The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it has disrupted a giant botnet built and operated by a Russian government intelligence unit known for launching destructive cyberattacks against energy infrastructure in the United States and Ukraine. Separately, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and Germany moved to decapitate “Hydra,” a billion-dollar Russian darknet drug bazaar that also helped to launder the profits of multiple Russian ransomware groups.

FBI officials said Wednesday they disrupted “Cyclops Blink,” a collection of compromised networking devices managed by hackers working with the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).

A statement from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says the GRU’s hackers built Cyclops Blink by exploiting previously undocumented security weaknesses in firewalls and routers made by both ASUS and WatchGuard Technologies. The DOJ said it did not seek to disinfect compromised devices; instead, it obtained court orders to remove the Cyclops Blink malware from its “command and control” servers — the hidden machines that allowed the attackers to orchestrate the activities of the botnet.

The FBI and other agencies warned in March that the Cyclops Blink malware was built to replace a threat called “VPNFilter,” an earlier malware platform that targeted vulnerabilities in a number of consumer-grade wireless and wired routers. In May 2018, the FBI executed a similar strategy to dismantle VPNFilter, which had spread to more than a half-million consumer devices.

On April 1, ASUS released updates to fix the security vulnerability in a range of its Wi-Fi routers. Meanwhile, WatchGuard appears to have silently fixed its vulnerability in an update shipped almost a year ago, according to Dan Goodin at Ars Technica.

SANDWORM AND TRITON

Security experts say both VPNFilter and Cyclops Blink are the work of a hacking group known as Sandworm or Voodoo Bear, the same Russian team blamed for disrupting Ukraine’s electricity in 2015.

Sandworm also has been implicated in the “Industroyer” malware attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in December 2016, as well as the 2016 global malware contagion “NotPetya,” which crippled companies worldwide using an exploit believed to have been developed by and then stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

The action against Cyclops Blink came just weeks after the Justice Department unsealed indictments against four Russian men accused of launching cyberattacks on power utilities in the United States and abroad.

One of the indictments named three officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) suspected of being members of Berserk Bear, a.k.a. Dragonfly 2.0, a.k.a. Havex, which has been blamed for targeting electrical utilities and other critical infrastructure worldwide and is widely believed to be working at the behest of the Russian government.

The other indictment named Russians affiliated with a skilled hacking group known as “Triton” or “Trisis,” which infected a Saudi oil refinery with destructive malware in 2017, and then attempted to do the same to U.S. energy facilities.

The Justice Department said that in Dragonfly’s first stage between 2012 and 2014, the defendants hacked into computer networks of industrial control systems (ICS) companies and software providers, and then hid malware inside legitimate software updates for such systems.

“After unsuspecting customers downloaded Havex-infected updates, the conspirators would use the malware to, among other things, create backdoors into infected systems and scan victims’ networks for additional ICS/SCADA devices,” the DOJ said. “Through these and other efforts, including spearphishing and “watering hole” attacks, the conspirators installed malware on more than 17,000 unique devices in the United States and abroad, including ICS/SCADA controllers used by power and energy companies.”

In Dragonfly’s second iteration between 2014 and 2017, the hacking group spear-phished more than 3,300 people at more than 500 U.S. and international companies and entities, including U.S. federal agencies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“In some cases, the spearphishing attacks were successful, including in the compromise of the business network (i.e., involving computers not directly connected to ICS/SCADA equipment) of the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation (Wolf Creek) in Burlington, Kansas, which operates a nuclear power plant,” the DOJ’s account continues. “Moreover, after establishing an illegal foothold in a particular network, the conspirators typically used that foothold to penetrate further into the network by obtaining access to other computers and networks at the victim entity.”

HYDRA

Also this week, German authorities seized the server infrastructure for the Hydra Market, a bustling underground market for illegal narcotics, stolen data and money laundering that’s been operating since 2015. The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) said Hydra had roughly 17 million customers, and over 19,000 vendors, with sales amounting to at least 1.23 billion euros in 2020 alone.

In a statement on the Hydra takedown, the U.S. Department of Treasury said blockchain researchers had determined that approximately 86 percent of the illicit Bitcoin received directly by Russian virtual currency exchanges in 2019 came from Hydra.

Treasury sanctioned a number of cryptocurrency wallets associated with Hydra and with a virtual currency exchange called “Garantex,” which the agency says processed more than $100 million in transactions associated with illicit actors and darknet markets. That amount included roughly $8 million in ransomware proceeds laundered through Hydra on behalf of multiple ransomware groups, including Ryuk and Conti.

“Today’s action against Hydra and Garantex builds upon recent sanctions against virtual currency exchanges SUEX and CHATEX, both of which, like Garantex, operated out of Federation Tower in Moscow, Russia,” the Treasury Department said.

Many organizations are already struggling to combat cybersecurity threats from ransomware purveyors and state-sponsored hacking groups, both of which tend to take days or weeks to pivot from an opportunistic malware infection to a full blown data breach. But few organizations have a playbook for responding to the kinds of virtual “smash and grab” attacks we’ve seen recently from LAPSUS$, a juvenile data extortion group whose short-lived, low-tech and remarkably effective tactics have put some of the world’s biggest corporations on edge.

Since surfacing in late 2021, LAPSUS$ has gained access to the networks or contractors for some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta and Samsung. LAPSUS$ typically threatens to release sensitive data unless paid a ransom, but with most victims the hackers ended up publishing any information they stole (mainly computer source code).

Microsoft blogged about its attack at the hands of LAPSUS$, and about the group targeting its customers. It found LAPSUS$ used a variety of old-fashioned techniques that seldom show up in any corporate breach post-mortems, such as:

-targeting employees at their personal email addresses and phone numbers;
-offering to pay $20,000 a week to employees who give up remote access credentials;
-social engineering help desk and customer support employees at targeted companies;
-bribing/tricking employees at mobile phone stores to hijack a target’s phone number;
-intruding on their victims’ crisis communications calls post-breach.

If these tactics sound like something you might sooner expect from spooky, state-sponsored “Advanced Persistent Threat” or APT groups, consider that the core LAPSUS$ members are thought to range in age from 15 to 21. Also, LAPSUS$ operates on a shoestring budget and is anything but stealthy: According to Microsoft, LAPSUS$ doesn’t seem to cover its tracks or hide its activity. In fact, the group often announces its hacks on social media.

ADVANCED PERSISTENT TEENAGERS

This unusual combination makes LAPSUS$ something of an aberration that is probably more aptly referred to as “Advanced Persistent Teenagers,” said one CXO at a large organization that recently had a run-in with LAPSUS$.

“There is a lot of speculation about how good they are, tactics et cetera, but I think it’s more than that,” said the CXO, who spoke about the incident on condition of anonymity. “They put together an approach that industry thought suboptimal and unlikely. So it’s their golden hour.”

LAPSUS$ seems to have conjured some worst-case scenarios in the minds of many security experts, who worry what will happen when more organized cybercriminal groups start adopting these techniques.

“LAPSUS$ has shown that with only $25,000, a group of teenagers could get into organizations with mature cybersecurity practices,” said Amit Yoran, CEO of security firm Tenable and a former federal cybersecurity czar, testifying last week before the House Homeland Security Committee. “With much deeper pockets, focus, and mission, targeting critical infrastructure. That should be a sobering, if not terrifying, call to action.”

My CXO source said LAPSUS$ succeeds because they simply refuse to give up, and just keep trying until someone lets them in.

“They would just keep jamming a few individuals to get [remote] access, read some onboarding documents, enroll a new 2FA [two-factor authentication method] and exfiltrate code or secrets, like a smash-and-grab,” the CXO said. “These guys were not leet, just damn persistent.”

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The smash-and-grab attacks by LAPSUS$ obscure some of the group’s less public activities, which according to Microsoft include targeting individual user accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges to drain crypto holdings.

In some ways, the attacks from LAPSUS$ recall the July 2020 intrusion at Twitter, wherein the accounts for Apple, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Uber and others were made to tweet messages inviting the world to participate in a cryptocurrency scam that promised to double any amount sent to specific wallets. The flash scam netted the perpetrators more than $100,000 in the ensuing hours.

The group of teenagers who hacked Twitter hailed from a community that traded in hacked social media accounts. This community places a special premium on accounts with short “OG” usernames, and some of its most successful and notorious members were known to use all of the methods Microsoft attributed to LAPSUS$ in the service of hijacking prized OG accounts.

The Twitter hackers largely pulled it off by brute force, writes Wired on the July 15, 2020 hack.

“Someone was trying to phish employee credentials, and they were good at it,” Wired reported. “They were calling up consumer service and tech support personnel, instructing them to reset their passwords. Many employees passed the messages onto the security team and went back to business. But a few gullible ones—maybe four, maybe six, maybe eight—were more accommodating. They went to a dummy site controlled by the hackers and entered their credentials in a way that served up their usernames and passwords as well as multifactor authentication codes.”

Twitter revealed that a key tactic of the group was “phone spear phishing” (a.k.a. “voice phishing” a.k.a. “vishing”). This involved calling up Twitter staffers using false identities, and tricking them into giving up credentials for an internal company tool that let the hackers reset passwords and multi-factor authentication setups for targeted users.

In August 2020, KrebsOnSecurity warned that crooks were using voice phishing to target new hires at major companies, impersonating IT employees and asking them to update their VPN client or log in at a phishing website that mimicked their employer’s VPN login page.

Two days after that story ran, the FBI and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued their own warning on vishing, saying the attackers typically compiled dossiers on employees at specific companies by mass-scraping public profiles on social media platforms, recruiter and marketing tools, publicly available background check services, and open-source research. The joint FBI/CISA alert continued:

“Actors first began using unattributed Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) numbers to call targeted employees on their personal cellphones, and later began incorporating spoofed numbers of other offices and employees in the victim company. The actors used social engineering techniques and, in some cases, posed as members of the victim company’s IT help desk, using their knowledge of the employee’s personally identifiable information—including name, position, duration at company, and home address—to gain the trust of the targeted employee.”

“The actors then convinced the targeted employee that a new VPN link would be sent and required their login, including any 2FA [2-factor authentication] or OTP [one-time passwords]. The actor logged the information provided by the employee and used it in real-time to gain access to corporate tools using the employee’s account.”

Like LAPSUS$, these vishers just kept up their social engineering attacks until they succeeded. As KrebsOnSecurity wrote about the vishers back in 2020:

“It matters little to the attackers if the first few social engineering attempts fail. Most targeted employees are working from home or can be reached on a mobile device. If at first the attackers don’t succeed, they simply try again with a different employee.”

“And with each passing attempt, the phishers can glean important details from employees about the target’s operations, such as company-specific lingo used to describe its various online assets, or its corporate hierarchy.”

“Thus, each unsuccessful attempt actually teaches the fraudsters how to refine their social engineering approach with the next mark within the targeted organization.”

SMASH & GRAB

The primary danger with smash-and-grab groups like LAPSUS$ is not just their persistence but their ability to extract the maximum amount of sensitive information from their victims using compromised user accounts that typically have a short lifespan. After all, in many attacks, the stolen credentials are useful only so long as the impersonated employee isn’t also trying to use them.

This dynamic puts tremendous pressure on cyber incident response teams, which suddenly are faced with insiders who are trying frantically to steal everything of perceived value within a short window of time. On top of that, LAPSUS$ has a habit of posting screenshots on social media touting its access to internal corporate tools. These images and claims quickly go viral and create a public relations nightmare for the victim organization.

Single sign-on provider Okta experienced this firsthand last month, when LAPSUS$ posted screenshots that appeared to show Okta’s Slack channels and another with a Cloudflare interface. Cloudflare responded by resetting its employees’ Okta credentials.

Okta quickly came under fire for posting only a brief statement that said the screenshots LAPSUS$ shared were connected to a January 2022 incident involving the compromise of “a third-party customer support engineer working for one of our subprocessors,” and that “the matter was investigated and contained by the subprocessor.”

This assurance apparently did not sit well with many Okta customers, especially after LAPSUS$ began posting statements that disputed some of Okta’s claims. On March 25, Okta issued an apology for its handling of the January breach at a third-party support provider, which ultimately affected hundreds of its customers.

My CXO source said the lesson from LAPSUS$ is that even short-lived intrusions can have a long-term negative impact on victim organizations — especially when victims are not immediately forthcoming about the details of a security incident that affects customers.

“It does force us to think about insider access differently,” the CXO told KrebsOnSecurity. “Nation states have typically wanted longer, more strategic access; ransomware groups want large lateral movement. LAPSUS$ doesn’t care, it’s more about, ‘What can these 2-3 accounts get me in the next 6 hours?’ We haven’t optimized to defend that.”

Any organizations wondering what they can do to harden their systems against attacks from groups like LAPSUS$ should consult Microsoft’s recent blog post on the group’s activities, tactics and tools. Microsoft’s guidance includes recommendations that can help prevent account takeovers or at least mitigate the impact from stolen employee credentials.

On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and is now asking technology companies and federal agencies for information about the frequency of such schemes.

At issue are forged “emergency data requests,” (EDRs) sent through hacked police or government agency email accounts. Tech companies usually require a search warrant or subpoena before providing customer or user data, but any police jurisdiction can use an EDR to request immediate access to data without a warrant, provided the law enforcement entity attests that the request is related to an urgent matter of life and death.

As Tuesday’s story showed, hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. After all, there are roughly 18,000 distinct police organizations in the United States alone, and many thousands of government and police agencies worldwide.

Criminal hackers exploiting that ambiguity are enjoying remarkable success rates gaining access to the data they’re after, and some are now selling EDRs as a service to other crooks online.

This week’s piece included confirmation from social media platform Discord about a fraudulent EDR they recently processed. On Wednesday, Bloomberg published a story confirming that both Apple and Meta/Facebook have recently complied with fake EDRs.

Today, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who said he was moved to action after reading this week’s coverage.

“Recent news reports have revealed an enormous threat to Americans’ safety and national security,” Wyden said in a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity. “I’m particularly troubled by the prospect that forged emergency orders may be coming from compromised foreign law enforcement agencies, and then used to target vulnerable individuals.”

“I’m requesting information from tech companies and multiple federal agencies to learn more about how emergency data requests are being abused by hackers,” Wyden’s statement continues. “No one wants tech companies to refuse legitimate emergency requests when someone’s safety is at stake, but the current system has clear weaknesses that need to be addressed. Fraudulent government requests are a significant concern, which is why I’ve already authored legislation to stamp out forged warrants and subpoenas.”

Tuesday’s story showed how fraudulently obtained EDRs were a tool used by members of LAPSUS$, the data extortion group that recently hacked Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta and Samsung. And it tracked the activities of a teenage hacker from the United Kingdom who was reportedly arrested multiple times for sending fake EDRs.

That was in March 2021, but there are similar fake EDR services on offer today. One example can be found on Telegram, wherein a member who favors the handle “Bug” has for the past month been selling access to various police and government email accounts.

All of the access Bug is currently offering was allegedly stolen from non-U.S. police and government email accounts, including a police department in India; a government ministry of the United Arab Emirates; the Brazilian Secretariat of Education; and Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education.

On Mar. 30, Bug posted a sales thread to the cybercrime forum Breached[.]co saying he could be hired to perform fake EDRs on targets at will, provided the account was recently active.

“I am doing LE Emergency Data Requests for snapchat, twitter, ig [Instagram] and many others,” Bug wrote. “Information we can get: emails, IPs, phone numbers, photos. Account must be active in the last week else we get rejected as shown below. Have gotten information only on Snapchat, Twitter and IG so far.”

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. This post will be updated in the event they respond.

The current scourge of fraudulent EDRs illustrates the dangers of relying solely on email to process legal requests for privileged subscriber data. In July 2021, Sen. Wyden and others introduced new legislation to combat the growing use of counterfeit court orders by scammers and criminals. The bill calls for funding for state and tribal courts to adopt widely available digital signature technology that meets standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Forged court orders, usually involving copy-and-pasted signatures of judges, have been used to authorize illegal wiretaps and fraudulently take down legitimate reviews and websites by those seeking to conceal negative information and past crimes,” the lawmakers said in a statement introducing their bill.

The Digital Authenticity for Court Orders Act would require federal, state and tribal courts to use a digital signature for orders authorizing surveillance, domain seizures and removal of online content.

There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

In the United States, when federal, state or local law enforcement agencies wish to obtain information about who owns an account at a social media firm, or what Internet addresses a specific cell phone account has used in the past, they must submit an official court-ordered warrant or subpoena.

Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as long as the proper documents are provided and the request appears to come from an email address connected to an actual police department domain name.

But in certain circumstances — such as a case involving imminent harm or death — an investigating authority may make what’s known as an Emergency Data Request (EDR), which largely bypasses any official review and does not require the requestor to supply any court-approved documents.

It is now clear that some hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. Using their illicit access to police email systems, the hackers will send a fake EDR along with an attestation that innocent people will likely suffer greatly or die unless the requested data is provided immediately.

In this scenario, the receiving company finds itself caught between two unsavory outcomes: Failing to immediately comply with an EDR — and potentially having someone’s blood on their hands — or possibly leaking a customer record to the wrong person.

“We have a legal process to compel production of documents, and we have a streamlined legal process for police to get information from ISPs and other providers,” said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“And then we have this emergency process, almost like you see on [the television series] Law & Order, where they say they need certain information immediately,” Rasch continued. “Providers have a streamlined process where they publish the fax or contact information for police to get emergency access to data. But there’s no real mechanism defined by most Internet service providers or tech companies to test the validity of a search warrant or subpoena. And so as long as it looks right, they’ll comply.”

To make matters more complicated, there are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world — including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone — and all it takes for hackers to succeed is illicit access to a single police email account.

THE LAPSUS$ CONNECTION

The reality that teenagers are now impersonating law enforcement agencies to subpoena privileged data on their targets at whim is evident in the dramatic backstory behind LAPSUS$, the data extortion group that recently hacked into some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, including Microsoft, Okta, NVIDIA and Vodafone.

In a blog post about their recent hack, Microsoft said LAPSUS$ succeeded against its targets through a combination of low-tech attacks, mostly involving old-fashioned social engineering — such as bribing employees at or contractors for the target organization.

“Other tactics include phone-based social engineering; SIM-swapping to facilitate account takeover; accessing personal email accounts of employees at target organizations; paying employees, suppliers, or business partners of target organizations for access to credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) approval; and intruding in the ongoing crisis-communication calls of their targets,” Microsoft wrote of LAPSUS$.

Researchers from security firms Unit 221B and Palo Alto Networks say that prior to launching LAPSUS$, the group’s leader “White” (a.k.a. “WhiteDoxbin,” “Oklaqq”) was a founding member of a cybercriminal group calling itself the “Recursion Team.” This group specialized in SIM swapping targets of interest and participating in “swatting” attacks, wherein fake bomb threats, hostage situations and other violent scenarios are phoned in to police as part of a scheme to trick them into visiting potentially deadly force on a target’s address.

The founder of the Recursion Team was a then 14-year-old from the United Kingdom who used the handle “Everlynn.” On April 5, 2021, Everlynn posted a new sales thread to the cybercrime forum cracked[.]to titled, “Warrant/subpoena service (get law enforcement data from any service).” The price: $100 to $250 per request.

“Services [include] Apple, Snapchat, Google (more expensive), not doing Discord, basically any site mostly,” read Everlynn’s ad, which was posted by the user account “InfinityRecursion.”

A month prior on Cracked, Everlynn posted a sales thread, “1x Government Email Account || BECOME A FED!,” which advertised the ability to send email from a federal agency within the government of Argentina.

“I would like to sell a government email that can be used for subpoena for many companies such as Apple, Uber, Instagram, etc.,” Everlynn’s sales thread explained, setting the price at $150. “You can breach users and get private images from people on SnapChat like nudes, go hack your girlfriend or something haha. You won’t get the login for the account, but you’ll basically obtain everything in the account if you play your cards right. I am not legally responsible if you mishandle this. This is very illegal and you will get raided if you don’t use a vpn. You can also breach into the government systems for this, and find LOTS of more private data and sell it for way, way more.”

Last week, the BBC reported that authorities in the United Kingdom had detained seven individuals aged 16 to 21 in connection with LAPSUS$.

TAKING ON THE DOXBIN

It remains unclear whether White or Everlynn were among those detained; U.K. police declined to name the suspects. But White’s real-life identity became public recently after he crossed the wrong people.

The de-anonymization of the LAPSUS$ leader began late last year after he purchased a website called Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic online community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people.

Based on the feedback posted by Doxbin members, White was not a particularly attentive administrator. Longtime members soon took to harassing him about various components of the site falling into disrepair. That pestering eventually prompted White to sell Doxbin back to its previous owner at a considerable loss. But before doing so, White leaked the Doxbin user database.

White’s leak triggered a swift counterpunch from Doxbin’s staff, which naturally responded by posting on White perhaps the most thorough dox the forum had ever produced.

KrebsOnSecurity recently interviewed the past and current owner of the Doxbin — an established hacker who goes by the handle “KT.” According to KT, it is becoming more common for hackers to use EDRs for stalking, hacking, harassing and publicly humiliating others.

KT shared several recent examples of fraudulent EDRs obtained by hackers who bragged about their success with the method.

“Terroristic threats with a valid reason to believe somebody’s life is in danger is usually the go-to,” KT said, referring to the most common attestation that accompanies a fake EDR.

One of the phony EDRs shared by KT targeted an 18-year-old from Indiana, and was sent to the social media platform Discord earlier this year. The document requested the Internet address history of Discord accounts tied to a specific phone number used by the target. Discord complied with the request.

“Discord replies to EDRs in 30 minutes to one hour with the provided information,” KT claimed.

Asked about the validity of the unauthorized EDR shared by KT, Discord said the request came from a legitimate law enforcement account that was later determined to have been compromised.

“We can confirm that Discord received requests from a legitimate law enforcement domain and complied with the requests in accordance with our policies,” Discord said in a written statement. “We verify these requests by checking that they come from a genuine source, and did so in this instance. While our verification process confirmed that the law enforcement account itself was legitimate, we later learned that it had been compromised by a malicious actor. We have since conducted an investigation into this illegal activity and notified law enforcement about the compromised email account.”

KT said fake EDRs don’t have to come from police departments based in the United States, and that some people in the community of those sending fake EDRs are hacking into police department emails by first compromising the agency’s website. From there, they can drop a backdoor “shell” on the server to secure permanent access, and then create new email accounts within the hacked organization.

In other cases, KT said, hackers will try to guess the passwords of police department email systems. In these attacks, the hackers will identify email addresses associated with law enforcement personnel, and then attempt to authenticate using passwords those individuals have used at other websites that have been breached previously.

“A lot of governments overseas are using WordPress, and I know a kid on Telegram who has multiple shells on gov sites,” KT said. “It’s near impossible to get U.S. dot-govs nowadays, although I’ve seen a few people with it. Most govs use [Microsoft] Outlook, so it’s more difficult because theres usually some sort of multi-factor authentication. But not all have it.”

According to KT, Everlynn and White recently had a falling out, with White paying KT to publish a dox on Everlynn and to keep it pinned to the site’s home page. That dox states that Everlynn is a 15-year-old from the United Kingdom who has used a variety of monikers over the past year alone, including “Miku” and “Anitsu.”

KT said Everlynn’s dox is accurate, and that the youth has been arrested multiple times for issuing fake EDRs. But KT said each time Everlynn gets released from police custody, he goes right back to committing the same cybercrimes.

“Anitsu (Miku, Everlynn), an old staff member of Doxbin, was arrested probably 4-5 months ago for jacking government emails used for EDR’ing,” KT said. “White and him are not friends anymore though. White paid me a few weeks ago to pin his dox on Doxbin. Also, White had planned to use EDRs against me, due to a bet we had planned; dox for dox, winner gets 1 coin.”

A FUNDAMENTALLY UNFIXABLE PROBLEM?

Nicholas Weaver, a security specialist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, said one big challenge to combating fraudulent EDRs is that there is fundamentally no notion of global online identity.

“The only way to clean it up would be to have the FBI act as the sole identity provider for all state and local law enforcement,” Weaver said. “But even that won’t necessarily work because how does the FBI vet in real time that some request is really from some podunk police department?”

It’s not clear that the FBI would be willing or able to take on such a task. In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that hackers sent a fake email alert to thousands of state and local law enforcement entities through the FBI’s Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP). In that attack, the intruders abused a fairly basic and dangerous coding error on the website, and the fake emails all came from a real fbi.gov address.

The particulars of how the FBI’s LEEP portal got hacked were provided by Pompompurin, the handle chosen by an individual who’s been involved in countless data breaches at major companies. But Doxbin’s KT told KrebsOnSecurity this week that White was the one who initially discovered the LEEP portal security weakness.

“White originally found that,” KT said. “Pom just took credit.”

KrebsOnSecurity asked the FBI whether it had any indication that its own systems were used for unauthorized EDRs. The FBI declined to answer that question, but confirmed it was aware of different schemes involving phony EDRs targeting both the public and the agency’s private sector partners.

“We take these reports seriously and vigorously pursue them,” reads a written statement shared by the FBI. “Visit this page for tips and resources to verify the information you are receiving. If you believe you are a victim of an emergency data request scheme, please report to www.ic3.gov or contact your local FBI field office.”

Rasch said while service providers need more rigorous vetting mechanisms for all types of legal requests, getting better at spotting unauthorized EDRs would require these companies to somehow know and validate the names of every police officer in the United States.

“One of the problems you have is there’s no validated master list of people who are authorized to make that demand,” Rasch said. “And that list is going to change all the time. But even then, the entire system is only as secure as the least secure individual police officer email account.”

The idea of impersonating law enforcement officers to obtain information typically only available via search warrant or subpoena is hardly new. A fictionalized example appeared in the second season of the hit television show Mr. Robot, wherein the main character Elliot pretends to be a police officer to obtain location data in real time from a cellular phone company.

Weaver said what probably keeps fraudulent EDRs from being more common is that most people in the criminal hacking community perceive it as too risky. This is supported by the responses in discussion threads across multiple hacking forums where members sought out someone to perform an EDR on their behalf.

“It’s highly risky if you get caught,” Weaver said. “But doing this is not a matter of skill. It’s one of will. It’s a fundamentally unfixable problem without completely redoing how we think about identity on the Internet on a national scale.”

The current situation with fraudulent EDRs illustrates the dangers of relying solely on email to process legal requests for highly sensitive subscriber data. In July 2021, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced new legislation to combat the growing use of counterfeit court orders by scammers and criminals. The bill calls for funding for state and tribal courts to adopt widely available digital signature technology that meets standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Forged court orders, usually involving copy-and-pasted signatures of judges, have been used to authorize illegal wiretaps and fraudulently take down legitimate reviews and websites by those seeking to conceal negative information and past crimes,” the lawmakers said in a statement introducing their bill.

The Digital Authenticity for Court Orders Act would require federal, state and tribal courts to use a digital signature for orders authorizing surveillance, domain seizures and removal of online content.

An Estonian man was sentenced today to more than five years in a U.S. prison for his role in at least 13 ransomware attacks that caused losses of approximately $53 million. Prosecutors say the accused also enjoyed a lengthy career of “cashing out” access to hacked bank accounts worldwide.

Maksim Berezan, 37, is an Estonian national who was arrested nearly two years ago in Latvia. U.S. authorities alleged Berezan was a longtime member of DirectConnection, a closely-guarded Russian cybercriminal forum that existed until 2015. Berezan’s indictment (PDF) says he used his status at DirectConnection to secure cashout jobs from other vetted crooks on the exclusive crime forum.

Berezan specialized in cashouts and “drops.” Cashouts refer to using stolen payment card data to make fraudulent purchases or to withdraw money from bank accounts without authorization. A drop is a location or individual able to securely receive and forward funds or goods obtained through cashouts or other types of fraud. Drops typically are used to make it harder for law enforcement to trace fraudulent transactions and to circumvent fraud detection measures used by banks and credit card companies.

Acting on information from U.S. authorities, in November 2020 Latvian police searched Berezan’s residence there and found a red Porsche Carrera 911, a black Porsche Cayenne, a Ducati motorcycle, and an assortment of jewelry. They also seized $200,000 in currency, and $1.7 million in bitcoin.

After Berezan was extradited to the United States in December 2020, investigators searching his electronic devices said they found “significant evidence of his involvement in ransomware activity.”

“The post-extradition investigation determined that Berezan had participated in at least 13 ransomware attacks, 7 of which were against U.S. victims, and that approximately $11 million in ransom payments flowed into cryptocurrency wallets that he controlled,” reads a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Berezan pleaded guilty in April 2021 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

For many years on DirectConnection and other crime forums, Berezan went by the hacker alias “Albanec.” Investigators close to the case told KrebsOnSecurity that Albanec was involved in multiple so-called “unlimited” cashouts, a highly choreographed, global fraud scheme in which crooks hack a bank or payment card processor and used cloned payment cards at cash machines around the world to fraudulently withdraw millions of dollars in just a few hours.

Berezan joins a growing list of top cybercriminals from DirectConnection who’ve been arrested and convicted of cybercrimes since the forum disappeared years ago. One of Albanec’s business partners on the forum was Sergey “Flycracker” Vovnenko, a Ukrainian man who once ran his own cybercrime forum and who in 2013 executed a plot to have heroin delivered to our home in a bid to get Yours Truly arrested for drug possession. Vovnenko was later arrested, extradited to the United States, pleaded guilty and spent more than three years in prison on botnet-related charges (Vovnenko is now back in Ukraine, trying to fight the Russian invasion with his hacking abilities).

Perhaps the most famous DirectConnection member was its administrator Aleksei Burkov, a Russian hacker thought to be so connected to the Russian cybercriminal scene that he was described as an “asset of extreme importance to Moscow.” Burkov was arrested in Israel in 2015, and the Kremlin arrested an Israeli woman on trumped-up drug charges to force a prisoner swap.

That effort failed. Burkov was extradited to the U.S. in 2019, soon pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to nine years. However, he was recently deported back to Russia prior to serving his full sentence, which has prompted Republican leaders in the House to question why.

Other notable cybercrooks from DirectConnection who’ve been arrested, extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to prison include convicted credit card fraudsters Vladislav “Badb” Horohorin and Sergey “zo0mer” Kozerev, as well as the infamous spammer and botnet master Peter “Severa” Levashov.

At his sentencing today, Berezan was sentenced to 66 months in prison and ordered to pay $36 million in restitution to his victims. A source close to the investigation said Berezan’s sentence likely would have been far more severe had he not entered into a cooperation agreement to share useful information with U.S. authorities.