Data Viper, a security startup that provides access to some 15 billion usernames, passwords and other information exposed in more than 8,000 website breaches, has itself been hacked and its user database posted online. The hackers also claim they are selling on the dark web roughly 2 billion records Data Viper collated from numerous breaches and data leaks, including data from several companies that likely either do not know they have been hacked or have not yet publicly disclosed an intrusion.

The apparent breach at St. Louis, Mo. based Data Viper offers a cautionary and twisted tale of what can happen when security researchers seeking to gather intelligence about illegal activity online get too close to their prey or lose sight of their purported mission. The incident also highlights the often murky area between what’s legal and ethical in combating cybercrime.

Data Viper is the brainchild of Vinny Troia, a security researcher who runs a cyber threat intelligence company called Night Lion Security. Since its inception in 2018, Data Viper has billed itself as a “threat intelligence platform designed to provide organizations, investigators and law enforcement with access to the largest collection of private hacker channels, pastes, forums and breached databases on the market.”

Many private companies sell access to such information to vetted clients — mainly law enforcement officials and anti-fraud experts working in security roles at major companies that can foot the bill for these often pricey services.

Data Viper has sought to differentiate itself by advertising “access to private and undisclosed breach data.” As KrebsOnSecurity noted in a 2018 story, Troia has acknowledged posing as a buyer or seller on various dark web forums as a way to acquire old and newly-hacked databases from other forum members.

But this approach may have backfired over the weekend, when someone posted to the deep web a link to an “e-zine” (electronic magazine) describing the Data Viper hack and linking to the Data Viper user base. The anonymous poster alleged he’d been inside Data Viper for months and had exfiltrated hundreds of gigabytes of breached data from the service without notice.

The intruder also linked to several dozen new sales threads on the dark web site Empire Market, where they advertise the sale of hundreds of millions of account details from dozens of leaked or hacked website databases that Data Viper allegedly acquired via trading with others on cybercrime forums.

Some of the databases for sale tie back to known, publicly reported breaches. But others correspond to companies that do not appear to have disclosed a security incident. As such, KrebsOnSecurity is not naming most of those companies and is currently attempting to ascertain the validity of the claims.

KrebsOnSecurity did speak with Victor Ho, the CEO of Fivestars.com, a company that helps smaller firms run customer loyalty programs. The hackers claimed they are selling 44 million records taken from Fivestars last year. Ho said he was unaware of any data security incident and that no such event had been reported to his company, but that Fivestars is now investigating the claims. Ho allowed that the number of records mentioned in the dark web sales thread roughly matches the number of users his company had last year.

But on Aug. 3, 2019, Data Viper’s Twitter account casually noted, “FiveStars — 44m breached records added – incl Name, Email, DOB.” The post, buried among a flurry of similar statements about huge caches of breached personal information added to Data Viper, received hardly any attention and garnered just one retweet.

GNOSTIC PLAYERS, SHINY HUNTERS

Reached via Twitter, Troia acknowledged that his site had been hacked, but said the attackers only got access to the development server for Data Viper, and not the more critical production systems that power the service and which house his index of compromised credentials.

Troia said the people responsible for compromising his site are the same people who hacked the databases they are now selling on the dark web and claiming to have obtained exclusively from his service.

What’s more, Troia believes the attack was a preemptive strike in response to a keynote he’s giving in Boston this week: On June 29, Troia tweeted that he plans to use the speech to publicly expose the identities of the hackers, who he suspects are behind a large number of website break-ins over the years.

Hacked or leaked credentials are prized by cybercriminals engaged in “credential stuffing,” a rampant form of cybercrime that succeeds when people use the same passwords across multiple websites. Armed with a list of email addresses and passwords from a breached site, attackers will then automate login attempts using those same credentials at hundreds of other sites.

Password re-use becomes orders of magnitude more dangerous when website developers engage in this unsafe practice. Indeed, a January 2020 post on the Data Viper blog suggests credential stuffing is exactly how the group he plans to discuss in his upcoming talk perpetrated their website compromises.

In that post, Troia wrote that the hacker group, known variously as “Gnostic Players” and “Shiny Hunters,” plundered countless website databases using roughly the same method: Targeting developers using credential stuffing attacks to log into their GitHub accounts.

“While there, they would pillage the code repositories, looking for AWS keys and similar credentials that were checked into code repositories,” Troia wrote.

Troia said the intrusion into his service wasn’t the result of the credential re-use, but instead because his developer accidentally left his credentials exposed in documents explaining how customers can use Data Viper’s application programming interface.

“I will say the irony of how they got in is absolutely amazing,” Troia said. “But all of this stuff they claim to be selling is [databases] they were already selling. All of this is from Gnostic players. None of it came from me. It’s all for show to try and discredit my report and my talk.”

Troia said he didn’t know how many of the databases Gnostic Players claimed to have obtained from his site were legitimate hacks or even public yet.

“As for public reporting on the databases, a lot of that will be in my report Wednesday,” he said. “All of my ‘reporting’ goes to the FBI.”

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

The e-zine produced by the Data Viper hackers claimed that Troia used many nicknames on various cybercrime forums, including the moniker “Exabyte” on OGUsers, a forum that’s been closely associated with account takeovers.

In a conversation with KrebsOnSecurity, Troia acknowledged that this Exabyte attribution was correct, noting that he was happy about the exposure because it further solidified his suspicions about who was responsible for hacking his site.

This is interesting because some of the hacked databases the intruders claimed to have acquired after compromising Data Viper correspond to discoveries credited to Troia in which companies inadvertently exposed tens of millions of user details by leaving them publicly accessible online at cloud services like Amazon’s EC2.

For example, in March 2019, Troia said he’d co-discovered a publicly accessible database containing 150 gigabytes of plaintext marketing data — including 763 million unique email addresses. The data had been exposed online by Verifications.io, an email validation firm.

On Oct 12, 2019, a new user named Exabyte registered on RaidForums — a site dedicated to sharing hacked databases and tools to perpetrate credential stuffing attacks. That Exabyte account was registered less than two weeks after Troia created his Exabyte identity on OGUsers. The Exabyte on RaidForums posted on Dec. 26, 2019 that he was providing the community with something of a belated Christmas present: 200 million accounts leaked from Verifications.io.

“Verifications.io is finally here!” Exabyte enthused. “This release contains 69 of 70 of the original verifications.io databases, totaling 200+ million accounts.”

In May 2018, Troia was featured in Wired.com and many other publications after discovering that sales intelligence firm Apollo left 125 million email addresses and nine billion data points publicly exposed in a cloud service. As I reported in 2018, prior to that disclosure Troia had sought my help in identifying the source of the exposed data, which he’d initially and incorrectly concluded was exposed by LinkedIn.com. Rather, Apollo had scraped and collated the data from many different sites, including LinkedIn.

Then in August 2018, someone using the nickname “Soundcard” posted a sales thread to the now-defunct Kickass dark web forum offering the personal information of 212 million LinkedIn users in exchange for two bitcoin (then the equivalent of ~$12,000 USD). Incredibly, Troia had previously told me that he was the person behind that Soundcard identity on the Kickass forum.

Asked about the Exabyte posts on RaidForums, Troia said he wasn’t the only one who had access to the Verifications.io data, and that the full scope of what’s been going on would become clearer soon.

“More than one person can have the same name ‘Exabyte,” Troia said. “So much from both sides you are seeing is smoke and mirrors.”

Smoke and mirrors, indeed. It’s entirely possible this incident is an elaborate and cynical PR stunt by Troia to somehow spring a trap on the bad guys. Troia recently published a book on threat hunting, and on page 360 (PDF) he describes how he previously staged a hack against his own site and then bragged about the fake intrusion on cybercrime forums in a bid to gather information about specific cybercriminals who took the bait — the same people, by the way, he claims are behind the attack on his site.

MURKY WATERS

While the trading of hacked databases may not technically be illegal in the United States, it’s fair to say the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) takes a dim view of those who operate services marketed to cybercriminals.

In January 2020, U.S. authorities seized the domain of WeLeakInfo.com, an online service that for three years sold access to data hacked from other websites. Two men were arrested in connection with that seizure. In February 2017, the Justice Department took down LeakedSource, a service that operated similarly to WeLeakInfo.

The DOJ recently released guidance (PDF) to help threat intelligence companies avoid the risk of prosecution when gathering and purchasing data from illicit sources online. The guidelines suggest that some types of intelligence gathering — particularly exchanging ill-gotten information with others on crime forums as a way to gain access to other data or to increase one’s status on the forum — could be especially problematic.

“If a practitioner becomes an active member of a forum and exchanges information and communicates directly with other forum members, the practitioner can quickly become enmeshed in illegal conduct, if not careful,” reads the Feb. 2020 DOJ document.

The document continues:

“It may be easier for an undercover practitioner to extract information from sources on the forum who have learned to trust the practitioner’s persona, but developing trust and establishing bona fides as a fellow criminal may involve offering useful information, services, or tools that can be used to commit crimes.”

“Engaging in such activities may well result in violating federal criminal law. Whether a crime has occurred usually hinges on an individual’s actions and intent. A practitioner must avoid doing anything that furthers the criminal objectives of others on the forums. Even though the practitioner has no intention of committing a crime, assisting others engaged in criminal conduct can constitute the federal offense of aiding and abetting.”

“An individual may be found liable for aiding and abetting a federal offense if her or she takes an affirmative act — even an act that is lawful on its own — that is in furtherance of the crime and conducted with the intent of facilitating the crime’s commission.”

One of the most-read advice columns on this site is a 2018 piece called “Plant Your Flag, Mark Your Territory,” which tried to impress upon readers the importance of creating accounts at websites like those at the Social Security Administration, the IRS and others before crooks do it for you. A key concept here is that these services only allow one account per Social Security number — which for better or worse is the de facto national identifier in the United States. But KrebsOnSecurity recently discovered that this is not the case with all federal government sites built to help you manage your identity online.

A reader who was recently the victim of unemployment insurance fraud said he was told he should create an account at the Department of Homeland Security‘s myE-Verify website, and place a lock on his Social Security number (SSN) to minimize the chances that ID thieves might abuse his identity for employment fraud in the future.

According to the website, roughly 600,000 employers at over 1.9 million hiring sites use E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of new employees. E-Verify’s consumer-facing portal myE-Verify lets users track and manage employment inquiries made through the E-Verify system. It also features a “Self Lock” designed to prevent the misuse of one’s SSN in E-Verify.

Enabling this lock is supposed to mean that for the next year thereafter, if an unauthorized individual attempts to fraudulently use a SSN for employment authorization, he or she cannot use the SSN in E-Verify, even if the SSN is that of an employment authorized individual. But in practice, this service may actually do little to deter ID thieves from impersonating you to a potential employer.

At the request of the reader who reached out (and in the interest of following my own advice to plant one’s flag), KrebsOnSecurity decided to sign up for a myE-Verify account. After verifying my email address, I was asked to pick a strong password and select a form of multi-factor authentication (MFA). The most secure MFA option offered (a one-time code generated by an app like Google Authenticator or Authy) was already pre-selected, so I chose that.

The site requested my name, address, SSN, date of birth and phone number. I was then asked to select five questions and answers that might be asked if I were to try to reset my password, such as “In what city/town did you meet your spouse,” and “What is the name of the company of your first paid job.” I chose long, gibberish answers that had nothing to do with the questions (yes, these password questions are next to useless for security and frequently are the cause of account takeovers, but we’ll get to that in a minute).

Password reset questions selected, the site proceeded to ask four, multiple-guess “knowledge-based authentication” questions to verify my identity. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission‘s primer page on preventing job-related ID theft says people who have placed a security freeze on their credit files with the major credit bureaus will need to lift or thaw the freeze before being able to answer these questions successfully at myE-Verify. However, I did not find that to be the case, even though my credit file has been frozen with the major bureaus for years.

After successfully answering the KBA questions (the answer to each was “none of the above,” by the way), the site declared I’d successfully created my account! I could then see that I had the option to place a “Self Lock” on my SSN within the E-Verify system.

Doing so required me to pick three more challenge questions and answers. The site didn’t explain why it was asking me to do this, but I assumed it would prompt me for the answers in the event that I later chose to unlock my SSN within E-Verify.

After selecting and answering those questions and clicking the “Lock my SSN” button, the site generated an error message saying something went wrong and it couldn’t proceed.

Alas, logging out and logging back in again showed that the site did in fact proceed and that my SSN was locked. Joy.

But I still had to know one thing: Could someone else come along pretending to be me and create another account using my SSN, date of birth and address but under a different email address? Using a different browser and Internet address, I proceeded to find out.

Imagine my surprise when I was able to create a separate account as me with just a different email address (once again, the correct answers to all of the KBA questions was “none of the above”). Upon logging in, I noticed my SSN was indeed locked within E-Verify. So I chose to unlock it.

Did the system ask any of the challenge questions it had me create previously? Nope. It just reported that my SSN was now unlocked. Logging out and logging back in to the original account I created (again under a different IP and browser) confirmed that my SSN was unlocked.

ANALYSIS

Obviously, if the E-Verify system allows multiple accounts to be created using the same name, address, phone number, SSN and date of birth, this is less than ideal and somewhat defeats the purpose of creating one for the purposes of protecting one’s identity from misuse.

Lest you think your SSN and DOB is somehow private information, you should know this static data about U.S. residents has been exposed many times over in countless data breaches, and in any case these digits are available for sale on most Americans via Dark Web sites for roughly the bitcoin equivalent of a fancy caffeinated drink at Starbucks.

Being unable to proceed through knowledge-based authentication questions without first unfreezing one’s credit file with one or all of the big three credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) can actually be a plus for those of us who are paranoid about identity theft. I couldn’t find any mention on the E-Verify site of which company or service it uses to ask these questions, but the fact that the site doesn’t seem to care whether one has a freeze in place is troubling.

And when the correct answer to all of the KBA questions that do get asked is invariably “none of the above,” that somewhat lessens the value of asking them in the first place. Maybe that was just the luck of the draw in my case, but also troubling nonetheless. Either way, these KBA questions are notoriously weak security because the answers to them often are pulled from records that are public anyway, and can sometimes be deduced by studying the information available on a target’s social media profiles.

Speaking of silly questions, relying on “secret questions” or “challenge questions” as an alternative method of resetting one’s password is severely outdated and insecure. A 2015 study by Google titled “Secrets, Lies and Account Recovery” (PDF) found that secret questions generally offer a security level that is far lower than just user-chosen passwords. Also, the idea that an account protected by multi-factor authentication could be undermined by successfully guessing the answer(s) to one or more secret questions (answered truthfully and perhaps located by thieves through mining one’s social media accounts) is bothersome.

Finally, the advice given to the reader whose inquiry originally prompted me to sign up at myE-Verify doesn’t seem to have anything to do with preventing ID thieves from fraudulently claiming unemployment insurance benefits in one’s name at the state level. KrebsOnSecurity followed up with four different readers who left comments on this site about being victims of unemployment fraud recently, and none of them saw any inquiries about this in their myE-Verify accounts after creating them. Not that they should have seen signs of this activity in the E-Verify system; I just wanted to emphasize that one seems to have little to do with the other.

We’ve seen an ugly trend recently of tech news stories and cybersecurity firms trumpeting claims of ransomware attacks on companies large and small, apparently based on little more than the say-so of the ransomware gangs themselves. Such coverage is potentially quite harmful and plays deftly into the hands of organized crime.

Often the rationale behind couching these events as newsworthy is that the attacks involve publicly traded companies or recognizable brands, and that investors and the public have a right to know. But absent any additional information from the victim company or their partners who may be affected by the attack, these kinds of stories and blog posts look a great deal like ambulance chasing and sensationalism.

Currently, nearly two dozen ransomware crime gangs have erected their own blogs to publish sensitive data from victims. A few of these blogs routinely issue self-serving press releases, some of which gallingly refer to victims as “clients” and cast themselves in a beneficent light. Usually, the blog posts that appear on ransom sites are little more than a teaser — screenshots of claimed access to computers, or a handful of documents that expose proprietary or financial information.

The goal behind the publication of these teasers is clear, and the ransomware gangs make no bones about it: To publicly pressure the victim company into paying up. Those that refuse to be extorted are told to expect that huge amounts of sensitive company data will be published online or sold on the dark web (or both).

Emboldened by their successes, several ransomware gangs recently have started demanding two ransoms: One payment to secure a digital key that can unlock files, folders and directories encrypted by their malware, and a second to avoid having any stolen information published or shared with others.

KrebsOnSecurity has sought to highlight ransomware incidents at companies whose core business involves providing technical services to others — particularly managed service providers that have done an exceptionally poor job communicating about the attack with their customers.

Overall, I’ve tried to use each story to call attention to key failures that frequently give rise to ransomware infections, and to offer information about how other companies can avoid a similar fate.

But simply parroting what professional extortionists have posted on their blog about victims of cybercrime smacks of providing aid and comfort to an enemy that needs and deserves neither.

Maybe you disagree, dear readers? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it harder for banks to trace the source of payment card data stolen from smaller, hacked online merchants. On the plus side, months of quarantine have massively decreased demand for account information that thieves buy and use to create physical counterfeit credit cards. But fraud experts say recent developments suggest both trends are about to change — and likely for the worse.

The economic laws of supply and demand hold just as true in the business world as they do in the cybercrime space. Global lockdowns from COVID-19 have resulted in far fewer fraudsters willing or able to visit retail stores to use their counterfeit cards, and the decreased demand has severely depressed prices in the underground for purloined card data.

That’s according to Gemini Advisory, a New York-based cyber intelligence firm that closely tracks the inventories of dark web stores trafficking in stolen payment card data.

Stas Alforov, Gemini’s director of research and development, said that since the beginning of 2020 the company has seen a steep drop in demand for compromised “card present” data — digits stolen from hacked brick-and-mortar merchants with the help of malicious software surreptitiously installed on point-of-sale (POS) devices.

Alforov said the median price for card-present data has dropped precipitously over the past few months.

“Gemini Advisory has seen over 50 percent decrease in demand for compromised card present data since the mandated COVID-19 quarantines in the United States as well as the majority of the world,” he told KrebsOnSecurity.

Meanwhile, the supply of card-present data has remained relatively steady. Gemini’s latest find — a 10-month-long card breach at dozens of Chicken Express locations throughout Texas and other southern states that the fast-food chain first publicly acknowledged today after being contacted by this author — saw an estimated 165,000 cards stolen from eatery locations recently go on sale at one of the dark web’s largest cybercrime bazaars.

“Card present data supply hasn’t wavered much during the COVID-19 period,” Alforov said. “This is likely due to the fact that most of the sold data is still coming from breaches that occurred in 2019 and early 2020.”

Naturally, crooks who ply their trade in credit card thievery also have been working from home more throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. That means demand for stolen “card-not-present” data — customer payment information extracted from hacked online merchants and typically used to defraud other e-commerce vendors — remains high. And so have prices for card-not-present data: Gemini found prices for this commodity actually increased slightly over the past few months.

Andrew Barratt is an investigator with Coalfire, the cyber forensics firm hired by Chicken Express to remediate the breach and help the company improve security going forward. Barratt said there’s another curious COVID-19 dynamic going on with e-commerce fraud recently that is making it more difficult for banks and card issuers to trace patterns in stolen card-not-present data back to hacked web merchants — particularly smaller e-commerce shops.

“One of the concerns that has been expressed to me is that we’re getting [fewer] overlapping hotspots,” Barratt said. “For a lot of the smaller, more frequently compromised merchants there has been a large drop off in transactions. Whilst big e-commerce has generally done okay during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of more modest sized or specialty online retailers have not had the same access to their supply chain and so have had to close or drastically reduce the lines they’re selling.”

Banks routinely take groups of customer cards that have experienced fraudulent activity and try to see if some or all of them were used at the same merchant during a similar timeframe, a basic anti-fraud process known as “common point of purchase” or CPP analysis. But ironically, this analysis can become more challenging when there are fewer overall transactions going through a compromised merchant’s site, Barratt said.

“With a smaller transactional footprint means less Common Point of Purchase alerts and less data to work on to trigger a forensic investigation or fraud alert,” Barratt said. “It does also mean less fraud right now – which is a positive. But one of the big concerns that has been raised to us as investigators — literally asking if we have capacity for what’s coming — has been that merchants are getting compromised by ‘lie in wait’ type intruders.”

Barratt says there’s a suspicion that hackers may have established beachheads [breachheads?] in a number of these smaller online merchants and are simply biding their time. If and when transaction volumes for these merchants do pick up, the concern is then hackers may be in a better position to mix the sale of cards stolen from many hacked merchants and further confound CPP analysis efforts.

“These intruders may have a beachhead in a number of small and/or middle market e-commerce entities and they’re just waiting for the transaction volumes to go back up again and they’ve suddenly got the capability to have skimmers capturing lots of card data in the event of a sudden uptick in consumer spending,” he said. “They’d also have a diverse portfolio of compromise so could possibly even evade common point of purchase detection for a while too. Couple all of that with major shopping cart platforms going out of support (like Magento 1 this month) and furloughed IT and security staff, and there’s a potentially large COVID-19 breach bubble waiting to pop.”

With a majority of payment cards issued in the United States now equipped with a chip that makes the cards difficult and expensive for thieves to clone, cybercriminals have continued to focus on hacking smaller merchants that have not yet installed chip card readers and are still swiping the cards’ magnetic stripe at the register.

Barratt said his company has tied the source of the breach to malware known as “PwnPOS,” an ancient strain of point-of-sale malware that first surfaced more than seven years ago, if not earlier.

Chicken Express CEO Ricky Stuart told KrebsOnSecurity that apart from “a handful” of locations his family owns directly, most of his 250 stores are franchisees that decide on their own how to secure their payment operations. Nevertheless, the company is now forced to examine each store’s POS systems to remediate the breach.

Stuart blamed the major point-of-sale vendors for taking their time in supporting and validating chip-capable payment systems. But when asked how many of the company’s 250 stores had chip-capable readers installed, Stuart said he didn’t know. Ditto for the handful of stores he owns directly.

“I don’t know how many,” he said. “I would think it would be a majority. If not, I know they’re coming.”

A well-connected Russian hacker once described as “an asset of supreme importance” to Moscow was sentenced on Friday to nine years in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty to running a site that sold stolen payment card data, and to administering a highly secretive crime forum that counted among its members some of the most elite Russian cybercrooks.

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

As KrebsOnSecurity noted in a November 2019 profile of Burkov’s hacker nickname ‘k0pa,’ “a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.”

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

When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned Israeli citizen Naama Issachar on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. Nevertheless, Burkov was extradited to the United States in November 2019. Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned Issachar in January 2020, just hours after Burkov pleaded guilty.

Arkady Bukh is a New York attorney who has represented a number of accused and convicted cybercriminals from Eastern Europe and Russia. Bukh said he suspects Burkov did not cooperate with the Justice Department investigators apart from agreeing not to take the case to trial.

“Nine years is a huge sentence, and the government doesn’t give nine years to defendants who cooperate,” Bukh said. “Also, the time span [between Burkov’s guilty plea and sentencing] was very short.”

DirectConnection was something of a Who’s Who of major cybercriminals, and many of its most well-known members have likewise been extradited to and prosecuted by the United States. Those include Sergey “Fly” Vovnenko, who was sentenced to 41 months in prison for operating a botnet and stealing login and payment card data. Vovnenko also served as administrator of his own cybercrime forum, which he used in 2013 to carry out a plan to have Yours Truly framed for heroin possession.

As noted in last year’s profile of Burkov, an early and important member of DirectConnection was a hacker who went by the moniker “aqua” and ran the banking sub-forum on Burkov’s site. In December 2019, the FBI offered a $5 million bounty leading to the arrest and conviction of aqua, who’s been identified as Maksim Viktorovich Yakubets. The Justice Department says Yakubets/aqua ran a transnational cybercrime organization called “Evil Corp.” that stole roughly $100 million from victims.

According to a statement of facts in Burkov’s case, the author of the infamous SpyEye banking trojan — Aleksandr “Gribodemon” Panin— was personally vouched for by Burkov. Panin was sentenced in 2016 to more than nine years in prison.

Other top DirectConnection members include convicted credit card fraudsters Vladislav “Badb” Horohorin and Sergey “zo0mer” Kozerev, as well as the infamous spammer and botnet master Peter “Severa” Levashov.

Also on Friday, the Justice Department said it obtained a guilty plea from another top cybercrime forum boss — Sergey “Stells” Medvedev — who admitted to administering the Infraud forum. The government says Infraud, whose slogan was “In Fraud We Trust,” attracted more than 10,000 members and inflicted more than $568 million in actual losses from the sale of stolen identity information, payment card data and malware.

A copy of the 108-month judgment entered against Burkov is available here (PDF).