March 28, 2024

Or, watch on YouTube

The government, along with Law Enforcement, is heavily impacted by ever-evolving technology and there is a multitude of malicious actors conducting espionage, stealing data, attempting to infiltrate, and shut down systems critical to everyday life.

These malicious actors with a proven state-sponsored tie are often called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). The digital realm is heavily involved in geopolitical conflict, and its role and that of adversarial actors must be explored.

In this session, we will dive into the big 4 cyber adversaries:

• Explain how cyber experts are trained
• Explore the use of front companies and technology to online activities
• Examine ties to their governments
• Cover common offensive and defensive capabilities
• Glimpse into the possible future with AI used in operations

For those that would rather read the presentation, we have transcribed it below.

NOTE: Some content has been edited for length and clarity.

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Mark: My name is Mark Turnage, I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of DarkOwl and with me, I have Erin Brown, who’s our Director of Intelligence. We’re pleased that you joined us here this morning. I’m just going to make some introductory remarks, and we’re going to conduct this webinar as a sort of fireside chat between me and Erin and talk about four cyber countries – powerful cyber countries: Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.  

Just a couple of introductory remarks from me, we live in very interesting times. It’s a very famous Chinese curse and I think it’s fair to say that over the last several years, the world has become considerably more uncertain and more unstable. We have wars being waged in Ukraine, in the Middle East, we have a considerable amount of tension in East Asia, between China and Taiwan, and against that backdrop, there are a number of elections taking place this year around the world, including here in the United States, our presidential election. All that means that the cyber sphere has become even more important and more deserving of our attention as we think about that instability and how to better manage that instability. And against that background, four countries are continually mentioned: Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. Interestingly enough, two of those, China and Russia, are quite large countries and powerful in their own right. Two of them, North Korea and Iran, are cyber superpowers, in spite of being relatively small and in the case certainly of North Korea, having quite a small economy.  So, we thought it would be useful to talk, to have a conversation about those four countries and talk about their cyber capabilities and how they use the cyber sphere, both for their own purposes and to sow instability and discord. So, with that, I’m going to just start asking Erin some questions.

What are the main cyber threats posed by these four countries?

Erin: There are a lot of different threats that they’re posing, and it really depends on what they’re trying to achieve. We see them conducting cyber espionage, we see intellectual property theft, attacks on infrastructure. It really depends on what their motivations are and they have many groups within their countries that are conducting these types of attacks – but most of them, all four of them, I would say, have a joint desire to advance their global influence. They all want to be the superpower of the world and they want to do that in both the digital and the physical world. We’re seeing that overlap, as you just mentioned in your introduction, as there’s more and more real-world conflicts happening. We’re seeing a huge cyber element to that. But then they do have their own distinct motivations as well in terms of what operations they’re conducting. North Korea, for example, we’ve seen them conducting a lot of attacks that lead to financial gain because they’re using those funds to finance other operations that they’re doing and things that they’re doing within the country.  So, they all pose a huge amount of risk to both countries and organizations in terms of what they’re trying to achieve to advance their global power, basically.

And is it fair to say that of those four, North Korea is the most quote unquote, financially oriented in terms of their cyber activities? Or is the same true, say, of Russia?

I would say so. I think we know North Korea from a government perspective, is doing that financial motivation and gain. I think with Russia, especially and Iran, to a certain extent as well, we see that overlap and bleeding between who is the state-sanctioned, state-sponsored groups, and those actors that maybe the state is allowing them to operate. So obviously, you know, the ransomware gangs in Russia are making a huge amount of money off of corporations worldwide and there are suggestions that they’re at least allowed to conduct their activities by the Russian government. One could infer from that that the Russian government may be getting kickbacks from them and from that type of activity, but we don’t see necessarily the state-sponsored groups that are the military groups necessarily having that financial motivation and other countries. But Iran and Russia certainly have that criminal overlap.

Which brings us to the question of how these countries actually organize their cyber operations. You mentioned that some of them may or may not incorporate private actors in those operations, and others are more official. So, how do they organize their operations?

It’s quite a complex makeup across all the different countries and they all do it slightly differently. You do get those differences between what is state-sponsored, what is state-sanctioned, what is state-allowed. So, there are all of these distinctions within how you group them, but primarily, we see that the countries have military and civilian intelligence services. So, they’ll have military operators that are part of their armed forces that are going out and conducting these cyberattacks, and then you’ll also have intelligence agencies. So similar to how we have the CIA in the US, they have their equivalents that will also be conducting cyber operations on their behalf as well and depending on who’s conducting the attack, you’ll see different types of attacks and different victims as well in terms of what they’re trying to achieve.

But then we do also see civilians that are somewhat separated from the government being utilized. So, we do see a lot of front companies being used by these countries. This will be a seemingly legitimate company that is set up in country that has government backing behind it. That’s not necessarily obvious, so that they can have that air of conducting activity and not being linked to the government, even though they are. Then also we do see, as we just mentioned, with the financial motivation, we do see in especially North Korea, around countries that don’t have as much stability and financial security. We’ll see these actors that are doing a day job with the government and then in the evening, they’ll be using those skills that they’ve learned with the government to conduct cyber activities and criminal activities. So, it’s a murky infrastructure in terms of how these are set up but I would say is all of these countries do have set up groups and organizations that are there to conduct cyber espionage and cyberattacks on other countries.

Mark: This odd mixture of official and unofficial criminal gangs must make attribution really difficult when you’re looking at an activity, trying to attribute who the actor is who is behind the actual action.

Erin: Yeah, it’s incredibly difficult. And I would say it’s probably more difficult for people like ourselves that are outside of the government remit to identify that information because it’s very noisy in terms of what’s being conducted, who’s doing what attacks, and then things like the malware that they use. A lot of countries will use off the shelf malware, but lots of other groups use that as well. So, just because a malware is being used doesn’t mean that it’s attributed to one particular group. Even if that group invented it. For instance, Stuxnet is a good example of that – it was developed by the US and the Israelis, but it has been utilized far and wide by other nation-states, and by criminal actors since then. So, it’s really difficult to know who is conducting these activities and mistakes are made in terms of these attributions as well between different groups. Whenever we’re looking at this attribution, whenever we’re looking at this activity, the attacks that are happening, we’ll make assumptions about what we think that’s connected to you don’t really know unless you’re in those groups and being able to see that. So attribution is incredibly difficult and when we’re talking about APTs and we’re talking about nation-states, we’re talking about probably the most sophisticated cyber actors that are out there, that most of the time are trying very hard to obfuscate their activities and obfuscate who they are and who is conducting them. It’s a very tricky thing to be able to attribute that activity. So, one of the things I would say about it is it’s more about knowing what the techniques are than knowing who is doing it so that you can protect yourself from those techniques and those vulnerabilities within your organization. I guess some might say it doesn’t really matter who’s doing it when it comes down to attribution, it just matters that you stop it. So, it’s an interesting balance.

Mark: Yeah. Although, if you’re a foreign leader, say, the president of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the President of France, and your country is in some fashion attacked by a cyber operator, attribution becomes important in terms of how you respond. So that’s a challenge I’m sure that many leaders face.

Let me switch gears a little bit and talk specifically about China. The Great Firewall of China – what’s the impact of that on both their capabilities and on the ability of outsiders to see what’s happening in China?

Erin: For those who don’t know, I’m sure most people do, but the Great Firewall is what we refer to as the operations that China put in place to silo their internet from the rest of the world. So, it means that most of their citizens aren’t able to access the internet in the same way that we do and they’re not allowed to access certain things. So, it means that the government can really lock down the messaging and the news that citizens are being able to access. And as part of that, they do also have their own apps and search engines and things like that. A lot of social media like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp can’t be accessed in China. Instead, they have WeChat and WeChen and Weibo and other ways that they’re, doing that. It always from the outside is seen as a way of controlling the citizens and the messaging that they’re getting and what they’re able to do, but it does also highlight the sophistication that the Chinese government have in terms of cyber activities, in terms of how they’re able to monitor their own citizens and lock down that information and how sophisticated their surveillance and censorship is. So, it really highlights some of the skills that they have. It’s the same cyber operators influencing the Great Firewall as conducting some of these attacks that are happening, and it shows how they want to have their world order and what some of their motivations are in terms of the cyber operations that they’re targeting.

It’s worth mentioning that they aren’t the only country that’s doing that. Russia has Runet – they are expanding and trying to lock down what their citizens are able to see. And Iran and North Korea have very similar methodologies in place. I would say with North Korea, we know even less about that, just because of the isolationist way that North Korea operates. It’s very hard to know how that functions but I think it just demonstrates the sophistication that they have and the abilities that they have of surveillance and censorship that they utilize outside of the firewall as well as inside it.

Mark: So, from an adversarial perspective, we’re in an environment where these four countries have unencumbered access to the world’s internet. It’s open. We’ve made it open deliberately, but we have very limited access, on a variable basis to their internal country networks and I would put, you would put China at the top of that at the top of that list.

Erin: Yeah, definitely. So, it’s very hard as analysts. Going back to that attribution point as well, to know what’s going on inside of that firewall because they’re locking down that information. What messages are they sharing? What is it that they’re putting out about adversaries when there is a campaign that is publicly reported or Chinese actors are indicted, which has happened several times? What is the messaging that they’re putting inside internally? And I think, with Russia, we’ve seen this with the Ukraine war and the messaging that they’ve put forward about Ukraine to their citizens in terms of “they’re saving the country, it’s not a war, it’s a defensive position,” like very different to what we’re seeing outside of, of that realm. So, it definitely impacts on that attribution and what we’re able to understand about what they’re doing. One thing I would mention, just as well, because we’re a dark web company, but this is one of the ways that Tor can be used in a very legitimate way. I think we tend to focus on the dark web being a bad thing for criminal activities, but it’s a way that a lot of citizens are in these countries that have lockdown internet, are able to access Western and outside media and this is the reason that a lot of social media companies will have mirrors on the dark web. X, formerly Twitter, has it, Facebook has it, some governments have websites on the dark web. So, people are able to access that information. It’s a useful way for people to be able to get that outside information as well.

Can you talk about some of the notable cyber campaigns that have been conducted by these four countries?

Sure. There are a lot, and as we’ve already covered attribution is tricky in terms of how we associate particular campaigns that we’re seeing to particular countries and the groups within them. China has had some very significant operations in recent years targeting a lot of countries in their region. We’ve seen them spying on Cambodia, the Philippines, South Korea, and they do this using phishing techniques to gain access. So, you know, they are using some of the same techniques that we’re seeing criminals using that we’re all warned about at our companies in terms of “don’t click on a link.” Those sophisticated users are using those methodologies as well and we have seen things like when they recently targeted Japan’s space agency and one of the things that China is well known for is targeting companies in stealing intellectual property, and then taking that information back and using it to develop their own technologies and issue patents on their technologies. So, that is a thing that they continue to do in terms of expanding their power and what they have access to. That’s something that we’ve seen China doing a lot of recently. 

With Russia, probably the most significant one that is fairly recent was that they targeted Microsoft’s corporate systems. They targeted the executives and I believe the legal team and were able to access some emails and documents, and they did this again with fairly simple methodology. It was a password spray attack. So basically, they just took lots of different ways that people might use a password and put it across all of their systems. This really highlights why you need to have good password hygiene across your corporation, and governments everywhere because that is a way, not just with nation-states, but across the whole adversarial cyber field that we’re seeing people get access is through credentials.  So, it’s a really important thing to identify. And then I think you can’t talk about Russia’s activities without mentioning the war in Ukraine, because there definitely is a cyber war going on as well as the on the ground war. One of the things we’ve seen fairly recently was they hacked into webcams in Kiev, so that they could look at what air defenses were being used in the city and they did that ahead of a missile attack. They wanted to see where their missiles would be defended and where they wouldn’t. That is a real-world example of how the cyber and the real world are linked together and they’re utilizing cyber tools to help them with military campaigns.

In terms of Iran, there is a group known as, Mint Sandstorm.  So again, using phishing techniques, but social engineering as well. This is something we see a lot with Iranian actors – utilizing social media and fake social media accounts to lure people into giving them what they want. We saw them on a large recruitment and job networking sites that were creating these accounts, creating several levels of personas that knew each other to make them look as, as real as possible and then we’re using that to identify people that they wanted to target as part of the Israel-Gaza conflict. They were using this as an espionage dash intelligence gathering campaign. With these campaigns, it’s not just about disruptive action or getting access, sometimes it’s just understanding things that are going on to help them with other areas.

Then North Korea, again, is a trickier one just because of their isolationism and the groups that we see. Probably the most prominent group that’s been mentioned in recent years, and they have been around for a long time now is Lazarus. They have been involved in significant financial thefts as well as espionage. So, a lot of cryptocurrency, ransomware attacks, etc. They were responsible for the Sony hack way back when, I believe it was 2016, but as recently as this year, they’re still operating. They were seen conducting cyber espionage campaigns, targeting defense technologies, again creating fake social media profiles, and then deploying malware once they’ve got access to individuals. So, you know, there’s a range of activities that are going on and that very much is a high-level overview of some of the activities. There’s probably a lot more going on that we don’t know about, and a lot more going on that we do know about, but it hopefully gives you a sense of the types of campaigns that they’re conducting and also the variety of people that they’re targeting. I think you said earlier about governments obviously care about attribution, and they should, and their governments hopefully are better at attribution, but I think there’s an old world view that nation-states and spying and espionage is a thing between governments and these days with cyber, it just isn’t like everyone is vulnerable to attacks.  Everyone has information worth stealing, so everyone has to be vigilant.

Mark: It’s notable that in your answer, in talking about the various cyber campaigns conducted by these countries that many, if not most of them, are using basic password access, phishing, social engineering, as opposed to, Zero-day exploits that they have access to on an exclusive basis. That’s quite notable.

Erin: Zero-day exploits are really hard to develop and they’re really expensive to develop. If you don’t need them, because you can get in by a weak link of a person clicking on a link or believing a phishing email, then then why waste your time and infrastructure? I would say they still definitely do utilize those Zero-day attacks and that is something that’s developed, especially Russia and China, but those are the ones that it’s harder to hear about, right? Those are the ones that they don’t want people to know what that capability is and who they’re targeting. And they would save that for their most important victims.

Mark: We, in the cyber security industry, live in evolving times. There’s a lot of changes in technologies and I would include in that, by the way, artificial intelligence, the rise of artificial intelligence. How does that affect how these four countries are both organizing themselves and conducting their cyber operations?

Erin: I think in the same way that the rest of us are, right, they’re still learning. They’re still coming to grips with these new technologies and how they can utilize them and how they’re going to work, but they definitely are. I think they definitely want to utilize them and there is a growing sophistication. We have seen particular countries trying to target AI companies. I think there was an article, a month or two ago about OpenAI reporting, I think it was 4 or 5 specific APT actors that they had kicked off of their site and they were using AI to do the things that a lot of other people are doing, like help them with their work, but also create phishing emails and ask it questions to do research for them about the capabilities that other countries and their victims have. So, we know that they’re using AI, we know that that’s happening.

There are also, I believe it was China, I’m trying to remember – it was either China or North Korea, but they’re actually investing in companies that are developing AI in certain areas of the world so that they can own that technology for themselves as well. What I would say with AI and those technologies is the US and Europe and the likes of OpenAI, oh, I can’t their name is escaping me.  But, you know, the prominent AI providers at the moment, they are far and above, ahead of Russia, and China at the moment. But I was actually at a talk with someone from those companies a couple of weeks ago, and they were saying, we’re only a couple of months ahead and they are going to catch up, like it is going to happen. So, it’s something that everyone needs to be aware of and needs to be vigilant about. I think the takeaway point from that is that they are using it. They are keeping an eye on emerging technologies. They themselves as well have to constantly evolve to remain relevant and successful because people’s defense gets better all the time. So, you need to constantly evolve to get around those defenses and those ways of operating. It’s definitely something that they focus on.

Mark: You mentioned earlier, by the way we’re a darknet company and we cover the darknets, and we cover darknet adjacent sites. You mentioned earlier in one of your answers the use of the darknet by citizens in countries which are behind firewalls or where they have limited access to the outside internet. But how do the countries themselves use darknet and these other online platforms in their own operations?

Erin: Yeah, that’s a difficult one and it’s a bit murky. Again, going back to that attribution problem and especially on the dark web where everyone is trying to stay as anonymous as possible to know who is doing what. We know that they definitely do utilize it. We know that there are probably actors on there that are sowing disinformation and details on the dark web and sharing them. But, you know, one of the things that we’ve seen more in recent years and is a bit more obvious is hacktivist groups and criminal groups that are associated or in somewhat sanctioned by governments. So, we’ve seen this with Killnet in Russia and a handful of other groups that came out in support of Russia when the invasion of Ukraine happened, and they are very active on things like Telegram. They will say who they’re targeting. They will say why they’re targeting them. They’re often going after NATO participants. They will show evidence of defacements or DDoS attacks. So, they’re very vocal and they want people to know what they’re doing, and they do have those links or at least a nationalist fervor that is very clear. And we see that other groups linked to North Korea and Iran also have telegram channels and other channels that are very vocal. One of the interesting things that we’ve seen, though, that is less how they’re operating but gives us more insight into how they’re operating, is we have seen a lot of data leaks relating to some of these countries and their governments. Everyone’s falling victim to data leaks in recent years. It’s big business on the dark web – selling that data, but there’s been a huge increase in the last probably 6 to 9 months, especially for China in terms of government data being leaked. There was a huge leak of the Shanghai police late last year that was assessed to be one of the biggest breaches ever, data breaches ever, and it had a huge amount of information about their law enforcement, but also their tools that they were using to target their citizens. So, it gave security analysts insight into what they’re doing that the governments wouldn’t necessarily want them to have and there was another recent one as well on a GitHub repository. So slightly not the dark web, but where it was one of the front companies that was conducting cyberattacks on behalf of China. All of their information was released, and we’ve seen large scale releases of Russian data, Israeli data as well, talking about those conflicts. There is information like that and while we’re all looking at that dark web data and saying, oh, this is giving us insights into these countries that we don’t know as much about. You can believe that they are also doing the same. So, when there are leaks of US, UK, European data, those countries are definitely going to have individuals that are on those dark websites collecting that data and reviewing it as well.

What do we do about this?  It’s not like these four countries are going to wake up tomorrow and become parliamentary democracies and decide to conform to rules of international law. So, what do we do?  What do we do about this?

Erin: I think it’s points we’ve already mentioned. You just have to be vigilant, and you have to have as much security as possible. I think there’s education that needs to happen to people about how you should operate, as you said, like these phishing techniques, password spray attacks, things like that. They’re fairly simple and they’re things that we can educate people about and I think we’ve been too focused in recent years on; okay, people know that if you get a bad email that you shouldn’t click on it, hopefully most of the time, but we’re seeing more and more smishing attacks, so text messaging and with the advent of AI, you can develop someone’s voice and get them to say anything you want them to say.  So, you can get like a voicemail from your boss telling you to send you money or to click on a link. Things are becoming way more sophisticated in terms of how attacks can be conducted and therefore, our education to people about how to combat those attacks needs to be more sophisticated and I think it’s just staying up to date with what these threat actors are doing and this isn’t just the nation-states, it’s across the board, like what tools and techniques are being utilized, and are your systems set up to protect against those vulnerabilities? So I think it’s trying to be as proactive as possible and not just reacting when attacks happen.

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Interested in reading more on this topic? Check Out Our Research Report.

March 05, 2024

Or, watch on YouTube

The internet is a vast realm that extends far beyond the surface web we commonly explore. Beneath the surface lies the darknet, a hidden network that poses significant challenges but also holds immense potential for open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigations. Join DarkOwl’s Director of Intelligence to learn how the darknet expands the scope of information available to researchers and analysts.

In this 30-minute session, Erin covers how darknet data:

• Enhances OSINT investigations by unveiling hidden information
• Strengthens our ability to combat cybercrime and protect individuals and organizations
• Enhances threat intelligence and helps maintain a safer digital ecosystem
• Is utilized in identity theft, fraud, compromised accounts and other real world examples

For those that would rather read the presentation, we have transcribed it below.

NOTE: Some content has been edited for length and clarity.

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Erin: Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. I’m going to do a quick high-level talk today of what darknet data is, why it’s important and how it can fit into your investigations. Please do ask any questions that you have throughout, and I’d be more than happy to answer those. So, what we’re going to cover today is what is the dark web? A really quick intro, what is OSINT? Again, very high level. Why is dark web important? And then what I really want to focus in on are some use cases and hopefully show you how we can integrate dark web and OSINT together to find some really interesting things in our investigations.

The obligatory who am I side… as any good analyst, I hate having any details about me on the internet, so I’m going to keep it brief, but my name is Erin. I’m the Director of Collections and Intelligence here at DarkOwl, and I’ve been an intelligence analyst for over 12 years now.

Another obligatory slide is the iceberg, you can’t really have an OSINT presentation without including an iceberg of some kind in here. This is to highlight the different areas of the internet. They’re all open-source, so they all form part of open-source investigations but obviously at DarkOwl, and me personally at the moment, focus on the darknet, but it’s always important to see the whole view and look at everything that’s going on. You want to be able to look at sources that are on the deep net and the surface net as well to make sure you’re getting as much information as possible and that you’re able to validate that information as well.

Diving into the dark web, hopefully most of you that are listening are familiar, but I’ll just give a very quick background of what the dark web is and what can be found there.  I’m not going to read everything on this slide, but you can see that it’s been around since the 2000, so we’ve got about 20 years now and there’s a lot of things that have happened in terms of the access, the marketplaces that are emerging and forums, breaches starting to occur, terrorists using the information, etc. There’s been a lot of uses of the dark web, and I would like to say that it isn’t just there for illicit uses. There are a lot of legitimate uses for the dark web. I think one of the best things is allowing some individuals that might not have open access to the internet in the countries that they live in are able to access a lot of websites, social media sites, etc. using the dark web that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. There are legitimate purposes, but obviously a lot of nefarious actors also use it and take advantage of the anonymity that they believe exists there.

What is on the Dark Web? What can you find there?

Marketplaces, people selling goods. These are usually illicit goods, usually, hacking tools, malware, data, drugs, weapons, counterfeit goods. We see all of those being sold on a regular basis. We also see forums – people chatting and talking to each other but also usually selling some kind of information or sharing information, some of it’s not all for sale. We do also see a lot of extremists, forums, people talking about, information that’s not great, but also getting together, planning events, things like that. As I just mentioned, there are also social media sites on there. There are mirrors of Twitter or X or Facebook, Reddit.  All that can be accessed from the dark web. There are cryptocurrency exchanges, mixers, other forms of things. Cryptocurrency is the currency of the dark web. Really, that’s the main way that people transact. The full ecosystem for cryptocurrency also exists on the dark web. You also get news media, news sources. A lot of the main media outlets and newspapers will also have dark web mirrors. The CIA has a dark web mirror. There are a lot of legitimate sites out there. And then of course, everyone is aware of data leaks, that is the main place that they are shared and ransomware. A lot of ransomware groups will have leak sites where they will have a shame board of all their victims, which they will put on the dark web for people to go and view. If the company doesn’t pay their ransom, then that information will be released there and can be downloaded. I should say with the leaks as well, it’s usually advertised on the dark web, but the dark web is very slow in terms of downloading information. Often a downloading service or a torrent will be used if the files are quite large.

This is just to give you kind of an idea of what the dark web looks like. These are some sites selling counterfeit goods, organs, drugs, cash apps and accounts. Then also we’ve got some of the advertisements that are shown here. 

You can see the different marketplaces that exist with the different areas, we’ve got people selling Social Security numbers, malware, botnets, different types of drugs. There really is this booming commercial aspect to the dark web and a lot of different stores that have been set up either for niche things or sell a huge amount of goods. And as I said, cryptocurrency is the currency of choice. You can see in that middle image: Monero, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin are just some of the ones that are accepted. But it is a variety of cryptocurrencies that are usually accepted these days.

There are quite a lot of challenges, though, with collecting from the dark web. I mean, the first one is you’ve got to know where to look. You don’t have the nice URLs that you would get on the surface web. You also don’t have Google to help you. There are search engines on the dark web, but the majority of sites are not indexed and therefore not easy to find. You need to know where to look, and need to be into networks where that information is being shared. You also, in most cases, need a login to access the pages. So, you need to create personas and you need to do that in a secure way. The threat actors that set up these sites and maintain these sites are very against bots. They’re very against DDoS, all of the things that they’re very familiar with but also, they don’t want people going in and crawling the data. They don’t want people to access it that aren’t there for the purposes that they’ve set it up for. I would say the dark web has some of the most sophisticated captures I have ever seen. I can spend quite a bit of my day just trying to solve math issues or see letters in squiggly lines or putting images together. It is quite difficult to get into those. There is a lot of bot traps on the dark web and a lot of human interaction that is required to get into it. It’s not easy but there is a huge amount of data and intelligence to be found once you do get into those sites.

I also just wanted to touch on before I get into some of what that data is what we call at DarkOwl dark web adjacent sites. These are things that are not necessarily on the dark web. They’re not on Tor or I2P or ZeroNet, or some of the other dark web services that are out there but they are used by the same types of people. They are used in the same kind of way. Telegram is a huge one where we do see a huge amount of marketplaces. We see a lot of fraud being conducted. We see a lot of hacking operations. There’s a lot of hacktivist channels, extremist channels, etc. That’s something that you need to be aware of as well when you’re doing these dark web and OSINT investigations. I’ve also mentioned ICQ and Jabber. But there are other things like Rocket, Tocket.io, Tox and things like that where people are communicating. We also see it on gaming apps. Discord got a lot of publicity last year with the leaks from the Pentagon leak. I believe he was just sentenced, actually, this week. In terms of leaking that information on there, but generally, a lot of threat actors are on Discord actively. It is a gaming site, but you can set up different servers and different channels. And so, we see a lot of people sharing and operating there as well. Then a lot of threat actors these days aren’t as worried about anonymity as they perhaps used to be. There’s been a lot of instances where dark web forums and marketplaces have been taken down by law enforcement action. So, some threat actors, I think, think, why should I go to all of this effort of having a Tor node and a Tor site and setting this up when I could just do it on the surface web with the same risks, almost. There are marketplaces that are vendor shops that are forums that sit on the surface web that’s still used by the same kind of actors for the same kind of use cases. We’re very much monitoring and looking at those as well.

To give you an idea of some of the things that we’re able to find from the darknet. A lot of data comes from the darknet, so we see things, huge amounts of personal data, PII. That is the currency of the dark web at the moment. I would say we see a huge amount of issues being stolen, email addresses, passwords, Social Security numbers, social media accounts, stealer logs becoming really prevalent in the last year or two. There’s cookies in there. There’s two factor authentication sign-ins. There’s key questions, etc. So, there’s a huge amount there. We also see a lot of banking information and fraud. There’s a lot of corporate data, especially with ransomware attacks which are only increasing. I’ve mentioned malware and then also risks. There’s a lot of threat actors on the dark web that are very good at what they do. There’s a lot of cyberattacks. There’s a lot of education, actually, on the dark web about how you can conduct those cyberattacks, leaks, etc. There’s a huge amount of information out there if you know where to look.

Will you be discussing during this webinar the uptick in Drainer as a service (DaaS) or explaining it to those new to dark web marketplaces?

No, that is not in the presentation, but I can definitely get to that at the end.

OSINT 101

OSINT is open-source intelligence. It’s information that’s been found from open-sources. Any information found on the dark web does count as OSINT information but obviously it’s a lot broader than that. These are just some of the sources and information that’s out there that you can use as part of OSINT to find information for whatever kind of investigation you’re trying to conduct.

I did want to highlight some tips in terms of doing OSINT. This is true of looking on social media or looking on the dark web. I created my little AI generated sock puppet. That’s what that’s supposed to be if no one can tell but always use the sock puppet. Always have a persona, always ensure that you’re doing this in a secure way – using VPN or proxies. Use a virtual machine, use burner phones. Don’t use any of your own equipment to do any of these investigations. You should never cross over your real-life persona with what you’re doing online ensuring that you’re recording all of the information you find. I mean, it really depends on if you’re doing this for law enforcement or internally. But I would say most people you need to record what you’re finding with the dates, the timestamp so you are able to validate the data is accurate as of the time that you found it. Because obviously all of these things can change, and particularly with the dark web sites go up and down all of the time. What you find today might not be there tomorrow. It might not be there an hour from now. There are a lot of open-source tools out there that can help you with doing that kind of collection. So I would recommend looking into those and if anyone has any questions, I’m more than happy to share some of the, the tools that I’m aware of that can help you with that collection. There’s lots of other OSINT tips and tricks out there. There’s a huge amount of resources, online and for anyone who’s new to the area, I would recommend having a look at those.

Why is Dark Web Important to OSINT Investigations

Basically, there’s a lot of illicit information and activity that’s happening on the dark web, so it can be a really good starting point for investigations in terms of finding out what’s going on. You can see what people are discussing, you can see trends, you can see victims, you can see how things are operating. Then moving into more surface web OSINT investigations, you can sometimes expand on that and build out a really big picture. I would say they’re very complementary of each other and especially if you’re looking at fraud or extremism or drugs or weapons trafficking or human trafficking, the dark web is going to be a really valuable source for you to find information and data points to help you in your investigation.

LockBit

Now I’m hopefully going to go on to some of the interesting bits and walk you through a couple of recent case studies that we have. I’m going to start with Lockbit. Obviously, this has been in the news a lot recently. Kathy is going to share in the chat a blog that we recently did on Lockbit. I think it’s been about two weeks now, Lockbit leak site was taken down by law enforcement. Really interestingly, I thought, rather than just seizing the site as they usually do, they actually had fun with it and started posting on the leak site things about the Lockbit group themselves. One of the things that they did share was that there were two Lockbit affiliates that they had sanctioned and put indictments against. This is after the fact, but I wanted to highlight how you can get really good information from government sources and official sources about threat actors, and then use that and pivot into other data.

So here we have this individual, Ivan, I’m not going to attempt to say, but Vassalord. We’ve got all his usernames and things that he’s using here, and we can pivot in our own data. We were able to identify that he was active on a number of dark web Russian speaking forums. Here we can see him, this is in Russian, I haven’t translated it, but he is selling malware. He is giving people advice on different malware and also selling it within the group. So, through looking at this you know obviously it’s after the fact, but we can see what his activity was. We can see this dates back to 2022, but we can also see who he was interacting with. We can see kind of what tools he was operating, and we can see more information about him. You can also then take that information and put it into social media tools. This is What’s My Name app, where you can put in usernames, and it will search across social media sites and identify if an account exists. So here we can see that there’s some old Twitter accounts. There’s a telegram account which I already mentioned. The threat actors are very active on. We’ve got a Roblox account. You know, threat actors love gaming.  It’s giving you these other areas to go and look and to go and research and investigate and can give you more information to build that picture about that individual.

One thing I was just going to highlight, just because I thought it was kind of funny, was that Lockbit actually put something out a few months ago, I believe it’s a few months ago. It might have been a bit longer, saying they would pay anyone who got Lockbit tattooed on them, and several people did it. And they shared that online, and we were able to see those tattoos, which they probably regret quite a lot now.

There was a second Lockbit affiliate, also that I wanted to highlight. This is just highlighting the usefulness of leaked data. We collect data breaches and leaked information and have that within our system. Here you can see there’s two separate leaks. One includes an email address with the full name of the individual. If you only knew this email address was linked to someone who was doing bad things, you could put that into a leak and see if you can get more information about them. And here we’ve got their full name in Cyrillic, which I’ve translated, and also their telephone number. And then pivoting on that telephone number, we’re able to see another leak, which I believe is linked to Yandex app for ordering food. So, you can see kind of the payments information. You can see his name again in Cyrillic as Arthur, you’ve got the phone number there. But also interestingly, you’ve got the iOS version.

So, there’s a lot of information that you can find within these leaks with information about threat actors. And then what I’ve shown below is again, using open-source tools, these are two freely available Python tools that you can use, where you can search on the email address or on the phone number, and it will go and look across social media sites to see if they appear there. And it won’t share that information with the email or the phone number holder. So, you still have OpSec, but here you can see that email address. It has a LastPass account, it has a Nike account, it has a Twitter account so you can start to see where this individual is operating.

Cryptocurrency and Extremism

Another use case I just wanted to highlight. I mentioned cryptocurrencies are used extensively on the dark web. I also wanted to highlight some of the extremist activity that we see. I’m not going to highlight any particular threads on this page because I personally don’t find them to be, I don’t agree with their point of view, but Kiwi Farms is an open forum where people share information about different things. It’s similar to a chan. It does have, some not so nice threads on it but just highlighting that with our Vision platform you’re able to find that information and then also view it through our direct to darknet feature as it would look on the site, and you can see this is their homepage. But one of the things that Kiwi Farms do is they have a donation address, so the people that maintain the account are asking individuals to provide them money to keep the site going. So I wanted to see if I could find out anything about that cryptocurrency address and how the funds are being used. I used an open-source blockchain explorer. This is called breadcrumbs; you can get a basic free account and it allows you to do some kind of network analysis. You can see we’ve got the Kiwi Farms bitcoin address right at the beginning with some of the people that are paying into that. But I was more interested in seeing where that money went and a lot of it was circling back. I have removed some of the nodes on this just to make it a little bit more visually easy to see but a lot of it was going back into Kiwi’s Farm, but then I was able to find areas where it was being cashed out; Kraken, Binance. And then Bravada, were some of the areas where we were seeing that the funds were actually being cashed out. And you can see that the site, breadcrumbs, does also give you an overview of the Bitcoin address and how much funds have gone in and out. You can see it’s quite a high volume and it’s been active for the last three years. You can also see that it plugs into bitcoin abuse. Bitcoin abuse, which I believe its name has changed now to Chain abuse, but it’s another really good source for looking at any cryptocurrency addresses you come across and seeing if they’ve previously been reported as linked to nefarious activity. One of the addresses in the Bravada exchange is actually been reported to be linked to terrorism and sponsoring groups in Russia. It’s interesting that an extremist forum, Kiwi Farms is utilizing and sending funds out that way. Obviously, I can’t say for definite that that’s what’s happening, but we can see that those funds are being trickled out that area and it’s another area for us to investigate and look into.

Israel-Hamas Conflict

The Israel-Hamas conflict has obviously been ongoing for a while now and it’s been all over telegram. So, as I mentioned, telegram is a really useful place to see a lot of hacktivism, a lot of threat groups. There’s also marketing there, but it’s also being used more and more as a new source and whether that news is factually accurate or is disinformation is always up for debate, but it’s been a really good source of being able to see what is happening on both sides of the conflict. Actually, on October 7th, it was one of the first places that anyone saw that something was happening. You can see one of the images here is them going through the wall into Israel.

This was on telegram almost immediately and anecdotally; I know that people in Israel were watching telegram for news updates because they were coming through quicker than they were on traditional media sources. But as I said, there’s also been a lot of information that’s been shared there that is probably not accurate. There were definitely videos that were being posted at the beginning of the conflict that actually came from video games and things like that but there’s also been a lot of the hacktivist groups on both sides, saying who they’re going to target or saying that they have successfully targeted someone showing evidence of DDoS attacks, showing evidence of defacement attacks, showing documents that have been stolen and leaks. A huge amount of leaks are being shared on telegram but one of the things I wanted to highlight, and I don’t necessarily have a good example here, but you definitely can do it, is taking some of these images and the videos that are being shared. Telegram, unlike Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat doesn’t always strip out the metadata on the images.  There are a lot of open-source tools that can kind of help you to see what the metadata is, and if there is any Exif data that’s going to help you there but also you can get hints of where things are occurring and what’s happening by looking at the images and matching them up with satellite imagery or previous images that have been shared as well.

Scattered Spider

I’m conscious I’m running out of time, so I’m going to go quickly. Scattered spider is another group, threat actor group that we’ve been monitoring. They are a financial crime group. Scattered spider is the name that’s been given to them by one of the cyber security threat actors, but they’ve been responsible for some very high-profile attacks in recent years, including taking down Vegas with the MGM and Caesars Palace ransomware attacks. They do a lot of social engineering and phishing techniques; we expect those to probably increase in sophistication. Not that they aren’t already, but we know that AI is being used to assist with those attacks but they are very active on telegram and discord and part of what is known within the community as the comm. We’re doing some analysis on who is active in those groups, who is interacting with each other, and what information can we find out about them. So, there’s a lot you can do with the data that’s in telegram to do analysis, to do that link analysis to, to find out who the individuals are and of course the main ones you can go and look in other sources to see if they have other social media profiles or other areas that you would want to be looking into.

Conclusion and Questions

So, I ran through that really, really quickly.  I’ll just leave the key takeaways up here for people to read.  Hopefully, that’s what you’ve taken away from it. I think the question about the Drainer service highlights that there’s a huge amount of things that you could cover here. This is very much designed to be an initial overview and an introduction but if there’s topics and interests that people would like to know more about, please put those into the chat and we can look at providing more information on that in the future. 

But with that being said I just wanted to highlight we do provide investigation services at DarkOwl for dark web and OSINT investigations so we can assist you with any investigations that you currently have. With that, I will open it up for questions.

What data sources are considered dark web?

Dark web traditionally is sites that are accessed through Tor, so the Onion router, but you also have things like I2P and ZeroNet, which are also dark web providers and there’s a few more out there, but they’re not as used as regularly, such as Magnesium. As I mentioned in the presentation, we also view things as dark web adjacent when it’s the same kind of use case and the same kind of individuals that are operating. So, we definitely consider that to be Telegram, to be Discord, ICQ and then some surface websites as well which are there. So, I think it’s open to interpretation. It depends how narrow you want to be but I think with OSINT Investigations you always need to be open to all of the information that’s out there and being able to validate it against different sources. So, the more data points that you have, the more likely that you’ll be able to do that.

How do you locate and identify new groups on Telegram or Onion sites?

Manually is the main way. So, telegram you can do searches in the global search or telegram on the desktop app. If you have a keyword or a search that you’re aware of, you can put that in and see what you would find. I would also look at the groups that you’re already tracking and monitoring and search for the links. If you click on the channel page, you can go to links and it will show you other telegram channels that have been shared. I will also sometimes look at other social media sources – people on Twitter or other forums will sometimes say, let’s take this conversation to telegram and they will share an invite link there. You can also use Google Dorking to search telegram, which is quite useful, but I would say it’s a keyword phrase. If you’ve got a particular topic you’re interested in, um, search for that. And then also if you’re looking at individuals in other countries, do you use the native language? So if you’re looking at Russian threat actors search for your turn and Cyrillic as well as in Roman characters because you’ll find more information that way. Onion sites, again, it’s similar. We are already monitoring the major forums and marketplaces, and they will share other areas that they’re accessing. There are sites out there that will track new onion sites that have been created and what they’re being used for. So we can look at those. It is kind of just kind of pulling through the different links that are being found and then reviewing them to make sure that they have actually got useful information on them.

Does DarkOwl have copies of entire sites that can be walked through. For example, could one walk through Silk Road and see the listings and users that were active back then?

Yes and no. We have our data, it goes back to 2016 in earnest. So, we do have all of that information, but we store it in documents and pages. You could search Silk Road and go through it. But one of the things that we don’t do is collect images due to legalities around CSAM material. You would be able to see the postings, you would be able to see the usernames and all of that information from any site that we’ve been collecting since 2016 but it wouldn’t be a walk through in terms of – it wouldn’t look like the site. You couldn’t click on buttons and things like that, but the data is all there.

Other than breadcrumbs and chainabuse, what are some other great sources for tracking crypto and blockchain across the deep and dark web?

I think there’s so many sources out there. Breadcrumbs is the one that I like to use just because it’s free. I mean obviously there’s paid services out there that are very, very good. I’m not aware of many others, especially not on the dark web. They’re not there for tracking purposes. I think one I heard of that I’m not familiar with but was recommended to me recently was Qlue – that is supposed to be quite good for cryptocurrency, monitoring but it really depends if you want to do a paid service or open-source.

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