If you’ve ever owned a domain name, the chances are good that at some point you’ve received a snail mail letter which appears to be a bill for a domain or website-related services. In reality, these misleading missives try to trick people into paying for useless services they never ordered, don’t need, and probably will never receive. Here’s a look at the most recent incarnation of this scam — DomainNetworks — and some clues about who may be behind it.

The DomainNetworks mailer may reference a domain that is or was at one point registered to your name and address. Although the letter includes the words “marketing services” in the upper right corner, the rest of the missive is deceptively designed to look like a bill for services already rendered.

DomainNetworks claims that listing your domain with their promotion services will result in increased traffic to your site. This is a dubious claim for a company that appears to be a complete fabrication, as we’ll see in a moment.  But happily, the proprietors of this enterprise were not so difficult to track down.

The website Domainnetworks[.]com says it is a business with a post office box in Hendersonville, N.C., and another address in Santa Fe, N.M. There are a few random, non-technology businesses tied to the phone number listed for the Hendersonville address, and the New Mexico address was used by several no-name web hosting companies.

However, there is little connected to these addresses and phone numbers that get us any closer to finding out who’s running Domainnetworks[.]com. And neither entity appears to be an active, official company in their supposed state of residence, at least according to each state’s Secretary of State database.

The Better Business Bureau listing for DomainNetworks gives it an “F” rating, and includes more than 100 reviews by people angry at receiving one of these scams via snail mail. Helpfully, the BBB says DomainNetworks previously operated under a different name: US Domain Authority LLC.

Copies of snail mail scam letters from US Domain Authority posted online show that this entity used the domain usdomainauthority[.]com, registered in May 2022. The Usdomainauthority mailer also featured a Henderson, NC address, albeit at a different post office box.

Usdomainauthority[.]com is no longer online, and the site seems to have blocked its pages from being indexed by the Wayback Machine at archive.org. But searching on a long snippet of text from DomainNetworks[.]com about refund requests shows that this text was found on just one other active website, according to publicwww.com, a service that indexes the HTML code of existing websites and makes it searchable.

That other website is a domain registered in January 2023 called thedomainsvault[.]com, and its registration details are likewise hidden behind privacy services. Thedomainsvault’s “Frequently Asked Questions” page is quite similar to the one on the DomainNetworks website; both begin with the question of why the company is sending a mailer that looks like a bill for domain services.

Thedomainsvault[.]com includes no useful information about the entity or people who operate it; clicking the “Contact-us” link on the site brings up a page with placeholder Lorem Ipsum text, a contact form, and a phone number of 123456789.

However, searching passive DNS records at DomainTools.com for thedomainsvault[.]com shows that at some point whoever owns the domain instructed incoming email to be sent to ubsagency@gmail.com.

The first result that currently pops up when searching for “ubsagency” in Google is ubsagency[.]com, which says it belongs to a Las Vegas-based Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and digital marketing concern generically named both United Business Service and United Business Services. UBSagency’s website is hosted at the same Ann Arbor, Mich. based hosting firm (A2 Hosting Inc) as thedomainsvault[.]com.

UBSagency’s LinkedIn page says the company has offices in Vegas, Half Moon Bay, Calif., and Renton, Wash. But once again, none of the addresses listed for these offices reveal any obvious clues about who runs UBSagency. And once again, none of these entities appear to exist as official businesses in their claimed state of residence.

Searching on ubsagency@gmail.com in Constella Intelligence shows the address was used sometime before February 2019 to create an account under the name “Sammy\Sam_Alon” at the interior decorating site Houzz.com. In January 2019, Houzz acknowledged that a data breach exposed account information on an undisclosed number of customers, including user IDs, one-way encrypted passwords, IP addresses, city and ZIP codes, as well as Facebook information.

Sammy\Sam_Alon registered at Houzz using an Internet address in Huntsville, Ala. (68.35.149.206). Constella says this address was associated with the email tropicglobal@gmail.com, which also is tied to several other “Sammy” accounts at different stores online.

Constella also says a highly unique password re-used by tropicglobal@gmail.com across numerous sites was used in connection with just a few other email accounts, including shenhavgroup@gmail.com, and distributorinvoice@mail.com.

The shenhavgroup@gmail.com address was used to register a Twitter account for a Sam Orit Alon in 2013, whose account says they are affiliated with the Shenhav Group. According to DomainTools, shenhavgroup@gmail.com was responsible for registering roughly two dozen domains, including the now-defunct unitedbusinessservice[.]com.

Constella further finds that the address distributorinvoice@mail.com was used to register an account at whmcs.com, a web hosting platform that suffered a breach of its user database several years back. The name on the WHMCS account was Shmuel Orit Alon, from Kidron, Israel.

UBSagency also has a Facebook page, or maybe “had” is the operative word because someone appears to have defaced it. Loading the Facebook page for UBSagency shows several of the images have been overlaid or replaced with a message from someone who is really disappointed with Sam Alon.

“Sam Alon is a LIAR, THIEF, COWARD AND HAS A VERY SMALL D*CK,” reads one of the messages:

The logo in the UBSagency profile photo includes a graphic of what appears to be a magnifying glass with a line that zig-zags through bullet points inside and outside the circle, a unique pattern that is remarkably similar to the logo for DomainNetworks:

Constella also found that the same Huntsville IP address used by Sam Alon at Houzz was associated with yet another Houzz account, this one for someone named “Eliran.”

The UBSagency Facebook page features several messages from an Eliran “Dani” Benz, who is referred to by commenters as an employee or partner with UBSagency. The last check-in on Benz’s profile is from a beach at Rishon Letziyon in Israel earlier this year.

Neither Mr. Alon nor Mr. Benz responded to multiple requests for comment.

It may be difficult to believe that anyone would pay an invoice for a domain name or SEO service they never ordered. However, there is plenty of evidence that these phony bills often get processed by administrative personnel at organizations that end up paying the requested amount because they assume it was owed for some services already provided.

In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity published How Internet Savvy are Your Leaders?, which examined public records to show that dozens of cities, towns, school districts and even political campaigns across the United States got snookered into paying these scam domain invoices from a similar scam company called WebListings Inc.

In 2020, KrebsOnSecurity featured a deep dive into who was likely behind the WebListings scam, which had been sending out these snail mail scam letters for over a decade. That investigation revealed the scam’s connection to a multi-level marketing operation run out of the U.K., and to two brothers living in Scotland.

Nikita Kislitsin, formerly the head of network security for one of Russia’s top cybersecurity firms, was arrested last week in Kazakhstan in response to 10-year-old hacking charges from the U.S. Department of Justice. Experts say Kislitsin’s prosecution could soon put the Kazakhstan government in a sticky diplomatic position, as the Kremlin is already signaling that it intends to block his extradition to the United States.

Kislitsin is accused of hacking into the now-defunct social networking site Formspring in 2012, and conspiring with another Russian man convicted of stealing tens of millions of usernames and passwords from LinkedIn and Dropbox that same year.

In March 2020, the DOJ unsealed two criminal hacking indictments against Kislitsin, who was then head of security at Group-IB, a cybersecurity company that was founded in Russia in 2003 and operated there for more than a decade before relocating to Singapore.

Prosecutors in Northern California indicted Kislitsin in 2014 for his alleged role in stealing account data from Formspring. Kislitsin also was indicted in Nevada in 2013, but the Nevada indictment does not name his alleged victim(s) in that case.

However, documents unsealed in the California case indicate Kislitsin allegedly conspired with Yevgeniy Nikulin, a Russian man convicted in 2020 of stealing 117 million usernames and passwords from Dropbox, Formspring and LinkedIn in 2012. Nikulin is currently serving a seven-year sentence in the U.S. prison system.

As first reported by Cyberscoop in 2020, a trial brief in the California investigation identified Nikulin, Kislitsin and two alleged cybercriminals — Oleg Tolstikh and Oleksandr Vitalyevich Ieremenko — as being present during a 2012 meeting at a Moscow hotel, where participants allegedly discussed starting an internet café business.

A 2010 indictment out of New Jersey accuses Ieremenko and six others with siphoning nonpublic information from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and public relations firms, and making $30 million in illegal stock trades based on the proprietary information they stole.

[The U.S. Secret Service has an outstanding $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Ieremenko (Александр Витальевич Еременко), who allegedly went by the hacker handles “Zl0m” and “Lamarez.”]

Kislitsin was hired by Group-IB in January 2013, nearly six months after the Formspring hack. Group-IB has since moved its headquarters to Singapore, and in April 2023 the company announced it had fully exited the Russian market.

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Group-IB said Mr. Kislitsin is no longer an employee, and that he now works for a Russian organization called FACCT, which stands for “Fight Against Cybercrime Technologies.”

“Dmitry Volkov, co-founder and CEO, sold his stake in Group-IB’s Russia-based business to the company’s local management,” the statement reads. “The stand-alone business in Russia has been operating under the new brand FACCT ever since and will continue to operate as a separate company with no connection to Group-IB.”

FACCT says on its website that it is a “Russian developer of technologies for combating cybercrime,” and that it works with clients to fight targeted attacks, data leaks, fraud, phishing and brand abuse. In a statement published online, FACCT said Kislitsin is responsible for developing its network security business, and that he remains under temporary detention in Kazakhstan “to study the basis for extradition arrest at the request of the United States.”

“According to the information we have, the claims against Kislitsin are not related to his work at FACCT, but are related to a case more than 10 years ago when Nikita worked as a journalist and independent researcher,” FACCT wrote.

From 2006 to 2012, Kislitsin was editor-in-chief of “Hacker,” a popular Russian-language monthly magazine that includes articles on information and network security, programming, and frequently features interviews with and articles penned by notable or wanted Russian hackers.

“We are convinced that there are no legal grounds for detention on the territory of Kazakhstan,” the FACCT statement continued. “The company has hired lawyers who have been providing Nikita with all the necessary assistance since last week, and we have also sent an appeal to the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Kazakhstan to assist in protecting our employee.”

FACCT indicated that the Kremlin has already intervened in the case, and the Russian government claims Kislitsin is wanted on criminal charges in Russia and must instead be repatriated to his homeland.

“The FACCT emphasizes that the announcement of Nikita Kislitsin on the wanted list in the territory of the Russian Federation became known only today, June 28, 6 days after the arrest in Kazakhstan,” FACCT wrote. “The company is monitoring developments.”

The Kremlin followed a similar playbook in the case of Aleksei Burkov, a cybercriminal who long operated two of Russia’s most exclusive underground hacking forums. Burkov was arrested in 2015 by Israeli authorities, and the Russian government fought Burkov’s extradition to the U.S. for four years — even arresting and jailing an Israeli woman on phony drug charges to force a prisoner swap.

That effort ultimately failed: Burkov was sent to America, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Arkady Bukh is a U.S. attorney who has represented dozens of accused hackers from Russia and Eastern Europe who were extradited to the United States over the years. Bukh said Moscow is likely to turn the Kislitsin case into a diplomatic time bomb for Kazakhstan, which shares an enormous border and a great deal of cultural ties with Russia. A 2009 census found that Russians make up about 24 percent of the population of Kazakhstan.

“That would put Kazakhstan at a crossroads to choose between unity with Russia or going with the West,” Bukh said. “If that happens, Kazakhstan may have to make some very unpleasant decisions.”

Group-IB’s exodus from Russia comes as its former founder and CEO Ilya Sachkov remains languishing in a Russian prison, awaiting a farcical trial and an inevitable conviction on charges of treason. In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason charges against Sachkov, although it has so far refused to disclose any details about the allegations.

Sachkov’s pending treason trial has been the subject of much speculation among denizens of Russian cybercrime forums, and the consensus seems to be that Sachkov and Group-IB were seen as a little too helpful to the DOJ in its various investigations involving top Russian hackers.

Indeed, since its inception in 2003, Group-IB’s researchers have helped to identify, disrupt and even catch a number of high-profile Russian hackers, most of whom got busted after years of criminal hacking because they made the unforgivable mistake of stealing from their own citizens.

When the indictments against Kislitsin were unsealed in 2020, Group-IB issued a lengthy statement attesting to his character and saying they would help him with his legal defense. As part of that statement, Group-IB noted that “representatives of the Group-IB company and, in particular, Kislitsin, in 2013, on their own initiative, met with employees of the US Department of Justice to inform them about the research work related to the underground, which was carried out by Kislitsin in 2012.”

Joseph James “PlugwalkJoe” O’Connor, a 24-year-old from the United Kingdom who earned his 15 minutes of fame by participating in the July 2020 hack of Twitter, has been sentenced to five years in a U.S. prison. That may seem like harsh punishment for a brief and very public cyber joy ride. But O’Connor also pleaded guilty in a separate investigation involving a years-long spree of cyberstalking and cryptocurrency theft enabled by “SIM swapping,” a crime wherein fraudsters trick a mobile provider into diverting a customer’s phone calls and text messages to a device they control.

On July 16, 2020 — the day after some of Twitter’s most recognizable and popular users had their accounts hacked and used to tweet out a bitcoin scam —  KrebsOnSecurity observed that several social media accounts tied to O’Connor appeared to have inside knowledge of the intrusion. That story also noted that thanks to COVID-19 lockdowns at the time, O’Connor was stuck on an indefinite vacation at a popular resort in Spain.

Not long after the Twitter hack, O’Connor was quoted in The New York Times denying any involvement. “I don’t care,” O’Connor told The Times. “They can come arrest me. I would laugh at them. I haven’t done anything.”

Speaking with KrebsOnSecurity via Instagram instant message just days after the Twitter hack, PlugwalkJoe demanded that his real name be kept out of future blog posts here. After he was told that couldn’t be promised, he remarked that some people in his circle of friends had been known to hire others to deliver physical beatings on people they didn’t like.

O’Connor was still in Spain a year later when prosecutors in the Northern District of California charged him with conspiring to hack Twitter. At the same time, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged O’Connor with an impressive array of cyber offenses involving the exploitation of social media accounts, online extortion, and cyberstalking, and the theft of cryptocurrency then valued at nearly USD $800,000.

In late April 2023, O’Connor was extradited from Spain to face charges in the United States. Two weeks later, he entered guilty pleas in both California and New York, admitting to all ten criminal charges levied against him. On June 23, O’Connor was sentenced to five years in prison.

PlugwalkJoe was part of a community that specialized in SIM-swapping victims to take over their online identities. Unauthorized SIM swapping is a scheme in which fraudsters trick or bribe employees at wireless phone companies into redirecting the target’s text messages and phone calls to a device they control.

From there, the attackers can reset the password for any of the victim’s online accounts that allow password resets via SMS. SIM swapping also lets attackers intercept one-time passwords needed for SMS-based multi-factor authentication (MFA).

O’Connor admitted to conducting SIM swapping attacks to take control over financial accounts tied to several cryptocurrency executives in May 2019, and to stealing digital currency currently valued at more than $1.6 million.

PlugwalkJoe also copped to SIM-swapping his way into the Snapchat accounts of several female celebrities and threatening to release nude photos found on their phones.

Victims who refused to give up social media accounts or submit to extortion demands were often visited with “swatting attacks,” wherein O’Connor and others would falsely report a shooting or hostage situation in the hopes of tricking police into visiting potentially lethal force on a target’s address.

Prosecutors said O’Connor even swatted and cyberstalked a 16-year-old girl, sending her nude photos and threatening to rape and/or murder her and her family.

In the case of the Twitter hack, O’Connor pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

To resolve the case against him in New York, O’Connor pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, two counts of committing computer intrusions, making extortive communications, two counts of stalking, and making threatening communications.

In addition to the prison term, O’Connor was sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $794,012.64 in forfeiture.

To be clear, the Twitter hack of July 2020 did not involve SIM-swapping. Rather, Twitter said the intruders tricked a Twitter employee over the phone into providing access to internal tools.

Three others were charged along with O’Connor in the Twitter compromise. The alleged mastermind of the hack, then 17-year-old Graham Ivan Clarke from Tampa, Fla., pleaded guilty in 2021 and agreed to serve three years in prison, followed by three years probation.

This story is good reminder about the need to minimize your reliance on the mobile phone companies for securing your online identity. This means reducing the number of ways your life could be turned upside down if someone were to hijack your mobile phone number.

Most online services require users to validate a mobile phone number as part of setting up an account, but some services will let you remove your phone number after the fact. Those services that do you let you remove your phone number or disable SMS/phone calls for account recovery probably also offer more secure multi-factor authentication options, such as app-based one-time passwords and security keys. Check out 2fa.directory for a list of multi-factor options available across hundreds of popular sites and services.

The United Parcel Service (UPS) says fraudsters have been harvesting phone numbers and other information from its online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) messages that spoofed UPS and other top brands. The missives addressed recipients by name, included details about recent orders, and warned that those orders wouldn’t be shipped unless the customer paid an added delivery fee.

In a snail mail letter sent this month to Canadian customers, UPS Canada Ltd. said it is aware that some package recipients have received fraudulent text messages demanding payment before a package can be delivered, and that it has been working with partners in its delivery chain to try to understand how the fraud was occurring.

“During that review, UPS discovered a method by which a person who searched for a particular package or misused a package look-up tool could obtain more information about the delivery, potentially including a recipient’s phone number,” the letter reads. “Because this information could be misused by third parties, including potentially in a smishing scheme, UPS has taken steps to limit access to that information.”

The written notice goes on to say UPS believes the data exposure “affected packages for a small group of shippers and some of their customers from February 1, 2022 to April 24, 2023.”

As early as April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity began receiving tips from Canadian readers who were puzzling over why they’d just received one of these SMS phishing messages that referenced information from a recent order they’d legitimately placed at an online retailer.

In March, 2023, a reader named Dylan from British Columbia wrote in to say he’d received one of these shipping fee scam messages not long after placing an order to buy gobs of building blocks directly from Lego.com. The message included his full name, phone number, and postal code, and urged him to click a link to mydeliveryfee-ups[.]info and pay a $1.55 delivery fee that was supposedly required to deliver his Legos.

“From searching the text of this phishing message, I can see that a lot of people have experienced this scam, which is more convincing because of the information the phishing text contains,” Dylan wrote. “It seems likely to me that UPS is leaking information somehow about upcoming deliveries.”

Josh is a reader who works for a company that ships products to Canada, and in early January 2023 he inquired whether there was any information about a breach at UPS Canada.

“We’ve seen many of our customers targeted with a fraudulent UPS text message scheme after placing an order,” Josh said. “A link is provided (often only after the customer responds to the text) which takes you to a captcha page, followed by a fraudulent payment collection page.”

Pivoting on the domain in the smishing message sent to Dylan shows the phishing domain shared an Internet host in Russia [91.215.85-166] with nearly two dozen other smishing related domains, including upsdelivery[.]info, legodelivery[.]info, adidascanadaltd[.]com, crocscanadafee[.]info, refw0234apple[.]info, vista-printcanada[.]info and telus-ca[.]info.

The inclusion of big-name brands in the domains of these UPS smishing campaigns suggests the perpetrators had the ability to focus their lookups on UPS customers who had recently ordered items from specific companies.

Attempts to visit these domains with a web browser failed, but loading them in a mobile device (or in my case, emulating a mobile device using a virtual machine and Developer Tools in Firefox) revealed the first stage of this smishing attack. As Josh mentioned, what first popped up was a CAPTCHA; after the visitor solved the CAPTCHA, they were taken through several more pages that requested the user’s full name, date of birth, credit card number, address, email and phone number.

In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Alex, the CEO of a technology company in Canada who asked to leave his last name out of this story. Alex reached out when he began receiving the smishing messages almost immediately after ordering two sets of Airpods directly from Apple’s website.

What puzzled Alex most was that he’d instructed Apple to send the Airpods as a gift to two different people, and less than 24 hours later the phone number he uses for his Apple account received two of the phishing messages, both of which contained salutations that included the names of the people for whom he’d bought Airpods.

“I’d put the recipient as different people on my team, but because it was my phone number on both orders I was the one getting the texts,” Alex explained. “That same day, I got text messages referring to me as two different people, neither of whom were me.”

Alex said he believes UPS Canada either doesn’t fully understand what happened yet, or it is being coy about what it knows. He said the wording of UPS’s response misleadingly suggests the smishing attacks were somehow the result of hackers randomly looking up package information via the company’s tracking website.

Alex said it’s likely that whoever is responsible figured out how to query the UPS Canada website for only pending orders from specific brands, perhaps by exploiting some type of application programming interface (API) that UPS Canada makes or made available to its biggest retail partners.

“It wasn’t like I put the order through [on Apple.ca] and some days or weeks later I got a targeted smishing attack,” he said. “It was more or less the same day. And it was as if [the phishers] were being notified the order existed.”

The letter to UPS Canada customers does not mention whether any other customers in North America were affected, and it remains unclear whether any UPS customers outside of Canada may have been targeted.

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Sandy Springs, Ga. based UPS [NYSE:UPS] said the company has been working with partners in the delivery chain to understand how that fraud was being perpetrated, as well as with law enforcement and third-party experts to identify the cause of this scheme and to put a stop to it.

“Law enforcement has indicated that there has been an increase in smishing impacting a number of shippers and many different industries,” reads an email from Brian Hughes, director of financial and strategy communications at UPS.

“Out of an abundance of caution, UPS is sending privacy incident notification letters to individuals in Canada whose information may have been impacted,” Hughes said. “We encourage our customers and general consumers to learn about the ways they can stay protected against attempts like this by visiting the UPS Fight Fraud website.”

If you operate a cybercrime business that relies on disseminating malicious software, you probably also spend a good deal of time trying to disguise or “crypt” your malware so that it appears benign to antivirus and security products. In fact, the process of “crypting” malware is sufficiently complex and time-consuming that most serious cybercrooks will outsource this critical function to a handful of trusted third parties. This story explores the history and identity behind Cryptor[.]biz, a long-running crypting service that is trusted by some of the biggest names in cybercrime.

Virtually all malware that is deployed for use in data stealing at some point needs to be crypted. This highly technical, laborious process involves iteratively altering the appearance and behavior of a malicious file until it no longer sets off alarm bells when scanned by different antivirus tools.

Experienced malware purveyors understand that if they’re not continuously crypting their malware before sending it out, then a lot more of whatever digital disease they are trying to spread is going to get flagged by security tools. In short, if you are running a cybercrime enterprise and you’re not equipped to handle this crypting process yourself, you probably need to pay someone else to do it for you.

Thanks to the high demand for reliable crypting services, there are countless cybercriminals who’ve hung out their shingles as crypting service providers. However, most of these people do not appear to be very good at what they do, because most are soon out of business.

One standout is Cryptor[.]biz. This service is actually recommended by the purveyors of the RedLine information stealer malware, which is a popular and powerful malware kit that specializes in stealing victim data and is often used to lay the groundwork for ransomware attacks. Cryptor[.]biz also has been recommended to customers of the Predator information stealer malware family (via the malware’s Telegram support channels).

WHO RUNS CRYPTOR[.]BIZ?

As good as Cryptor[.]biz may be at obfuscating malware, its proprietor does not appear to have done a great job covering his own tracks. The registration records for the website Cryptor[.]biz are hidden behind privacy protection services, but the site’s homepage says potential customers should register by visiting the domain crypt[.]guru, or by sending a Jabber instant message to the address “masscrypt@exploit.im.”

Crypt[.]guru’s registration records also are hidden, yet passive domain name system (DNS) records for both cryptor[.]biz and crypt[.]guru show that in 2018 the domains were forwarding incoming email to the address obelisk57@gmail.com.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 reports that obelisk57@gmail.com was used to register an account on the forum Blacksoftware under the nickname “Kerens.” Meanwhile, the Jabber address masscrypt@exploit.im has been associated with the user Kerens on the Russian hacking forum Exploit from 2011 to the present day.

The very first post by Kerens on Exploit in 2011 was a negative review of a popular crypting service that predated Cryptor[.]biz called VIP Crypt, which Kerens accused of being “shitty” and unreliable. But Intel 471 finds that after his critical review of VIP Crypt, Kerens did not post publicly on Exploit again for another four years until October 2016, when they suddenly began advertising Cryptor[.]biz.

Intel 471 found that Kerens used the email address pepyak@gmail.com, which also was used to register Kerens accounts on the Russian language hacking forums Verified and Damagelab.

Ironically, Verified has itself been hacked multiple times over the years, with its private messages and user registration details leaked online. Those records indicate the user Kerens registered on Verified in March 2009 from an Internet address in Novosibirsk, a city in the southern Siberian region of Russia.

In 2010, someone with the username Pepyak on the Russian language affiliate forum GoFuckBiz[.]com shared that they typically split their time during the year between living in Siberia (during the milder months) and Thailand (when Novosibirsk is typically -15 °C/°5F).

For example, in one conversation about the best car to buy for navigating shoddy roads, Pepyak declared, “We have shitty roads in Siberia.” In January 2010, Pepyak asked the GoFuckBiz community where one might find a good USB-based modem in Phuket, Thailand.

DomainTools.com says the email address pepyak@gmail.com was used to register 28 domain names over the years, including a now-defunct Russian automobile sales website called “autodoska[.]biz.” DomainTools shows this website was registered in 2008 to a Yuri Churnov from Sevastpol, Crimea (prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the peninsula was part of Ukraine).

The WHOIS records for autodoska[.]biz were changed in 2010 to Sergey Purtov (pepyak@gmail.com) from Yurga, a town in Russia’s Kemerovo Oblast, which is a relatively populous area in Western Siberia that is adjacent to Novosibirsk.

Many of the 28 domains registered to pepyak@gmail.com have another email address in their registration records: unforgiven57@mail.ru. According to DomainTools, the Unforgiven email address was used to register roughly a dozen domains, including three that were originally registered to Keren’s email address — pepyak@gmail.com (e.g., antivirusxp09[.]com).

One of the domains registered in 2006 to the address unforgiven57@mail.ru was thelib[.]ru, which for many years was a place to download pirated e-books. DomainTools says thelib[.]ru was originally registered to a Sergey U Purtov.

Most of the two-dozen domains registered to pepyak@gmail.com shared a server at one point with a small number of other domains, including mobile-soft[.]su, which was registered to the email address spurtov@gmail.com.

CDEK, an express delivery company based in Novosibirsk, was apparently hacked at some point because cyber intelligence firm Constella Intelligence found that its database shows the email address spurtov@gmail.com was assigned to a Sergey Yurievich Purtov (Сергей Юрьевич Пуртов).

DomainTools says the same phone number in the registration records for autodoska[.]biz (+7.9235059268) was used to secure two other domains — bile[.]ru and thelibrary[.]ru, both of which were registered to a Sergey Y Purtov.

A search on the phone number 79235059268 in Skype reveals these digits belong to a “Sergey” from Novosibirsk with the now-familiar username  — Pepyak.

Bringing things full circle, Constella Intelligence shows that various online accounts tied to the email address unforgiven57@mail.ru frequently relied on the somewhat unique password, “plk139t51z.” Constella says that same password was used for just a handful of other email addresses, including gumboldt@gmail.com.

Hacked customer records from CDEK show gumboldt@gmail.com was tied to a customer named Sergey Yurievich Purtov. DomainTools found that virtually all of the 15 domain names registered to gumboldt@gmail.com (including the aforementioned mobile-soft[.]su) were at one point registered to spurtov@gmail.com.

Intel 471 reports that gumboldt@gmail.com was used in 2009 to register a user by the nickname “Kolumb” on the Russian hacking forum Antichat. From Kolumb’s posts on Antichat, it seems this user was mostly interested in buying access to compromised computers inside of Russia.

Then in December 2009, Kolumb said they were in desperate need of a reliable crypting service or full-time cryptor.

“We need a person who will crypt software every day, sometimes even a couple of times a day,” Kolumb wrote on Antichat.

Mr. Purtov did not respond to requests for comment sent to any of the email addresses referenced in this report. Mail.ru responded that the email address spurtov@mail.ru is no longer active.

ANALYSIS

As KrebsOnSecurity opined on Mastodon earlier this week, it makes a lot of sense for cybersecurity researchers and law enforcement alike to focus attention on the top players in the crypting space — for several reasons. Most critically, the cybercriminals offering time-tested crypting services also tend to be among the most experienced and connected malicious coders on the planet.

Think of it this way: By definition, a crypting service scans and examines all types of malware before those new nasties are first set loose in the wild. This fact alone should make these criminal enterprises a primary target of cybersecurity firms looking to gain more timely intelligence about new malware.

Also, a review of countless posts and private messages from Pepyak and other crypting providers shows that a successful crypting service will have direct and frequent contact with some of the world’s most advanced malware authors.

In short, infiltrating or disrupting a trusted crypting service can be an excellent way to slow down or even sideline a large number of cybercrime operations all at once.

Further reading on the crypting industry:

This Service Helps Malware Authors Fix Flaws in Their Code
Antivirus is Dead: Long Live Antivirus!