top Russian-language cybercrime forums over the past 15 years. In a series of recent advertisements, Dr. Samuil says he’s eagerly hiring experienced people who are familiar with tools used by legitimate pentesters for exploiting access once inside of a target company — specifically, post-exploit frameworks like the closely-guarded Cobalt Strike.

“You will be regularly provided select accesses which were audited (these are about 10-15 accesses out of 100) and are worth a try,” Dr. Samuil wrote in one such help-wanted ad. “This helps everyone involved to save time. We also have private software that bypasses protection and provides for smooth performance.”

From other classified ads he posted in August and September 2020, it seems clear Dr. Samuil’s team has some kind of privileged access to financial data on targeted companies that gives them a better idea of how much cash the victim firm may have on hand to pay a ransom demand. To wit:

“There is huge insider information on the companies which we target, including information if there are tape drives and clouds (for example, Datto that is built to last, etc.), which significantly affects the scale of the conversion rate.

Requirements:
– experience with cloud storage, ESXi.
– experience with Active Directory.
– privilege escalation on accounts with limited rights.

* Serious level of insider information on the companies with which we work. There are proofs of large payments, but only for verified LEADs.
* There is also a private MEGA INSIDE , which I will not write about here in public, and it is only for experienced LEADs with their teams.
* We do not look at REVENUE / NET INCOME / Accountant reports, this is our MEGA INSIDE, in which we know exactly how much to confidently squeeze to the maximum in total.

According to cybersecurity firm Intel 471, Dr. Samuil’s ad is hardly unique, and there are several other seasoned cybercriminals who are customers of popular ransomware-as-a-service offerings that are hiring sub-contractors to farm out some of the grunt work.

“Within the cybercriminal underground, compromised accesses to organizations are readily bought, sold and traded,” Intel 471 CEO Mark Arena said. “A number of security professionals have previously sought to downplay the business impact cybercriminals can have to their organizations.”

“But because of the rapidly growing market for compromised accesses and the fact that these could be sold to anyone, organizations need to focus more on efforts to understand, detect and quickly respond to network compromises,” Arena continued. “That covers faster patching of the vulnerabilities that matter, ongoing detection and monitoring for criminal malware, and understanding the malware you are seeing in your environment, how it got there, and what it has or could have dropped subsequently.” Continue reading →

Promising Infusions of Cash, Fake Investor John Bernard Walked Away With $30M

October 7, 2020
40 Comments

September featured two stories on a phony tech investor named John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief named John Clifton Davies who’s fleeced dozens of technology companies out of an estimated $30 million with the promise of lucrative investments. Those stories prompted a flood of tips from Davies’ victims that paints a much clearer picture of this serial con man and his cohorts, including allegations of hacking, smuggling, bank fraud and murder.

KrebsOnSecurity interviewed more than a dozen of Davies’ victims over the past five years, none of whom wished to be quoted here out of fear of reprisals from a man they say runs with mercenaries and has connections to organized crime.

As described in Part II of this series, John Bernard is in fact John Clifton Davies, a 59-year-old U.K. citizen who absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015. Prior to his conviction, Davies served 16 months in jail before being cleared of murdering his third wife on their honeymoon in India.

The scam artist John Bernard (left) in a recent Zoom call, and a photo of John Clifton Davies from 2015.

After eluding justice in the U.K., Davies reinvented himself as The Private Office of John Bernard, pretending to a be billionaire Swiss investor who made his fortunes in the dot-com boom 20 years ago and who was seeking investment opportunities.

In case after case, Bernard would promise to invest millions in tech startups, and then insist that companies pay tens of thousands of dollars worth of due diligence fees up front. However, the due diligence company he insisted on using — another Swiss firm called Inside Knowledge — also was secretly owned by Bernard, who would invariably pull out of the deal after receiving the due diligence money.

Bernard found a constant stream of new marks by offering extraordinarily generous finders fees to investment brokers who could introduce him to companies seeking an infusion of cash. When it came time for companies to sign legal documents, Bernard’s victims interacted with a 40-something Inside Knowledge employee named “Katherine Miller,” who claimed to be his lawyer.

It turns out that Katherine Miller is a onetime Moldovan attorney who was previously known as Ecaterina “Katya” Dudorenko. She is listed as a Romanian lawyer in the U.K. Companies House records for several companies tied to John Bernard, including Inside Knowledge Solutions Ltd., Docklands Enterprise Ltd., and Secure Swiss Data Ltd (more on Secure Swiss data in a moment).

Another of Bernard’s associates listed as a director at Docklands Enterprise Ltd. is Sergey Valentinov Pankov. This is notable because in 2018, Pankov and Dudorenko were convicted of cigarette smuggling in the United Kingdom.

Sergey Pankov and Ecaterina Dudorenco, in undated photos. Source: Mynewsdesk.com

According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, “illicit trafficking of tobacco is a multibillion-dollar business today, fueling organized crime and corruption [and] robbing governments of needed tax money. So profitable is the trade that tobacco is the world’s most widely smuggled legal substance. This booming business now stretches from counterfeiters in China and renegade factories in Russia to Indian reservations in New York and warlords in Pakistan and North Africa.”

Like their erstwhile boss Mr. Davies, both Pankov and Dudorenko disappeared before their convictions in the U.K. They were sentenced in absentia to two and a half years in prison.

Incidentally, Davies was detained by Ukrainian authorities in 2018, although he is not mentioned by name in this story from the Ukrainian daily Pravda. The story notes that the suspect moved to Kiev in 2014 and lived in a rented apartment with his Ukrainian wife. Continue reading →

Attacks Aimed at Disrupting the Trickbot Botnet

October 2, 2020
31 Comments

Over the past 10 days, someone has been launching a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt Trickbot, an enormous collection of more than two million malware-infected Windows PCs that are constantly being harvested for financial data and are often used as the entry point for deploying ransomware within compromised organizations.

A text snippet from one of the bogus Trickbot configuration updates. Source: Intel 471

On Sept. 22, someone pushed out a new configuration file to Windows computers currently infected with Trickbot. The crooks running the Trickbot botnet typically use these config files to pass new instructions to their fleet of infected PCs, such as the Internet address where hacked systems should download new updates to the malware.

But the new configuration file pushed on Sept. 22 told all systems infected with Trickbot that their new malware control server had the address 127.0.0.1, which is a “localhost” address that is not reachable over the public Internet, according to an analysis by cyber intelligence firm Intel 471.

It’s not known how many Trickbot-infected systems received the phony update, but it seems clear this wasn’t just a mistake by Trickbot’s overlords. Intel 471 found that it happened yet again on Oct. 1, suggesting someone with access to the inner workings of the botnet was trying to disrupt its operations.

“Shortly after the bogus configs were pushed out, all Trickbot controllers stopped responding correctly to bot requests,” Intel 471 wrote in a note to its customers. “This possibly means central Trickbot controller infrastructure was disrupted. The close timing of both events suggested an intentional disruption of Trickbot botnet operations.”

Intel 471 CEO Mark Arena said it’s anyone’s guess at this point who is responsible.

“Obviously, someone is trying to attack Trickbot,” Arena said. “It could be someone in the security research community, a government, a disgruntled insider, or a rival cybercrime group. We just don’t know at this point.”

Arena said it’s unclear how successful these bogus configuration file updates will be given that the Trickbot authors built a fail-safe recovery system into their malware. Specifically, Trickbot has a backup control mechanism: A domain name registered on EmerDNS, a decentralized domain name system.

“This domain should still be in control of the Trickbot operators and could potentially be used to recover bots,” Intel 471 wrote.

But whoever is screwing with the Trickbot purveyors appears to have adopted a multi-pronged approach: Around the same time as the second bogus configuration file update was pushed on Oct. 1, someone stuffed the control networks that the Trickbot operators use to keep track of data on infected systems with millions of new records.

Alex Holden is chief technology officer and founder of Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm that helps recover stolen data. Holden said at the end of September Trickbot held passwords and financial data stolen from more than 2.7 million Windows PCs.

By October 1, Holden said, that number had magically grown to more than seven million.

“Someone is flooding the Trickbot system with fake data,” Holden said. “Whoever is doing this is generating records that include machine names indicating these are infected systems in a broad range of organizations, including the Department of Defense, U.S. Bank, JP Morgan Chase, PNC and Citigroup, to name a few.” Continue reading →

Ransomware Victims That Pay Up Could Incur Steep Fines from Uncle Sam

October 1, 2020
58 Comments

Companies victimized by ransomware and firms that facilitate negotiations with ransomware extortionists could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the crooks who profit from the attack are already under economic sanctions, the Treasury Department warned today.

Image: Shutterstock

In its advisory (PDF), the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said “companies that facilitate ransomware payments to cyber actors on behalf of victims, including financial institutions, cyber insurance firms, and companies involved in digital forensics and incident response, not only encourage future ransomware payment demands but also may risk violating OFAC regulations.”

As financial losses from cybercrime activity and ransomware attacks in particular have skyrocketed in recent years, the Treasury Department has imposed economic sanctions on several cybercriminals and cybercrime groups, effectively freezing all property and interests of these persons (subject to U.S. jurisdiction) and making it a crime to transact with them.

A number of those sanctioned have been closely tied with ransomware and malware attacks, including the North Korean Lazarus Group; two Iranians thought to be tied to the SamSam ransomware attacks; Evgeniy Bogachev, the developer of Cryptolocker; and Evil Corp, a Russian cybercriminal syndicate that has used malware to extract more than $100 million from victim businesses.

Those that run afoul of OFAC sanctions without a special dispensation or “license” from Treasury can face several legal repercussions, including fines of up to $20 million. Continue reading →