Image: Shutterstock.

On July 16, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sent a letter to the owners of the .top domain registry. ICANN has filed hundreds of enforcement actions against domain registrars over the years, but in this case ICANN singled out a domain registry responsible for maintaining an entire top-level domain (TLD).

Among other reasons, the missive chided the registry for failing to respond to reports about phishing attacks involving .top domains.

“Based on the information and records gathered through several weeks, it was determined that .TOP Registry does not have a process in place to promptly, comprehensively, and reasonably investigate and act on reports of DNS Abuse,” the ICANN letter reads (PDF).

ICANN’s warning redacted the name of the recipient, but records show the .top registry is operated by a Chinese entity called Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co. Ltd. Representatives for the company have not responded to requests for comment.

Domains ending in .top were represented prominently in a new phishing report released today by the Interisle Consulting Group, which sources phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus.

Interisle’s newest study examined nearly two million phishing attacks in the last year, and found that phishing sites accounted for more than four percent of all new .top domains between May 2023 and April 2024. Interisle said .top has roughly 2.76 million domains in its stable, and that more than 117,000 of those were phishing sites in the past year.

Source: Interisle Consulting Group.

ICANN said its review was based on information collected and studied about .top domains over the past few weeks. But the fact that high volumes of phishing sites are being registered through Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co Ltd. is hardly a new trend.

For example, more than 10 years ago the same Chinese registrar was the fourth most common source of phishing websites, as tracked by the APWG. Bear in mind that the APWG report excerpted below was published more than a year before Jiangsu Bangning received ICANN approval to introduce and administer the new .top registry.

Source: APWG phishing report from 2013, two years before .top came into being.

A fascinating new wrinkle in the phishing landscape is the growth in scam pages hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized data storage and delivery network that is based on peer-to-peer networking. According to Interisle, the use of IPFS to host and launch phishing attacks — which can make phishing sites more difficult to take down — increased a staggering 1,300 percent, to roughly 19,000 phishing sites reported in the last year.

Last year’s report from Interisle found that domain names ending in “.us” — the top-level domain for the United States — were among the most prevalent in phishing scams. While .us domains are not even on the Top 20 list of this year’s study, “.com” maintained its perennial #1 spot as the largest source of phishing domains overall.

A year ago, the phishiest domain registrar by far was Freenom, a now-defunct registrar that handed out free domains in several country-code TLDs, including .tk, .ml, .ga and .cf. Freenom went out of business after being sued by Meta, which alleged Freenom ignored abuse complaints while monetizing traffic to abusive domains.

Following Freenom’s demise, phishers quickly migrated to other new low-cost TLDs and to services that allow anonymous, free domain registrations — particularly subdomain services. For example, Interisle found phishing attacks involving websites created on Google’s blogspot.com skyrocketed last year more than 230 percent. Other subdomain services that saw a substantial growth in domains registered by phishers include weebly.com, github.io, wix.com, and ChangeIP, the report notes.

Source: Interisle Consulting.

Interisle Consulting partner Dave Piscitello said ICANN could easily send similar warning letters to at least a half-dozen other top-level domain registries, noting that spammers and phishers tend to cycle through the same TLDs periodically — including .xyz, .info, .support and .lol, all of which saw considerably more business from phishers after Freenom’s implosion.

Piscitello said domain registrars and registries could significantly reduce the number of phishing sites registered through their services just by flagging customers who try to register huge volumes of domains at once. Their study found that at least 27% of the domains used for phishing were registered in bulk — i.e. the same registrant paid for hundreds or thousands of domains in quick succession.

The report includes a case study in which a phisher this year registered 17,562 domains over the course of an eight-hour period — roughly 38 domains per minute — using .lol domains that were all composed of random letters.

ICANN tries to resolve contract disputes privately with the registry and registrar community, and experts say the nonprofit organization usually only publishes enforcement letters when the recipient is ignoring its private notices. Indeed, ICANN’s letter notes Jiangsu Bangning didn’t even open its emailed notifications. It also cited the registry for falling behind in its ICANN membership fees.

With that in mind, a review of ICANN’s public enforcement activity suggests two trends: One is that there have been far fewer public compliance and enforcement actions in recent years — even as the number of new TLDs has expanded dramatically.

The second is that in a majority of cases, the failure of a registry or registrar to pay its annual ICANN membership fees was cited as a reason for a warning letter. A review of nearly two dozen enforcement letters ICANN has sent to domain registrars since 2022 shows that failure to pay dues was cited as a reason (or the reason) for the violation at least 75 percent of the time.

Piscitello, a former vice president of security at ICANN, said nearly all breach notices sent out while he was at ICANN were because the registrar owed money.

“I think the rest is just lipstick to suggest that ICANN’s on top of DNS Abuse,” Piscitello said.

KrebsOnSecurity has sought comment from ICANN and will update this story if they respond.

ICANN said most of its investigations are resolved and closed through the initial informal resolution stage, and that hundreds of enforcement cases are initiated during this stage with the contracted parties who are required to demonstrate compliance, become compliant, and/or present and implement remediation plans to prevent the recurrence of those enforcement issues.

“It is important to take into account that, prior to issuing any notice of breach to a registrar or registry operator, ICANN Compliance conducts an overall contractual compliance ‘health check’ of the relevant contracted party,” ICANN said in a written response to questions. “During this check, ICANN Compliance proactively reviews the contracted party’s compliance with obligations across the agreements and policies. Any additional contractual violation found during these checks is added to the Notice of Breach. It is not uncommon for parties who failed to comply with contractual obligations (whether they are related to DNS Abuse, RDDS, or others) to also be in arrears with ICANN fees.”

Update, 11:49 p.m. ET: Added statement from ICANN. Clarified Piscitello’s former role at ICANN.

A photo taken at San Jose International Airport today shows the dreaded Microsoft “Blue Screen of Death” across the board. Credit: Twitter.com/adamdubya1990

Earlier today, an errant update shipped by Crowdstrike began causing Windows machines running the software to display the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death,” rendering those systems temporarily unusable. Like most security software, Crowdstrike requires deep hooks into the Windows operating system to fend off digital intruders, and in that environment a tiny coding error can quickly lead to catastrophic outcomes.

In a post on Twitter/X, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said an update to correct the coding mistake has been shipped, and that Mac and Linux systems are not affected.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” Kurtz said on Twitter, echoing a written statement by Crowdstrike. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

Posting to Twitter/X, the director of Crowdstrike’s threat hunting operations said the fix involves booting Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE), deleting the file “C-00000291*.sys” and then restarting the machine.

The software snafu may have been compounded by a recent series of outages involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, The New York Times reports, although it remains unclear whether those Azure problems are at all related to the bad Crowdstrike update. Update, 4:03 p.m. ET: Microsoft reports the Azure problems today were unrelated to the bad Crowdstrike update.

A reader shared this photo taken earlier today at Denver International Airport. Credit: Twitter.com/jterryy07

Matt Burgess at Wired writes that within health care and emergency services, various medical providers around the world have reported issues with their Windows-linked systems, sharing news on social media or their own websites.

“The US Emergency Alert System, which issues hurricane warnings, said that there had been various 911 outages in a number of states,” Burgess wrote. “Germany’s University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein said it was canceling some nonurgent surgeries at two locations. In Israel, more than a dozen hospitals have been impacted, as well as pharmacies, with reports saying ambulances have been rerouted to nonimpacted medical organizations.”

In the United Kingdom, NHS England has confirmed that appointment and patient record systems have been impacted by the outages.

“One hospital has declared a ‘critical’ incident after a third-party IT system it used was impacted,” Wired reports. “Also in the country, train operators have said there are delays across the network, with multiple companies being impacted.”

Reactions to today’s outage were swift and brutal on social media, which was flooded with images of people at airports surrounded by computer screens displaying the Microsoft blue screen error. Many Twitter/X users chided the Crowdstrike CEO for failing to apologize for the massively disruptive event, while others noted that doing so could expose the company to lawsuits.

Meanwhile, the international Windows outage quickly became the most talked-about subject on Twitter/X, whose artificial intelligence bots collated a series of parody posts from cybersecurity professionals pretending to be on their first week of work at Crowdstrike. Incredibly,Twitter/X’s AI summarized these sarcastic posts into a sunny, can-do story about Crowdstrike that was promoted as the top discussion on Twitter this morning.

“Several individuals have recently started working at the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and have expressed their excitement and pride in their new roles,” the AI summary read. “They have shared their experiences of pushing code to production on their first day and are looking forward to positive outcomes in their work.”

The top story today on Twitter/X, as brilliantly summarized by X’s AI bots.

This is an evolving story. Stay tuned for updates.

Until this past weekend, Squarespace’s website had an option to log in via email.

The Squarespace domain hijacks, which took place between July 9 and July 12, appear to have mostly targeted cryptocurrency businesses, including Celer Network, Compound Finance, Pendle Finance, and Unstoppable Domains. In some cases, the attackers were able to redirect the hijacked domains to phishing sites set up to steal visitors’ cryptocurrency funds.

New York City-based Squarespace purchased roughly 10 million domain names from Google Domains in June 2023, and it has been gradually migrating those domains to its service ever since. Squarespace has not responded to a request for comment, nor has it issued a statement about the attacks.

But an analysis released by security experts at Metamask and Paradigm finds the most likely explanation for what happened is that Squarespace assumed all users migrating from Google Domains would select the social login options — such “Continue with Google” or “Continue with Apple” — as opposed to the “Continue with email” choice.

Taylor Monahan, lead product manager at Metamask, said Squarespace never accounted for the possibility that a threat actor might sign up for an account using an email associated with a recently-migrated domain before the legitimate email holder created the account themselves.

“Thus nothing actually stops them from trying to login with an email,” Monahan told KrebsOnSecurity. “And since there’s no password on the account, it just shoots them to the ‘create password for your new account’ flow. And since the account is half-initialized on the backend, they now have access to the domain in question.”

What’s more, Monahan said, Squarespace did not require email verification for new accounts created with a password.

“The domains being migrated from Google to Squarespace are known,” Monahan said. “It’s either public or easily discernible info which email addresses have admin of a domain. And if that email never sets up their account on Squarespace — say because the billing admin left the company five years ago or folks just ignored the email — anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.”

The researchers say some Squarespace domains that were migrated over also could be hijacked if attackers discovered the email addresses for less privileged user accounts tied to the domain, such as “domain manager,” which likewise has the ability to transfer a domain or point it to a different Internet address.

Squarespace says domain owners and domain managers have many of the same privileges, including the ability to move a domain or manage the site’s domain name server (DNS) settings.

Monahan said the migration has left domain owners with fewer options to secure and monitor their accounts.

“Squarespace can’t support users who need any control or insight into the activity being performed in their account or domain,” Monahan said. “You basically have no control over the access different folks have. You don’t have any audit logs. You don’t get email notifications for some actions. The owner doesn’t get email notification for actions taken by a ‘domain manager.’ This is absolutely insane if you’re used to and expecting the controls Google provides.”

The researchers have published a comprehensive guide for locking down Squarespace user accounts, which urges Squarespace users to enable multi-factor authentication (disabled during the migration).

“Determining what emails have access to your new Squarespace account is step 1,” the help guide advises. “Most teams DO NOT REALIZE these accounts even exist, let alone theoretically have access.”

The guide also recommends removing unnecessary Squarespace user accounts, and disabling reseller access in Google Workspace.

“If you bought Google Workspace via Google Domains, Squarespace is now your authorized reseller,” the help document explains. “This means that anyone with access to your Squarespace account also has a backdoor into your Google Workspace unless you explicitly disable it by following the instructions here, which you should do. It’s easier to secure one account than two.”

Update, July 23, 1:50 p.m. ET: Squarespace has published a post-mortem about the incident. Their statement blames the domain hijacks on “a weakness related to OAuth logins”, which Squarespace said it fixed within hours, and contradicts the findings presented by the researchers above. Here are the relevant bits from their statement:

“During this incident, all compromised accounts were using third-party OAuth. Neither Squarespace nor any third-party authentication provider made any changes to authentication as part of our migration of Google Domains to Squarespace. To be clear, the migration of domains involved no changes to multi-factor authentication before, during or after.”

“To date there is no evidence that Google Workspace accounts were or are at risk, and we have received no customer reports to this effect. As a reseller, Squarespace manages billing but customers access Workspace directly using their Google account.”

“Our analysis shows no evidence that Squarespace accounts using an email-based login with an unverified email address were involved with this attack.”

In a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today, AT&T said cyber intruders accessed an AT&T workspace on a third-party cloud platform in April, downloading files containing customer call and text interactions between May 1 and October 31, 2022, as well as on January 2, 2023.

The company said the stolen data includes records of calls and texts for mobile providers that resell AT&T’s service, but that it does not include the content of calls or texts, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or any other personally identifiable information.

However, the company said a subset of stolen records included information about the location of cellular communications towers closest to the subscriber, data that could be used to determine the approximate location of the customer device initiating or receiving those text messages or phone calls.

“While the data does not include customer names, there are often ways, using publicly available online tools, to find the name associated with a specific telephone number,” AT&T allowed.

AT&T’s said it learned of the breach on April 19, but delayed disclosing it at the request of federal investigators. The company’s SEC disclosure says at least one individual has been detained by the authorities in connection with the breach.

In a written statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, the FBI confirmed that it asked AT&T to delay notifying affected customers.

“Shortly after identifying a potential breach to customer data and before making its materiality decision, AT&T contacted the FBI to report the incident,” the FBI statement reads. “In assessing the nature of the breach, all parties discussed a potential delay to public reporting under Item 1.05(c) of the SEC Rule, due to potential risks to national security and/or public safety. AT&T, FBI, and DOJ worked collaboratively through the first and second delay process, all while sharing key threat intelligence to bolster FBI investigative equities and to assist AT&T’s incident response work.”

Techcrunch quoted an AT&T spokesperson saying the customer data was stolen as a result of a still-unfolding data breach involving more than 160 customers of the cloud data provider Snowflake.

Earlier this year, malicious hackers figured out that many major companies have uploaded massive amounts of valuable and sensitive customer data to Snowflake servers, all the while protecting those Snowflake accounts with little more than a username and password.

Wired reported last month how the hackers behind the Snowflake data thefts purchased stolen Snowflake credentials from dark web services that sell access to usernames, passwords and authentication tokens that are siphoned by information-stealing malware. For its part, Snowflake says it now requires all new customers to use multi-factor authentication.

Other companies with millions of customer records stolen from Snowflake servers include Advance Auto Parts, Allstate, Anheuser-Busch, Los Angeles Unified, Mitsubishi, Neiman Marcus, Pure Storage, Santander Bank, State Farm, and Ticketmaster.

Earlier this year, AT&T reset passwords for millions of customers after the company finally acknowledged a data breach from 2018 involving approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and roughly 65.4 million former account holders.

Mark Burnett is an application security architect, consultant and author. Burnett said the only real use for the data stolen in the most recent AT&T breach is to know who is contacting whom and how many times.

“The most concerning thing to me about this AT&T breach of ALL customer call and text records is that this isn’t one of their main databases; it is metadata on who is contacting who,” Burnett wrote on Mastodon. “Which makes me wonder what would call logs without timestamps or names have been used for.”

It remains unclear why so many major corporations persist in the belief that it is somehow acceptable to store so much sensitive customer data with so few security protections. For example, Advance Auto Parts said the data exposed included full names, Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and government issued ID numbers on 2.3 million people who were former employees or job applicants.

That may be because, apart from the class-action lawsuits that invariably ensue after these breaches, there is little holding companies accountable for sloppy security practices. AT&T told the SEC it does not believe this incident is likely to materially impact AT&T’s financial condition or results of operations. AT&T reported revenues of more than $30 billion in its most recent quarter.

In May 2023, the U.S. attorney for Washington state declared “Fin7 is an entity no more,” after prosecutors secured convictions and prison sentences against three men found to be high-level Fin7 hackers or managers. This was a bold declaration against a group that the U.S. Department of Justice described as a criminal enterprise with more than 70 people organized into distinct business units and teams.

The first signs of Fin7’s revival came in April 2024, when Blackberry wrote about an intrusion at a large automotive firm that began with malware served by a typosquatting attack targeting people searching for a popular free network scanning tool.

Now, researchers at security firm Silent Push say they have devised a way to map out Fin7’s rapidly regrowing cybercrime infrastructure, which includes more than 4,000 hosts that employ a range of exploits, from typosquatting and booby-trapped ads to malicious browser extensions and spearphishing domains.

Silent Push said it found Fin7 domains targeting or spoofing brands including American Express, Affinity Energy, Airtable, Alliant, Android Developer, Asana, Bitwarden, Bloomberg, Cisco (Webex), CNN, Costco, Dropbox, Grammarly, Google, Goto.com, Harvard, Lexis Nexis, Meta, Microsoft 365, Midjourney, Netflix, Paycor, Quickbooks, Quicken, Reuters, Regions Bank Onepass, RuPay, SAP (Ariba), Trezor, Twitter/X, Wall Street Journal, Westlaw, and Zoom, among others.

Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at Silent Push, said many of the Fin7 domains are innocuous-looking websites for generic businesses that sometimes include text from default website templates (the content on these sites often has nothing to do with the entity’s stated business or mission).

Edwards said Fin7 does this to “age” the domains and to give them a positive or at least benign reputation before they’re eventually converted for use in hosting brand-specific phishing pages.

“It took them six to nine months to ramp up, but ever since January of this year they have been humming, building a giant phishing infrastructure and aging domains,” Edwards said of the cybercrime group.

In typosquatting attacks, Fin7 registers domains that are similar to those for popular free software tools. Those look-alike domains are then advertised on Google so that sponsored links to them show up prominently in search results, which is usually above the legitimate source of the software in question.

A malicious site spoofing FreeCAD showed up prominently as a sponsored result in Google search results earlier this year.

According to Silent Push, the software currently being targeted by Fin7 includes 7-zip, PuTTY, ProtectedPDFViewer, AIMP, Notepad++, Advanced IP Scanner, AnyDesk, pgAdmin, AutoDesk, Bitwarden, Rest Proxy, Python, Sublime Text, and Node.js.

In May 2024, security firm eSentire warned that Fin7 was spotted using sponsored Google ads to serve pop-ups prompting people to download phony browser extensions that install malware. Malwarebytes blogged about a similar campaign in April, but did not attribute the activity to any particular group.

A pop-up at a Thomson Reuters typosquatting domain telling visitors they need to install a browser extension to view the news content.

Edwards said Silent Push discovered the new Fin7 domains after a hearing from an organization that was targeted by Fin7 in years past and suspected the group was once again active. Searching for hosts that matched Fin7’s known profile revealed just one active site. But Edwards said that one site pointed to many other Fin7 properties at Stark Industries Solutions, a large hosting provider that materialized just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

As KrebsOnSecurity wrote in May, Stark Industries Solutions is being used as a staging ground for wave after wave of cyberattacks against Ukraine that have been tied to Russian military and intelligence agencies.

“FIN7 rents a large amount of dedicated IP on Stark Industries,” Edwards said. “Our analysts have discovered numerous Stark Industries IPs that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure.”

Fin7 once famously operated behind fake cybersecurity companies — with names like Combi Security and Bastion Secure — which they used for hiring security experts to aid in ransomware attacks. One of the new Fin7 domains identified by Silent Push is cybercloudsec[.]com, which promises to “grow your business with our IT, cyber security and cloud solutions.”

The fake Fin7 security firm Cybercloudsec.

Like other phishing groups, Fin7 seizes on current events, and at the moment it is targeting tourists visiting France for the Summer Olympics later this month. Among the new Fin7 domains Silent Push found are several sites phishing people seeking tickets at the Louvre.

“We believe this research makes it clear that Fin7 is back and scaling up quickly,” Edwards said. “It’s our hope that the law enforcement community takes notice of this and puts Fin7 back on their radar for additional enforcement actions, and that quite a few of our competitors will be able to take this pool and expand into all or a good chunk of their infrastructure.”

Further reading:

Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud.

A 2022 deep dive on Fin7 from the Swiss threat intelligence firm Prodaft (PDF).

The first Microsoft zero-day this month is CVE-2024-38080, a bug in the Windows Hyper-V component that affects Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 systems. CVE-2024-38080 allows an attacker to increase their account privileges on a Windows machine. Although Microsoft says this flaw is being exploited, it has offered scant details about its exploitation.

The other zero-day is CVE-2024-38112, which is a weakness in MSHTML, the proprietary engine of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Kevin Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said exploitation of CVE-2024-38112 likely requires the use of an “attack chain” of exploits or programmatic changes on the target host, a la Microsoft’s description: “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.”

“Despite the lack of details given in the initial advisory, this vulnerability affects all hosts from Windows Server 2008 R2 onwards, including clients,” Breen said. “Due to active exploitation in the wild this one should be prioritized for patching.”

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, called special attention to CVE-2024-38021, a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Office. Attacks on this weakness would lead to the disclosure of NTLM hashes, which could be leveraged as part of an NTLM relay or “pass the hash” attack, which lets an attacker masquerade as a legitimate user without ever having to log in.

“One of the more successful attack campaigns from 2023 used CVE-2023-23397, an elevation of privilege bug in Microsoft Outlook that could also leak NTLM hashes,” Narang said. “However, CVE-2024-38021 is limited by the fact that the Preview Pane is not an attack vector, which means that exploitation would not occur just by simply previewing the file.”

The security firm Morphisec, credited with reporting CVE-2024-38021 to Microsoft, said it respectfully disagrees with Microsoft’s “important” severity rating, arguing the Office flaw deserves a more dire “critical” rating given how easy it is for attackers to exploit.

“Their assessment differentiates between trusted and untrusted senders, noting that while the vulnerability is zero-click for trusted senders, it requires one click user interaction for untrusted senders,” Morphisec’s Michael Gorelik said in a blog post about their discovery. “This reassessment is crucial to reflect the true risk and ensure adequate attention and resources are allocated for mitigation.”

In last month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft fixed a flaw in its Windows WiFi driver that attackers could use to install malicious software just by sending a vulnerable Windows host a specially crafted data packet over a local network. Jason Kikta at Automox said this month’s CVE-2024-38053 — a security weakness in Windows Layer Two Bridge Network — is another local network “ping-of-death” vulnerability that should be a priority for road warriors to patch.

“This requires close access to a target,” Kikta said. “While that precludes a ransomware actor in Russia, it is something that is outside of most current threat models. This type of exploit works in places like shared office environments, hotels, convention centers, and anywhere else where unknown computers might be using the same physical link as you.”

Automox also highlighted three vulnerabilities in Windows Remote Desktop a service that allocates Client Access Licenses (CALs) when a client connects to a remote desktop host (CVE-2024-38077, CVE-2024-38074, and CVE-2024-38076). All three bugs have been assigned a CVSS score of 9.8 (out of 10) and indicate that a malicious packet could trigger the vulnerability.

Tyler Reguly at Fortra noted that today marks the End of Support date for SQL Server 2014, a platform that according to Shodan still has ~110,000 instances publicly available. On top of that, more than a quarter of all vulnerabilities Microsoft fixed this month are in SQL server.

“A lot of companies don’t update quickly, but this may leave them scrambling to update those environments to supported versions of MS-SQL,” Reguly said.

It’s a good idea for Windows end-users to stay current with security updates from Microsoft, which can quickly pile up otherwise. That doesn’t mean you have to install them on Patch Tuesday. Indeed, waiting a day or three before updating is a sane response, given that sometimes updates go awry and usually within a few days Microsoft has fixed any issues with its patches. It’s also smart to back up your data and/or image your Windows drive before applying new updates.

For a more detailed breakdown of the individual flaws addressed by Microsoft today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s list. For those admins responsible for maintaining larger Windows environments, it often pays to keep an eye on Askwoody.com, which frequently points out when specific Microsoft updates are creating problems for a number of users.

As ever, if you experience any problems applying any of these updates, consider dropping a note about it in the comments; chances are decent someone else reading here has experienced the same issue, and maybe even has a solution.

Most accomplished cybercriminals go out of their way to separate their real names from their hacker handles. But among certain old-school Russian hackers it is not uncommon to find major players who have done little to prevent people from figuring out who they are in real life. A case study in this phenomenon is “x999xx,” the nickname chosen by a venerated Russian hacker who specializes in providing the initial network access to various ransomware groups.

x999xx is a well-known “access broker” who frequently sells access to hacked corporate networks — usually in the form of remote access credentials — as well as compromised databases containing large amounts of personal and financial data.

In an analysis published in February 2019, cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint called x999xx one of the most senior and prolific members of the top-tier Russian-language cybercrime forum Exploit, where x999xx could be seen frequently advertising the sale of stolen databases and network credentials.

In August 2023, x999xx sold access to a company that develops software for the real estate industry. In July 2023, x999xx advertised the sale of Social Security numbers, names, and birthdays for the citizenry of an entire U.S. state (unnamed in the auction).

A month earlier, x999xx posted a sales thread for 80 databases taken from Australia’s largest retail company. “You may use this data to demand a ransom or do something different with it,” x999xx wrote on Exploit. “Unfortunately, the flaw was patched fast. [+] no one has used the data yet [+] the data hasn’t been used to send spam [+] the data is waiting for its time.”

In October 2022, x999xx sold administrative access to a U.S. healthcare provider.

ALIAS: MAXNM

The oldest account by the name x999xx appeared in 2009 on the Russian language cybercrime forum Verified, under the email address maxnm@ozersk.com. Ozersk is a city in the Chelyabinsk region of west-central Russia.

According to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence, the address maxnm@ozersk.com was used more than a decade ago to create an account at Vktontakte (the Russian answer to Facebook) under the name Maxim Kirtsov from Ozersk. Mr. Kirtsov’s profile — “maxnm” — says his birthday is September 5, 1991.

Personal photos Maxnm shared on Vktontakte in 2016. The caption has been machine translated from Russian.

The user x999xx registered on the Russian language cybercrime community Zloy in 2014 using the email address maxnmalias-1@yahoo.com. Constella says this email address was used in 2022 at the Russian shipping service cdek.ru by a Maksim Georgievich Kirtsov from Ozersk.

Additional searches on these contact details reveal that prior to 2009, x999xx favored the handle Maxnm on Russian cybercrime forums. Cyber intelligence company Intel 471 finds the user Maxnm registered on Zloy in 2006 from an Internet address in Chelyabinsk, using the email address kirtsov@telecom.ozersk.ru.

That same email address was used to create Maxnm accounts on several other crime forums, including Spamdot and Exploit in 2005 (also from Chelyabinsk), and Damagelab in 2006.

A search in Constella for the Russian version of Kirtsov’s full name — Кирцов Максим Георгиевич — brings up multiple accounts registered to maksya@icloud.com.

A review of the digital footprint for maksya@icloud.com at osint.industries reveals this address was used a decade ago to register a still-active account at imageshack.com under the name x999xx. That account features numerous screenshots of financial statements from various banks, chat logs with other hackers, and even hacked websites.

x999xx’s Imageshack account includes screenshots of bank account balances from dozens of financial institutions, as well as chat logs with other hackers and pictures of homegrown weed.

Some of the photos in that Imageshack account also appear on Kirtsov’s Vkontakte page, including images of vehicles he owns, as well as pictures of potted marijuana plants. Kirtsov’s Vkontakte profile says that in 2012 he was a faculty member of the Ozersk Technological Institute National Research Nuclear University.

The Vkontakte page lists Kirtsov’s occupation as a website called ozersk[.]today, which on the surface appears to be a blog about life in Ozersk. However, in 2019 the security firm Recorded Future published a blog post which found this domain was being used to host a malicious Cobalt Strike server.

Cobalt Strike is a commercial network penetration testing and reconnaissance tool that is sold only to vetted partners. But stolen or ill-gotten Cobalt Strike licenses are frequently abused by cybercriminal gangs to help lay the groundwork for the installation of ransomware on a victim network.

In August 2023, x999xx posted a message on Exploit saying he was interested in buying a licensed version of Cobalt Strike. A month earlier, x999xx filed a complaint on Exploit against another forum member named Cobaltforce, an apparent onetime partner whose sudden and prolonged disappearance from the community left x999xx and others in the lurch. Cobaltforce recruited people experienced in using Cobalt Strike for ransomware operations, and offered to monetize access to hacked networks for a share of the profits.

DomainTools.com finds ozersk[.]today was registered to the email address dashin2008@yahoo.com, which also was used to register roughly two dozen other domains, including x999xx[.]biz. Virtually all of those domains were registered to Maxim Kirtsov from Ozersk. Below is a mind map used to track the identities mentioned in this story.

A visual depiction of the data points connecting x999xx to Max Kirtsov.

x999xx is a prolific member of the Russian webmaster forum “Gofuckbiz,” with more than 2,000 posts over nearly a decade, according to Intel 471. In one post from 2016, x999xx asked whether anyone knew where he could buy a heat lamp that simulates sunlight, explaining that one his pet rabbits had recently perished for lack of adequate light and heat. Mr. Kirtsov’s Vkontakte page includes several pictures of caged rabbits from 2015 and earlier.

CONFIRMATION

Reached via email, Mr. Kirtsov acknowledged that he is x999xx. Kirtsov said he and his team are also regular readers of KrebsOnSecurity.

“We’re glad to hear and read you,” Kirtsov replied.

Asked whether he was concerned about the legal and moral implications of his work, Kirtsov downplayed his role in ransomware intrusions, saying he was more focused on harvesting data.

“I consider myself as committed to ethical practices as you are,” Kirtsov wrote. “I have also embarked on research and am currently mentoring students. You may have noticed my activities on a forum, which I assume you know of through information gathered from public sources, possibly using the new tool you reviewed.”

“Regarding my posts about selling access, I must honestly admit, upon reviewing my own actions, I recall such mentions but believe they were never actualized,” he continued. “Many use the forum for self-serving purposes, which explains why listings of targets for sale have dwindled — they simply ceased being viable.”

Kirtsov asserted that he is not interested in harming healthcare institutions, just in stealing their data.

“As for health-related matters, I was once acquainted with affluent webmasters who would pay up to $50 for every 1000 health-themed emails,” Kirtsov said. “Therefore, I had no interest in the more sensitive data from medical institutions like X-rays, insurance numbers, or even names; I focused solely on emails. I am proficient in SQL, hence my ease with handling data like IDs and emails. And i never doing spam or something like this.”

On the Russian crime forums, x999xx said he never targets anything or anyone in Russia, and that he has little to fear from domestic law enforcement agencies provided he remains focused on foreign adversaries.

x999xx’s lackadaisical approach to personal security mirrors that of Wazawaka, another top Russian access broker who sold access to countless organizations and even operated his own ransomware affiliate programs.

“Don’t shit where you live, travel local, and don’t go abroad,” Wazawaka said of his own personal mantra. “Mother Russia will help you. Love your country, and you will always get away with everything.”

In January 2022, KrebsOnSecurity followed clues left behind by Wazawaka to identify him as 32-year-old Mikhail Matveev from Khakassia, Russia. In May 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Matveev as a key figure in several ransomware groups that collectively extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from victim organizations. The U.S. State Department is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to the capture and/or prosecution of Matveev.

Perhaps in recognition that many top ransomware criminals are largely untouchable so long as they remain in Russia, western law enforcement agencies have begun focusing more on getting inside the heads of those individuals. These so-called “psyops” are aimed at infiltrating ransomware-as-a-service operations, disrupting major cybercrime services, and decreasing trust within cybercriminal communities.

When authorities in the U.S. and U.K. announced in February 2024 that they’d infiltrated and seized the infrastructure used by the infamous LockBit ransomware gang, they borrowed the existing design of LockBit’s victim shaming website to link instead to press releases about the takedown, and included a countdown timer that was eventually replaced with the personal details of LockBit’s alleged leader.

In May 2024, law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe announced Operation Endgame, a coordinated action against some of the most popular cybercrime platforms for delivering ransomware and data-stealing malware. The Operation Endgame website also included a countdown timer, which served to tease the release of several animated videos that mimic the same sort of flashy, short advertisements that established cybercriminals often produce to promote their services online.

Radaris is just one cog in a sprawling network of people-search properties online that sell highly detailed background reports on U.S. consumers and businesses. Those reports typically include the subject’s current and previous addresses, partial Social Security numbers, any known licenses, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as the same information for any of their immediate relatives.

Radaris has a less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to responding to consumers seeking to have their reports removed from its various people-search services. That poor reputation, combined with indications that the true founders of Radaris have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their stewardship of the company, was what prompted KrebsOnSecurity to investigate the origins of Radaris in the first place.

On April 18, KrebsOnSecurity received a certified letter (PDF) from Valentin “Val” Gurvits, an attorney with the Boston Law Group, stating that KrebsOnSecurity would face a withering defamation lawsuit unless the Radaris story was immediately retracted and an apology issued to the two brothers named in the story as co-founders.

That March story worked backwards from the email address used to register radaris.com, and charted an impressive array of data broker companies created over the past 15 years by Massachusetts residents Dmitry and Igor Lubarsky (also sometimes spelled Lybarsky or Lubarski). Dmitry goes by “Dan,” and Igor uses the name “Gary.”

Those businesses included numerous websites marketed to Russian-speaking people who are new to the United States, such as russianamerica.com, newyork.ru, russiancleveland.com, russianla.com, russianmiami.com, etc. Other domains connected to the Lubarskys included Russian-language dating and adult websites, as well as affiliate programs for their international calling card businesses.

A mind map of various entities apparently tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.

The story on Radaris noted that the Lubarsky brothers registered most of their businesses using a made-up name — “Gary Norden,” sometimes called Gary Nord or Gary Nard.

Mr. Gurvits’ letter stated emphatically that my reporting was lazy, mean-spirited, and obviously intended to smear the reputation of his clients. By way of example, Mr. Gurvits said the Lubarskys were actually Ukrainian, and that the story painted his clients in a negative light by insinuating that they were somehow associated with Radaris and with vaguely nefarious elements in Russia.

But more to the point, Mr. Gurvits said, neither of his clients were Gary Norden, and neither had ever held any leadership positions at Radaris, nor were they financial beneficiaries of the company in any way.

“Neither of my clients is a founder of Radaris, and neither of my clients is the CEOs of Radaris,” Gurvits wrote. “Additionally, presently and going back at least the past 10 years, neither of my clients are (or were) officers or employees of Radaris. Indeed, neither of them even owns (or ever owned) any equity in Radaris. In intentional disregard of these facts, the Article implies that my clients are personally responsible for Radaris’ actions. Therefore, you intentionally caused all negative allegations in the Article made with respect to Radaris to be imputed against my clients personally.”

Dan Lubarsky’s Facebook page, just prior to the March 8 story about Radaris, said he was from Moscow.

We took Mr. Gurvits’ word on the ethnicity of his clients, and adjusted the story to remove a single mention that they were Russian. We did so even though Dan Lubarsky’s own Facebook page said (until recently) that he was from Moscow, Russia.

KrebsOnSecurity asked Mr. Gurvits to explain precisely which other details in the story were incorrect, and replied that we would be happy to update the story with a correction if they could demonstrate any errors of fact or omission.

We also requested specifics about several aspects of the story, such as the identity of the current Radaris CEO — listed on the Radaris website as “Victor K.” Mr. Gurvits replied that Radaris is and always has been based in Ukraine, and that the company’s true founder “Eugene L” is based there.

While Radaris has claimed to have offices in Massachusetts, Cyprus and Latvia, its website has never mentioned Ukraine. Mr. Gurvits has not responded to requests for more information about the identities of “Eugene L” or “Victor K.”

Gurvits said he had no intention of doing anyone’s reporting for them, and that the Lubarskys were going to sue KrebsOnSecurity for defamation unless the story was retracted in full. KrebsOnSecurity replied that journalists often face challenges to things that they report, but it is more than rare for one who makes a challenge to take umbrage at being asked for supporting information.

On June 13, Mr. Gurvits sent another letter (PDF) that continued to claim KrebsOnSecurity was defaming his clients, only this time Gurvits said his clients would be satisfied if KrebsOnSecurity just removed their names from the story.

“Ultimately, my clients don’t care what you say about any of the websites or corporate entities in your Article, as long as you completely remove my clients’ names from the Article and cooperate with my clients to have copies of the Article where my clients’ names appear removed from the Internet,” Mr. Gurvits wrote.

MEET THE FAKE RADARIS CEO

The June 13 letter explained that the name Gary Norden was a pseudonym invented by the Radaris marketing division, but that neither of the Lubarsky brothers were Norden.

This was a startling admission, given that Radaris has quoted the fictitious Gary Norden in press releases published and paid for by Radaris, and in news media stories where the company is explicitly seeking money from investors. In other words, Radaris has been misrepresenting itself to investors from the beginning. Here’s a press release from Radaris that was published on PR Newswire in April 2011:

A press release published by Radaris in 2011 names the CEO of Radaris as Gary Norden, which was a fake name made up by Radaris’ marketing department.

In April 2014, the Boston Business Journal published a story (PDF) about Radaris that extolled the company’s rapid growth and considerable customer base. The story noted that, “to date, the company has raised less than $1 million from Cyprus-based investment company Difive.”

“We live in a world where information becomes much more broad and much more available every single day,” the Boston Business Journal quoted Radaris’ fake CEO Gary Norden, who by then had somehow been demoted from CEO to vice president of business development.

A Boston Business Journal story from April 2014 quotes the fictitious Radaris CEO Gary Norden.

“We decided there needs to be a service that allows for ease of monitoring of information about people,” the fake CEO said. The story went on to say Radaris was seeking to raise between $5 million and $7 million from investors in the ensuing months.

THE BIG LUBARSKY

In his most recent demand letter, Mr. Gurvits helpfully included resumes for both of the Lubarsky brothers.

Dmitry Lubarsky’s resume states he is the owner of Difive.com, a startup incubator for IT companies. Recall that Difive is the same company mentioned by the fake Radaris CEO in the 2014 Boston Business Journal story, which said Difive was the company’s initial and sole investor.

Difive’s website in 2016 said it had offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Riga (Latvia) and Moscow (nothing in Ukraine). Meanwhile, DomainTools.com reports difive.com was originally registered in 2007 to the fictitious Gary Norden from Massachusetts.

Archived copies of the Difive website from 2017 include a “Portfolio” page indexing all of the companies in which Difive has invested. That list, available here, includes virtually every “Gary Norden” domain name mentioned in my original report, plus a few that escaped notice earlier.

Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was CEO of a people search company called HumanBook. The Wayback machine at archive.org shows the Humanbook domain (humanbook.com) came online around April 2008, when the company was still in “beta” mode.

By August 2008, however, humanbook.com had changed the name advertised on its homepage to Radaris Beta. Eventually, Humanbook simply redirected to radaris.com.

Archive.org’s record of humanbook.com from 2008, just after its homepage changed to Radaris Beta.

Astute readers may notice that the domain radaris.com is not among the companies listed as Difive investments. However, passive domain name system (DNS) records from DomainTools show that between October 2023 and March 2024 radaris.com was hosted alongside all of the other Gary Norden domains at the Internet address range 38.111.228.x.

That address range simultaneously hosted every domain mentioned in this story and in the original March 2024 report as connected to email addresses used by Gary Norden, including radaris.com, radaris.ru, radaris.de, difive.com, privet.ru, blog.ru, comfi.com, phoneowner.com, russianamerica.com, eprofit.com, rehold.com, homeflock.com, humanbook.com and dozens more. A spreadsheet of those historical DNS entries for radaris.com is available here (.csv).

Image: DomainTools.com

The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds just two email addresses ending in difive.com have been exposed in data breaches over the years: dan@difive.com, and gn@difive.com. Presumably, “gn” stands for Gary Norden.

A search on the email address gn@difive.com via the breach tracking service osint.industries reveals this address was used to create an account at Airbnb under the name Gary, with the last four digits of the account’s phone number ending in “0001.”

Constella Intelligence finds gn@difive.com was associated with the Massachusetts number 617-794-0001, which was used to register accounts for “Igor Lybarsky” from Wellesley or Sherborn, Ma. at multiple online businesses, including audiusa.com and the designer eyewear store luxottica.com.

The phone number 617-794-0001 also appears for a “Gary Nard” user at russianamerica.com. Igor Lubarsky’s resume says he was the manager of russianamerica.com.

DomainTools finds 617-794-0001 is connected to registration records for three domains, including paytone.com, a domain that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed. DomainTools also found that number on the registration records for trustoria.com, another major consumer data broker that has an atrocious reputation, according to the Better Business Bureau.

Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was responsible for several international telecommunications services, including the website comfi.com. DomainTools says the phone number connected to that domain — 617-952-4234 — was also used on the registration records for humanbook.net/biz/info/mobi/us, as well as for radaris.me, radaris.in, and radaris.tel.

Two other key domains are connected to that phone number. The first is barsky.com, which is the website for Barsky Estate Realty Trust (PDF), a real estate holding company controlled by the Lubarskys. Naturally, DomainTools finds barsky.com also was registered to a Gary Norden from Massachusetts. But the organization listed in the barsky.com registration records is Comfi Inc., a VOIP communications firm that Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he managed.

The other domain of note is unipointtechnologies.com. Dan Lubarsky’s resume says he was the CEO of Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. In 2012, Unipoint was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said the company had failed to apply for a license to provide international telecommunications services.

A pandemic assistance loan granted in 2020 to Igor Lybarsky of Sherborn, Ma. shows he received the money to an entity called Norden Consulting.

Notice the name on the recipient of this government loan for Igor Lybarsky from Sherborn, Ma: Norden Consulting. 

PATENTLY REMARKABLE

The 2011 Radaris press release quoting their fake CEO Gary Norden said the company had four patents pending from a team of computer science PhDs. According to the resume shared by Mr. Gurvits, Dan Lubarsky has a PhD in computer science.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) says Dan Lubarsky/Lubarski has at least nine technology patents to his name. The fake CEO press release from Radaris mentioning its four patents was published in April 2011. By that time, the PTO says Dan Lubarsky had applied for exactly four patents, including, “System and Method for a Web-Based People Directory.” The first of those patents, published in 2009, is tied to Humanbook.com, the company Dan Lubarsky founded that later changed its name to Radaris.

If the Lubarskys were never involved in Radaris, how do they or their attorney know the inside information that Gary Norden is a fiction of Radaris’ marketing department? KrebsOnSecurity has learned that Mr. Gurvits is the same attorney responding on behalf of Radaris in a lawsuit against the data broker filed earlier this year by Atlas Data Privacy.

Mr. Gurvits also stepped forward as Radaris’ attorney in a class action lawsuit the company lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn’t collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the judge ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed the verdict, arguing that the lawsuit hadn’t named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge ruled in Radaris’ favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. Andtop also operates the aforementioned people-search service Trustoria.

Mr. Gurvits’ most-publicized defamation case was a client named Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology executive whose name appeared in the Steele Dossier. That document included a collection of salacious, unverified information gathered by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign at the direction of former president Donald Trump’s political rivals.

Gubarev, the head of the IT services company XBT Holding and the Florida web hosting firm Webzilla, sued BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele dossier. One of the items in the dossier alleged that XBT/Webzilla and affiliated companies played a key role in the hack of Democratic Party computers in the spring of 2016. The memo alleged Gubarev had been coerced into providing services to Russia’s main domestic security agency, known as the FSB.

In December 2018, a federal judge in Miami ruled in favor of BuzzFeed, saying the publication was protected by the fair report privilege, which gives news organizations latitude in reporting on official government proceedings.

Radaris was originally operated by Bitseller Expert Limited. Who owns Bitseller Expert Limited? A report (PDF) obtained from the Cyprus business registry shows this company lists its director as Pavel Kaydash from Moscow. Mr. Kaydash could not be reached for comment.

The Spanish daily Murcia Today reports the suspect was wanted by the FBI and arrested in Palma de Mallorca as he tried to board a flight to Italy.

A still frame from a video released by the Spanish national police shows Tylerb in custody at the airport.

“He stands accused of hacking into corporate accounts and stealing critical information, which allegedly enabled the group to access multi-million-dollar funds,” Murcia Today wrote. “According to Palma police, at one point he controlled Bitcoins worth $27 million.”

The cybercrime-focused Twitter/X account vx-underground said the U.K. man arrested was a SIM-swapper who went by the alias “Tyler.” In a SIM-swapping attack, crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control and intercept any text messages or phone calls sent to the victim — including one-time passcodes for authentication, or password reset links sent via SMS.

“He is a known SIM-swapper and is allegedly involved with the infamous Scattered Spider group,” vx-underground wrote on June 15, referring to a prolific gang implicated in costly data ransom attacks at MGM and Caesars casinos in Las Vegas last year.

Sources familiar with the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the accused is a 22-year-old from Dundee, Scotland named Tyler Buchanan, also allegedly known as “tylerb” on Telegram chat channels centered around SIM-swapping.

In January 2024, U.S. authorities arrested another alleged Scattered Spider member — 19-year-old Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla. — and charged him with stealing at least $800,000 from five victims between August 2022 and March 2023. Urban allegedly went by the nicknames “Sosa” and “King Bob,” and is believed to be part of the same crew that hacked Twilio and a slew of other companies in 2022.

Investigators say Scattered Spider members are part of a more diffuse cybercriminal community online known as “The Com,” wherein hackers from different cliques boast loudly about high-profile cyber thefts that almost invariably begin with social engineering — tricking people over the phone, email or SMS into giving away credentials that allow remote access to corporate internal networks.

One of the more popular SIM-swapping channels on Telegram maintains a frequently updated leaderboard of the most accomplished SIM-swappers, indexed by their supposed conquests in stealing cryptocurrency. That leaderboard currently lists Sosa as #24 (out of 100), and Tylerb at #65.

0KTAPUS

In August 2022, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about peering inside the data harvested in a months-long cybercrime campaign by Scattered Spider involving countless SMS-based phishing attacks against employees at major corporations. The security firm Group-IB called the gang by a different name — 0ktapus, a nod to how the criminal group phished employees for credentials.

The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.

These phishing attacks used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the targeted company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule. The phishing sites also featured a hidden Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website.

One of Scattered Spider’s first big victims in its 2022 SMS phishing spree was Twilio, a company that provides services for making and receiving text messages and phone calls. The group then pivoted, using their access to Twilio to attack at least 163 of its customers.

A Scattered Spider phishing lure sent to Twilio employees.

Among those was the encrypted messaging app Signal, which said the breach could have let attackers re-register the phone number on another device for about 1,900 users.

Also in August 2022, several employees at email delivery firm Mailchimp provided their remote access credentials to this phishing group. According to Mailchimp, the attackers used their access to Mailchimp employee accounts to steal data from 214 customers involved in cryptocurrency and finance.

On August 25, 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which attackers stole some source code and proprietary LastPass technical information, and weeks later LastPass said an investigation revealed no customer data or password vaults were accessed.

However, on November 30, 2022 LastPass disclosed a far more serious breach that the company said leveraged data stolen in the August breach. LastPass said criminal hackers had stolen encrypted copies of some password vaults, as well as other personal information.

In February 2023, LastPass disclosed that the intrusion involved a highly complex, targeted attack against an engineer who was one of only four LastPass employees with access to the corporate vault. In that incident, the attackers exploited a security vulnerability in a Plex media server that the employee was running on his home network, and succeeded in installing malicious software that stole passwords and other authentication credentials. The vulnerability exploited by the intruders was patched back in 2020, but the employee never updated his Plex software.

Plex announced its own data breach one day before LastPass disclosed its initial August intrusion. On August 24, 2022, Plex’s security team urged users to reset their passwords, saying an intruder had accessed customer emails, usernames and encrypted passwords.

TURF WARS

Sosa and Tylerb were both subjected to physical attacks from rival SIM-swapping gangs. These communities have been known to settle scores by turning to so-called “violence-as-a-service” offerings on cybercrime channels, wherein people can be hired to perform a variety geographically-specific “in real life” jobs, such as bricking windows, slashing car tires, or even home invasions.

In 2022, a video surfaced on a popular cybercrime channel purporting to show attackers hurling a brick through a window at an address that matches the spacious and upscale home of Urban’s parents in Sanford, Fl.

January’s story on Sosa noted that a junior member of his crew named “Foreshadow” was kidnapped, beaten and held for ransom in September 2022. Foreshadow’s captors held guns to his bloodied head while forcing him to record a video message pleading with his crew to fork over a $200,000 ransom in exchange for his life (Foreshadow escaped further harm in that incident).

According to several SIM-swapping channels on Telegram where Tylerb was known to frequent, rival SIM-swappers hired thugs to invade his home in February 2023. Those accounts state that the intruders assaulted Tylerb’s mother in the home invasion, and that they threatened to burn him with a blowtorch if he didn’t give up the keys to his cryptocurrency wallets. Tylerb was reputed to have fled the United Kingdom after that assault.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Mr. Buchanan, and will update this story in the event he responds.

Last month, Microsoft debuted Copilot+ PCs, an AI-enabled version of Windows. Copilot+ ships with a feature nobody asked for that Redmond has aptly dubbed Recall, which constantly takes screenshots of what the user is doing on their PC. Security experts roundly trashed Recall as a fancy keylogger, noting that it would be a gold mine of information for attackers if the user’s PC was compromised with malware.

Microsoft countered that Recall snapshots never leave the user’s system, and that even if attackers managed to hack a Copilot+ PC they would not be able to exfiltrate on-device Recall data. But that claim rang hollow after former Microsoft threat analyst Kevin Beaumont detailed on his blog how any user on the system (even a non-administrator) can export Recall data, which is just stored in an SQLite database locally.

“I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade,” Beaumont said on Mastodon.

In a recent Risky Business podcast, host Patrick Gray noted that the screenshots created and indexed by Recall would be a boon to any attacker who suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar environment.

“The first thing you want to do when you get on a machine if you’re up to no good is to figure out how someone did their job,” Gray said. “We saw that in the case of the SWIFT attacks against central banks years ago. Attackers had to do screen recordings to figure out how transfers work. And this could speed up that sort of discovery process.”

Responding to the withering criticism of Recall, Microsoft said last week that it will no longer be enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs.

Only one of the patches released today — CVE-2024-30080 — earned Microsoft’s most urgent “critical” rating, meaning malware or malcontents could exploit the vulnerability to remotely seize control over a user’s system, without any user interaction.

CVE-2024-30080 is a flaw in the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service that can allow attackers to execute code of their choosing. Microsoft says exploitation of this weakness is likely, enough to encourage users to disable the vulnerable component if updating isn’t possible in the short run. CVE-2024-30080 has been assigned a CVSS vulnerability score of 9.8 (10 is the worst).

Kevin Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said a saving grace is that MSMQ is not a default service on Windows.

“A Shodan search for MSMQ reveals there are a few thousand potentially internet-facing MSSQ servers that could be vulnerable to zero-day attacks if not patched quickly,” Breen said.

CVE-2024-30078 is a remote code execution weakness in the Windows WiFi Driver, which also has a CVSS score of 9.8. According to Microsoft, an unauthenticated attacker could exploit this bug by sending a malicious data packet to anyone else on the same network — meaning this flaw assumes the attacker has access to the local network.

Microsoft also fixed a number of serious security issues with its Office applications, including at least two remote-code execution flaws, said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7.

“CVE-2024-30101 is a vulnerability in Outlook; although the Preview Pane is a vector, the user must subsequently perform unspecified specific actions to trigger the vulnerability and the attacker must win a race condition,” Barnett said. “CVE-2024-30104 does not have the Preview Pane as a vector, but nevertheless ends up with a slightly higher CVSS base score of 7.8, since exploitation relies solely on the user opening a malicious file.”

Separately, Adobe released security updates for Acrobat, ColdFusion, and Photoshop, among others.

As usual, the SANS Internet Storm Center has the skinny on the individual patches released today, indexed by severity, exploitability and urgency. Windows admins should also keep an eye on AskWoody.com, which often publishes early reports of any Windows patches gone awry.