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[DEVELOPING] Impacts of Ukraine Invasion Felt Across the Darknet

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on August 26, 2022. Posted in Blog.

Last updated: April 18 18:30 UTC

The DarkOwl team are actively tracking the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The effects of the kinetic military operation are causing ripples across the global cyber space including critical underground ecosystems across the deep and darknet.

18 April 2022 – 01:12 UTC

DDoSecrets Leaks 222GB of Data from Gazregion Collected by Anonymous Hacktivists

Three different hacktivist groups (Anonymous, nb65, and DepaixPorteur) submitted archives consisting of emails and sensitive corporate files from Gazregion, a Russian supplier specializing in gas pipelines construction with direct support to Gazprom.

There have been numerous claims of attacks against Gazprom since invasion of Ukraine by Anonymous and other cyber offensive groups. nb65 posted to social media they compromised SSK Gazregion on April 3rd with their version of CONTI ransomware.

18 April 2022 – 01:12 UTC

nb65 Claims Attack Against Russian JSC Bank PSCB with CONTI Ransomware

The Hacktivist group, Network Battalion 65 had claimed they successfully attacked JSC Bank PSCB in Russia and successfully encrypted their network with their version of CONTI ransomware.

The group stated they managed to exfiltrated over 1TB of data including financial statements, tokens, tax forms, client information, and sensitive databases before deleting all backups to prevent data and functionality restoration.

The hacktivists further taunted the bank stating how grateful they were the stored so many credentials in Chrome – a browser for which several emergency security patches have been recently released.

We’re very thankful that you store so many credentials in Chrome. Well done. It’s obvious that incident response has started. Good luck getting your data back without us.

15 April 2022 – 21:59 UTC

GhostSec Leaks Data from domain[.]ru Hosting Provider

The Hacktivist group, GhostSec claimed to target Russian internet domain registration provider, domain[.]ru in a cyberattack. The group managed to exfiltrate over 100MB of data including screenshots of sensitive files and excel spreadsheet data.

According to the README file in the data leak, during the breach, GhostSec identified over 4TB of SQL databases, but in all the excitement the team’s presence was caught by the company’s intrusion detection systems and kicked off the network before the SQL data could be harvested.

15 April 2022 – 17:52 UTC

nb65 Confirms Attack on Continent Express; DDoSecrets Leaks 400 GB of Russian Travel Agency’s Data

The attack on a Russian travel agency occurred several days ago and was shortly after confirmed by the organization. DDoSecrets assisted nb65 in leaking over 400GB of sensitive files and databases from the travel agency. The details of the leak have not been confirmed.

15 April 2022 – 14:32 UTC

Anonymous Takes Over Pro-Russian Discord Accounts

Hacktivists from the Anonymous Collective have successfully taken control of several pro-Russian accounts on the chat platform, Discord, and are now using these accounts to circulate pro-Ukrainian messaging. An Anonymous member @v0g3lsec – who has been extremely active in the #opRussia campaign – shared an image of a hacked account where they posted links and information about the information operations group, squad303 to share truths about the invasion via SMS, WhatsApp, and email with random Russian citizens.

14 April 2022 – 20:02 UTC

DDoSecrets Leaks Unprecedented Amount of Email Data from Russian Organizations

In the last three days, DDoSecrets uploaded archives for five (5) different organizations across Russia totaling 1.97 Million emails and 2 TBs of data.

230,000 emails from the Blagoveshchensk City Administration (Благове́щенск) – 150GB
230,000 emails from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation (Министерство культуры Российской Федерации) responsible for state policy regarding art, cinematography, archives, copyright, cultural heritage, and censorship – 446 GB
250,000 emails from the Deptartment of Education of the Strezhevoy (Стрежево́й) City District Administration – 221GB
495,000 emails from the Russian firm Technotec, which has provided oil and gas field services along with chemical reagents used in oil production and transportation – 440GB
768,000 emails from Gazprom Linde Engineering, which specializes in designing gas and petrochemical processing facilities and oil refineries – 728GB

13 April 2022 – 17:09 UTC

CISA Issues Alert About Destructive Malware Targeting US Critical Infrastructure

A joint advisory issued by the Department of Energy (DOE), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) details how nation state actors (likely sponsored by the Russian government) have demonstrated the capability to gain full system access to multiple industrial control system (ICS) and affiliated supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices. The critical alert indicated there is an immediate HIGH cybersecurity risk to critical infrastructure around the US. The devices include:

Schneider Electric programmable logic controllers (PLCs);
OMRON Sysmac NEX PLCs; and
Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers.

For more information read the advisory along with recommended security mitigation measures here: https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-103a

12 April 2022 – 15:31 UTC

ATW | Blue Hornet Announces That They are a “State-Sponsored” Group

The “GOD” account representing AgainstTheWest (APT49) on the new BreachedForums (with many users from the now officially seized RaidForums) announced moments ago that they are indeed a “state-sponsored” cyber group with “direct instructions to infiltrate, attack and leak the country of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea & Belarus.” The group’s Twitter account was also blocked by Russia’s Kremlin account earlier this week and the notification of this block was included in the post.

There is no way to verify the accuracy of the statement posted and it’s unclear whether or not the group will continue their operations in support of Ukraine.

11 April 2022 – TIME UNKNOWN

CONTI Claims Responsibility for Cyberattack Against German Wind Turbine Company

On the 31st of March, Nordex wind turbine manufacturing company in Germany suffered a significant cyberattack. CONTI has claimed responsibility for the attack (over 10 days later) posting the company’s name to their public-facing Tor service of victims. We anticipate that sensitive corporate data will be leaked by the RaaS gang shortly.

11 April 2022 – 20:58 UTC

Anonymous Compromises Regional Government of Tver, Russia; Leaks 130,000 Emails from Governor’s Mail Server

Hacktivists from the Anonymous Collective using the monikers DepaixPorteur and wh1t3sh4d0w0x90 have compromised the domain tverreg[.]ru believed to be associated with the Regional Government of Tver, Russia. Tver is located 110 miles (180km) northwest of Moscow on the banks of the Volga River. The archive is over 116GB in size and consists of over 130,000 emails exfiltrated from Governor Igor Rudenya’s email system dating from 2016 through 2022. The governor was appointed by President Putin in 2016.

Anonymous shared a leak consisting of Russian regional governors on the darknet on 23 March 2022.

11 April 2022 – 14:35 UTC

Finland Suffers Cyberattack; Announces They Will Expedite Application for NATO Membership

On April 8th, the Finnish government confirmed many of its military, defense, and foreign affairs webservers experienced unsophisticated, yet concerted DDoS attacks likely originating from Russian threat actors. The cyberattacks coincidentally occurred just as Ukraine President Zelenskyy started to address the Finnish Parliament on the status of the war in Ukraine around 10:30 GMT.

On the same day, the Finnish Minstry of Defense confirmed, hours earlier, Russia state-owned aircraft also breached Finland’s airspace off Porvoo in the Gulf of Finland – the first time in over 2 years. The aircraft, an Ilyushin IL-96-300 cargo transport airplane, was traveling east to west and landed in Berlin.

Both Finland and Sweden have signaled they will be submitting applications to join NATO. According to open-source reporting, Finland will likely finalize their application during the month of May in time for a NATO summit scheduled in Madrid, Spain in June.

Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov stated that Russia would have to “rebalance the situation ” with its own measures should Sweden and Finland choose to join NATO.

09 April 2022 – 03:39 UTC

ATW | BH Group Leaks Data Stolen from Russian Temporary Work Agency and Recruitment Firm: Rabotut

AgainstTheWest (Blue Hornet) announced on their Telegram channel they have successfully targeted the domain (rabotut[.]ru) for Rabotut, a “federal scale service” supplier in Russia. According to the threat actor, the archive includes the organization’s entire backend and front end source code, API keys, and SSL keys. According to open-sources, Rabotut is a temporary workers agency and provides contract employees to a number of critical government and corporate businesses around the country.

Contents of leak are in the process of verification by Darkowl analysts.

08 April 2022 – 21:41 UTC

KelvinSecurity Team Targets Russian Cryotcurrency Scam Website: alfa-finrase

KelvinSec released data reportedly from the domain (alfa-finrase[.]com) known for trading in fraud data, e.g. passports, driver’s license, and other sensitve PII. The group claims to have exploited the website, shutdown a cryptocurrency scam, deleted 400GB from the site’s server, and exposed 1.4GB of customer data from the deep web store.

07 April 2022 – 19:30 UTC

DDoSecrets Leaks Over 400,000 Russian Organization Emails Exfiltrated by Anonymous Operations

The leak site, DDoSecrets once again assists Anonymous hactivist collective in distributing sensitive data exfiltrated from companies and organizations in Russia. Three archives were leaked – within minutes of each other – for three organizations: Petrofort, Aerogas, and Forest. The data from these corporate email archives date back over decades of commercial activitiy.

Petrofort: 244GB archive consisting of over 300,000 emails between employees and clients. Petrofort is one of the largest office spaces and business centers in Saint Petersburg.
Aerogas: 145GB archive consisting of over 100,000 emails between employees and clients. Aerogas is an engineering company supporting Russia’s critical oil and gas infrastructure and supports such as: Rosneft, NOVATEK, Volgagaz and Purneft.
Forest (Форест): 35GB archive consisting of over 37,000 emails between employees and clients. Forest is a Russian logging and wood manufacturing company associated with many high-valued construction projects across the company.

A representative from DDoSecrets earlier shared thoughts about the extraordinary volume of leak data coming out of Russia earlier this week in a social media post.

06 April 2022 – 21:42 UTC

Anonymous Claims to Attack Russian MAUK Cinema, Mirkino Belebey

Members of Anonymous using the aliases ShadowS3c and Anonfearless3c have allegedly targeted servers for the Russian cinema and movie theatre, Mirkino Belebey (domain:mirkino-belebey[.]ru). The Mirkino theatre is also known as the MAUK Cinema a.k.a. “World of cinema” in the Belebeevsky District of Russia.

The hacktivists have leaked screenshots with credential data from the breached database containing hundreds of usernames, email adresses, and passwords.

This entry will be updated if/when the leak contents can be confirmed.

06 April 2022 – 20:42 UTC

Hajun Project Identifies Russian Soldiers Who Sent Parcels from Belarus Back to Russia

On April 3rd, the Hajun Project published three hours of surveillance camera footage from a CDEK delivery service located in Mazyr, Belarus. The video shows several soldiers from the Russian Armed Forces sending, among other things, items stolen from Ukrainians, during their “special military operation.”

Using leaked personal data available across the darknet and deepweb, the Hajun Project further confirmed the identities of the Russian military consignors and have released the names and phone numbers for at least 50 of the servicemen that sent parcels around the same time as the published camera video.

The Hajun Project maintains a Telegram channel and Twitter account monitoring and tracking the movement of military land and air assets in Belarus.

05 April 2022 – 16:22 UTC

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Agency (GURMO) Conduct SCADA Attacks on Gazprom

Due to the sensitivities of on-going military operations, there is limited detail available on the nature of the attack, but it appears that offensive cyber units under the direction of Main Director of Intelligence for the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine conducted SCADA cyberattacks against Gazprom pipelines. The attacks began within 48 hours of a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Belgorod region last Friday, that western media reported was the first time Ukrainian helicopters had been spotted going across the border.

The cyberattacks likely triggered an underground gas leak from a highly pressurized gas pipeline in the village of Verkhnevilyuysk; the leak was reported in Russian open sources. Shortly after this, an explosion occurred in a main gas pipeline “Urengoy-Center-2” that civilians captured on Russian social media platform, VK as a large fire occurred in the Lysvensky district of the Kama region near the village of Matveevo.

Over pressurizing gas lines through disrupting infrastructure industrial control systems (ICS) is a documented method for using cyber to cause kinetic damage to pipeline critical infrastructure. The Congressional Research Services detailed such security risks to ICS in their 2021 report.

05 April 2022 – 14:21 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Data from Russian Rations Supplier, Korolevskiy

The company, Korolevskiy (korolevskiy[.].ru) appears to supply Russian companies and organizations with grain, nuts, and confectionaries in addition to rations for the military. This cyberattack could impact the availability of some food ingredient supplies, such as sugar, which is already in short supply and skyrocketing in price across the country due to sanctions.

The data leak includes an 82GB archive containing thousands of emails exfiltrated from the company’s mail servers.

05 April 2022 – 12:29 UTC

nb65 Claims to Hack Civilian Travel Service in Retaliation for Bucha Massacre

Anonymous and hacktivists around the world step up their offensive against Russia after images of Russian soldiers’ war crimes and atrocities against civlians in Bucha emerged on Monday.

Network Battalion 65 (nb65) reportedly targeted Continent Express (continent[.]ru), a Russia-based travel and supply company, with Conti’s ransomware variant in retaliation for the crimes.

Continent Express is one of the largest agencies for travel in Russia and helps arrange tickets and accomodations. As of time of writing the public facing website for continent[.] is operational.

Details of the group’s threatening message posted to social media called out the company’s CEO Stanislav Kostyashkinis in the image below.

“Why, you ask? The answer is simple. We read and watched the coverage of Bucha with horror. The utter lack of humanity in the way Russian soldiers have treated the civilian population of Ukraine left us all in tears. The world has pleased with your country to put an end to this madness drive by the mind of a cowardly tyrant: your president.”

(Update 6 April 2022) Earlier today, Continent Express posted to their news section of the website acknowledging the cyberattack but stated that important data and booking systems were not affected.

04 April 2022 – 12:29 UTC

DDoSecrets Distributes Data Exfiltrated by nb65 From Russian Broadcasting Company

Earlier in the campaign, nb65 leaked a sample of files and emails from All-Russia’s State Television and Broadcasting Company (VGTRK / ВГТРК). The Russian state-owned broadcaster operates five national TV stations, two international networks, five radio stations, and over 80 regional TV and radio networks and has been heralded as essential for the “security of the state.”

According to former VGTRK employees, Kremlin officials have dictated how the news should be covered, and provided incendiary phrases meant to discredit Ukraine. According to the former employees, editors normally have freedom to make decisions, but “where big politics are concerned, war and peace, he has no freedom.”

The 786 GB archive contains over 900,000 emails and 4,000 files spanning 20 years of operations at the broadcaster.

04 April 2022 – 06:24 UTC

Anonymous Leaks List of Russian Soldiers Deployed in Bucha

Anonymous shared a PDF file containing the identities of the members Russia’s 64 Motor Rifle Brigade that was positioned in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Since Russia’s withdrawl from the village, the atrocities and war crimes carried out by members of the Brigade have come to light.

The PDF consists of 87 pages detailing the identities of over 1,600 members of the Bridage, including their full name, date of birth, and passport number.

The file most likely originated from the Ukrainian government or intelligence services.

03 April 2022 – 06:16 UTC

Anonymous Shares Data Leaked from Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management

Anonymous shared a single PostGreSQL database, presumably from the domain: rosim.gov.ru, containing over 785MB of logged domain Internet activity available via the domain user: kluser. Much of the data is several years old, including IP addresses, domains, user agents of site vistors. Without further analysis, the value of leaking this data other than psychological operations and information warfare is unclear.

03 April 2022 – 05:07 UTC

nb65 Claims to Compromise Russian Gas Pipeline Supplier: SSK Gazregion

nb65 shared on social media that they have successfully hacked SSK Gazregion LLC (domain: ssk-gaz.ru) – a prominent natural gas pipeline construction company – with an ‘improved’ version of Conti’s ransomware. They taunted the company’s IT department, claiming that they also deleted all backups and restoring services would be an issue for the department.

They also claim to have exfiltrated 110GB of sensitive files, emails, and company data during the operation and trolled the company further stating it took forever to steal the data with the “chincy ass soviet connection” they were using for Internet connectivity.

“Federal Government: This will stop as soon as you cease all activity in Ukraine. Until then, fuck you. Your Preisdent is a coward who sends Russian sons away to die for his own ego. War in Ukraine will gain your country nothing but death and more sanctions. none of your internet facing tech is off limits to us.”

“We won’t stop until you stop.”

03 April 2022 – 04:24 UTC

ATW Release Dox of KILLNET Member

Similar to the personal details shared for various APT cyber groups in China, Russia, and North Korea, ATW targeted the pro-Russian cyber group, KILLNET. They released a dox containing the Russian national’s personal information, his social media, contact information, and familial associations.

KILLNET claimed to launch cyberattacks against Polish government and financial networks in support of Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. Last week, KILLNET also reportedly conducted DDoS attacks against the International Cyber Police agency, CYBERPOL and hacked the ticketing system at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut.

02 April 2022 – 17:28 UTC

Darknet Threat Actor, spectre123 Releases Sensitive Databases for the Indian Government and Military

The threat actor is well-known for targeting governments and defence contractors and has been circulating sensitive government databases for some time. This weekend, they released a “mega leak” of Indian government data for the PM Modi adminsitration’s “turning a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis…. in Ukraine.”

Over 40 GB of data is included in 11 different archived files and includes classified (up to TOP SECRET) and Confidential government documents from the following sectors: ALISDA, DGAQA, MSQAA, DRDO, DDP, Joint Defence Secretary India, BSF, MOD and the Indian Navy.

“The Indian government has a remarkably twisted propensity towards turning a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis in their own nation and now as well in Ukraine. It continues to do business with Russia and refuses to speak on the war, all in an effort to maintain their shallow political interests. These documents have been released to show that there are consequences for taking such foolish decisions.”

02 April 2022 – 06:13 UTC

ATW | BH Claims to Leak Personal Details of Members of Nation State APT Cyber Groups: ATP3, APT40, APT38, & APT28

The AgainstTheWest group continued their offensive against Chinese, North Korean, and Russian nation state cyber groups. Releasing a dox-style text file on Telegram and the deep web forum, breached.co, the ATW group included the names, email addresses, socials and Github accounts, credit card data, front companies, and other identifying information about the group’s participants along with other shocking revelations. Some include:

APT38: China and North Korea have collaboratively had a mole inside the United States Congress since 2011.
APT3: Threat actors are closely aligned with employees from Tencent – the Chinese technological giant behind WeChat and QQ.
APT38/APT3: The alias “ph4nt0m” appears in information for both groups and is believed to be affiliated with APT17 from China.
APT40: Threat actors are randomly connected to employees of ByteDance, the parent company for TikTok.

We are unfortunately unable to corroberate the veracity of the information shared by ATW (Blue Hornet).

01 April 2022 – 20:13 UTC

Anonymous Attacks Russian S-300 Supplier: Lipetsk Mechanical Plant

Anonymous shared another large archive of data stolen from a prominent Russian defense manufacturing facility. The archive is nearly 27GB total and consists of company emails and sensitive documents.

Russia’s “Lipetsk Mechanical Plant” produces several defense products for the Russian military and industrial defense complex. Today, the plant is one of the leading and main manufacturers of modernized self-propelled tractors for S-300V4 anti-aircraft missile systems in Russia. The S-300 is one of Russia’s premier air-defense platforms.

01 April 2022 – 16:00 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Multiple Data Archives From Critical Moscow-Based Organizations

Coordinating today through DDoSecrets on distribution, Anonymous shared several highly significant archives, consisting of over 500GB total of emails, files, and databases from critical Russian organizations with close ties to the Russian government.

Department for Church Charity and Social Service of the Russian Orthodox Church: Database containing 57,500 emails from the Russian Orthodox Church’s charitable wing.
Capital Legal Services: 200,000 emails exfiltrated from a prominent Russian law firm includes an additional 89,000 emails are located in a “Purges” mailbox, consisting largely of bounced email notifications, cron jobs and other server notifications.
Mosekspertiza: Three archives consisting of a) 150,000 emails b) 8,200 files and c) multiple databases totally over 400GB of data. Mosekspertiza is a state-owned company setup by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce to provide expert services and consultations to Russian businesses.

1 April 2022 – 08:56 UTC

GhostSec Wreaks Additional Havoc on Alibaba

After ATW attacked Alibaba Cloud days before, Ghost Security has allegedly hacked and deleted Alibaba’s UAE branch’s ElasticSearch service database. They included a leak to the database extracted from the company on their Telegram channel.

We have also deleted everything and even cleared the backups so there is no recovery, and we left a little celebration from us <3

31 March 2022 – TIME UNKNOWN

German Wind Turbine Company Impacted by Cyberattack

A German-based wind turbine – Nordex – with over $6 billion dollars in global sales faced a cyberattack that incident responders caught “in the early stages.” It’s likely the attack is retaliation for Germany pausing on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline deal with Russia.

“Customers, employees, and other stakeholders may be affected by the shutdown of several IT systems. The Nordex Group will provide further updates when more information is available.”

In the early days of the cyberwar, a cyberattack on the satellite communications company Viasat caused 5,800 Enercon wind turbines in Germany to malfunction.

31 March 2022 – 19:43 UTC

Anonymous Leaks 62,000 Emails from Moscow-Based Marathon Group

Anonymous again targets associates of those closest to Putin launching recent cyberattacks against Marathon Group. The Marathon Group is an investment firm owned by Alexander Vinokurov. Vinokurov is the son-in-law of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Larov and is under heavy sanctions by the EU for providing financial support to Russia. The leaked archive is over 51GB in size and is being distributed via DDoSecrets.

31 March 2022 – 14:31 UTC

Ukraine Government Sets Up Website for Whistleblower Reporting

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office in coordination with the National Agency on Corruption Prevention and Task Force Ukraine deployed the Whistleblower Portal on the Assets of Persons Involved in the Russian Aggression against Ukraine. The website is setup to provide a secure and anonymous method for the submission of tips and evidence of corruption any activities causing national harm. The website will ideally help in the “tracing, freezing, and confisicating of assets of those involved in Russia’s War Crimes.”

Many OSINT sleuths have identified Russian oligarchs’ and government officials’ assets, like super yachets parked in international ports and submitted photographs via posts on social media. This website could be used to officially report supporting information leading to the seizure of those assets or other correlative intelligence obtained through leaks shared by Anonymous.

30 March 2022 – 22:09 UTC

Database Containing the PII of 56 Million Ukrainian Citizens Leaked on Deep Web

A user on the forum breached.co leaked an arhive containing the personal identification information for over 56 Million citizens of Ukraine. The database includes the full name, dates of birth, and address for the individuals. Its unclear the origins of the data. Members of the forum stated it was the Ukrainian Tax Service and could be dated back to 2018.

30 March 2022 – 21:53 UTC

ATW Continues Offensive Against China, Leaks Alibaba Cloud & Ministry of Justice of PRC Data

The AgainstTheWest/Blue Hornet group have ramped up their attacks against Chinese targets and leaked the largest archive they have exfiltrated to date. ATW successfully breached the e-commerce company Alibaba and have dropped a 30GB archive consisting of Alibaba’s cloud endpoint environment, source code, and customer data. They also released a smaller database obtained from the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China. Both were shared to the deep web forum, breached.co.

30 March 2022 – 19:49 UTC

Anonymous Continues to Encourage SCADA Attacks; Leaks Default Credentials for COTS Hardware Suppliers

Members of the Anonymous Collective circulate spreadsheets and websites containing the default factory credentials for most commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) vendor hardware. Hardware, that in turn, is often affiliated with and successfully exploited via SCADA-based industrial control system (ICS) cyberattacks.

One list includes 138 unique products including manufacturers such as Emerson, General Electric, Hirshmann, and Schneider Electric accompanied with default factory settings such as username: admin and password:default. Another resource is a surface web website (intentionally not included but available upon request) which lists 531 vendors and over 2,100 passwords deployed with hardware from the factory.

Sadly, most companies will rely on the default passwords upon installaton and do not bother with updating to a more robust credential security standard.

30 March 2022 – 18:19 UTC

Anonymous Leaks 5,500 Emails Stolen from Thozis Corporation

Anonymous successfully attacked Thozis Corporation – a Russian investment firm with links to Zakhar Smushkin of St. Petersburg. According to the Panama Papers, the company is registered in the British Virgin Islands. The firm is allegedly involved in one of the largest development projects in Russia, including a project to build a satellite city within St. Petersburg.

The trove of leaked emails likely include sensitive documents and agreements between the Russian government, its societal elite, and other international entites.

DDoSecrets assisted in the publication of the 5.9GB archive obtained by Anonymous.

30 March 2022 – 17:55 UTC

GhostSec Leaks Shambala Casino Network Data

GhostSec claimed a few days ago they had successfully attacked a prominent casino operator in Russia, known as Shambala.

The hacktivist group targeted the casino as they believed members of the Russian government used Russian casinos to move cash into different currencies besides the Ruble. At least 27 computers were reportedly compromised, data exfiltrated, systems locked, and files erased.

29 March 2022 – 06:12 UTC

Russian Aviation Sector Suffer Additional IT Operational Impacts

A post shared on the Russian Telegram channel, Авиаторщина, indicates that the aviation industry of Russia will have additional impacts to their IT support with the withdrawl of the Swiss-based company, SITA as of 29 March.

According to the Telegram post, SITA shutting down their operations will impact numerous systems utilized by the aviation industry and airlines across Russia.

[translated]

“Products for pilots such as AIRCOM Datalink, AIRCOM FlightMessenger, AIRCOM FlightTracker, and AIRCOM Flight Planning services will no longer be available. Such software is utilized by airlines and flight crews to plan, perform aeronautical calculations and track flights, and more accurately calculate remaining fuel, flight time, etc.”

The company – choosing to withdrawl from operating in Russia due to Putin’s invasion – suffered a significant cyberattack on 24 February, the same day as the invasion of Ukraine, resulting in the compromise of passenger data stored on their SITA Passenger Service System (US) Inc. servers. SITA supports numerous international air carriers.

This annoucement comes within days of the cyberattack against Rosaviatsiya (see below), Russia’s Federal Air Transport Authority.

(Update 30 March – 23:42 UTC) No alias associated with Anonymous has claimed credit for the 28 March cyberattacks against Rosaviatsiya which resulted in 65TB of lost agency data. Interestingly, new Anonymous groups have only recently joined the campaign, including RedCult, increasingly the likelihood that widespread industry sector attacks will continue across Russia.

28 March 2022 – 18:23 UTC

nb65 Claims to Hack JSC Mosexpertiza; Steals 450GB of Sensitive Data

In a social media post, nb65 hacktivist group claims they compromised Joint Stock Company (JSC) Mosexpertiza, Moscow’s independent center for expertise and certifications, via the domain mosekspertiza.ru.

They claim they also infected the domain with, none other than Conti’s “crypto-locking ransomware variant” – released earlier this month in the opRussia campaign. In the process of hacking the network nb65 also exfiltrated 450GB of emails, internal documents, and financial data.

28 March 2022 – 17:07 UTC

Anonymous Leaks 140,000 Emails from Russian Oil & Gas Company, MashOil

Distributed via DDoSecrets, the Anonymous hacktivist collective recently targeted MashOil, releasing over 140,000 sensitive corporate emails from the company.

Moscow-based, MashOil manufacturers equipment for hydraulic fracturing and enhanced oil recovery (EOR); injection, nitrogen and cementing equipment; top drive mobile drilling rigs; directional drilling equipment; and, ejector well clean-up.

Anonymous continues to target companies in Russia and any companies that continue to contribute to economic and financial viability for the Russian Federation.

28 March 2022 – 12:41 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Russian Document Ordering Propaganda Video Development

Knowing propaganda is widely circulated by both Ukrainian and Russian affiliated organizations, Anonymous has leaked an official Russian document, titled “On holding informational events on the Internet”, dated 21 March 2022, stating this was an official “order issued” by the Russian government to develop videos to discredit the Ukrainian military and their treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). The order was signed by the “Temporary Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation”, Dmitry Bulgakov and decrees:

Develop and distribute a series of video materials demonstrating the inhuman behavior of the military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and nationalist formations on the territory of Ukraine in relatinos to prisoners who showed a voluntary desire to surrender
Develop and distribute sermographic materials, evidence of the use of briefings by captured military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation during the filming
Provide informational support for materials in the comments, the main argument is the violation of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners
To impose control over the implmtnation of this order on the head of the Information Warfare and Disguise Department of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

(UPDATE 29 March 2022 – 20:56 UTC) DarkOwl advises that recent open source intelligence research suggests this letter could be fake and disseminated as part of an information operations campaign. Researchers caught signature mismatches of the Russian official, Bulgakov. Such data is a reality in the the fog of asymmetric warfare.

28 March 2022 – 11:58 UTC

Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Doxxes 620 Russian FSB Agents

The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Agency of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, known simily as Defence Intelligence of Ukraine or GUR, has leaked the identities of over 600 Russian FSB spies. The database includes the agents’ full names, dates of birth, passport numbers, passport dates of issue, registration addresses as well as other identifying markers for the FSB employees.

Many of these agents may be conducting covert operations around the world and leaking their identities may compromise the success of their operations.

28 March 2022 – 11:05 UTC

ATW (BH) Targets Chinese Companys and Government Organizations

After a brief vacation announced on 23 March, the AgainstTheWest (Blue_Hornet) group returns with concerted attacks against a number of Chinese companies and government organizations. The group claims they successfully attacked the following:

The group also referenced a supply-chain software dependency attack, via a poisoned burgeon-r3 NPM package.

Fenglian Technology-Digital Ecological Platform Solution
Bluetopo China security development tool
China Pat Intellectual Property
Weipass
Ministry of Transport China
Freemud Software (supplier to Starbucks)
China Joint Convention Committee.

Shortly after the announcement and initial round of leaks, the group also released source code affiliated with China Guangfa Bank, along with associated Maven releases. The group also claims to have breached the Chinese social messaging platform, weChat.

We are still evaluating the data and determining the specific types of data compromised and released.

28 March 2022 – 03:22 UTC

Russian Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsiya Confirms CyberAttack; 65TB of Data Erased

The civil aviation agency Rosaviatsiyan responsible for air cargo transportation confirmed with a letter shared on the Russian Telegram channel, Авиаторщина that their website domain favt.ru was offline since Saturday due to a significant cyber attack. The attacks had severely impacted their ability to plan and conduct flight operations and the agency had resorted to pen-and-paper-based operations in the interim.

The notice stated that over 65TB of emails, files and critical documents had been allegedly erased along with the registry of aircraft and aviation personnel. There were no systems backups to restore from because according to the agency spokesperson, the Ministry of Finance had not allocated funds to purchase backups.

“All incoming and outgoing emails for 1.5 years have been lost. We don’t know how to work…”

“The attack occurred due to poor-quality performance of contractual obligations on the part of the company LLC ‘InfAvia’, which carries out the operation of the IT infrastructure of the Federal Air Transport Agency.”

27 March 2022 – 20:44 UTC

Anonymous Leaks 2.4GB of Emails from Russian Construction Company, RostProekt

Over the weekend, DDoSecrets helped Anonymous distribute over 2 gigabytes of sensitive company emails exfiltrated by breaching a prominent Russian construction company, RostProekt (in Russian: РостПроект). The company primarily operates in Russia, with the head office in Moscow Oblast. RostProekt is a primary contributor to Russia’s lumber and other construction materials merchant wholesalers sector. The breach may impact construction projects in the country.

As of time of writing, the website for the company is online.

25 March 2022 – 20:36 UTC

nb65 Leaks Sample Internal Data from the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK)

The nb65 hacktivist team targeted and released data affiliated with a state-sponsored propaganda broadcasting company of the Russian Federation, VGTRK. The All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, also known as Russian Television and Radio (native: Всероссийская государственная телевизионная и радиовещательная компания) owns and operates five national television stations, two international networks, five radio stations, and over 80 regional TV and radio networks. It also runs the information agency Rossiya Segodnya.

nb65 claims they have successfully compromised the organization’s network and exfiltrated over 750GB of data, much of which consists of employee email (.pst) files from the company’s email network. The group claims to be ‘watching’ for their ‘eventual incident response.’

The group continued to troll the organization…

“Your blue team kinda sucks. Hard to find good IT help when all your techies are fleeing the country, eh?”

25 March 2022 – 18:36 UTC

Anonymous Releases Files Exfiltrated from the Central Bank of Russia

Anonymous has released data the hacktivists collected while conducting attacks against the Central Bank of Russia. The archive, broken up into 10 separate parts consists of over 25GB of archived data consisting of over 35,000 files of sensitive bank data. Earlier in the campaign, we observed several posts containing targeting information, e.g. domains, IP addresses, etc for the bank on the deep web.

24 March 2022 – 20:49 UTC

GNG Claims to Hack Russian Mail Server, mail.ru

Georgia’s Society of Hackers (GNG) announced today they successfully attacked Russia’s equivalent to Gmail, mail.ru, including their maps.mail.ru subdomain. The hacktivist group is in process of exfiltrating the data and will provide the detailed data dump in the next few days.

As of time of writing this, the maps.mail.ru website is online and operational.

24 March 2022 – 14:11 UTC

Anonymous Shares Proof of Hacked ATMs in Russia

Earlier today, users at what appears to be a Sberbank ATM reportedly located in Russia experienced technical errors when selecting the Russian language on the screen. Upon selection, the ATM monitor quickly flashes to the Ukrainian flag and the words Glory to Ukraine (Слава Україні!). See the video captured video here.

ATM malware is widely circulated on the darknet and used extensively in the fraud and financial crime communities.

24 March 2022 – 10:43 UTC

Pro-Russian Killnet Launches Anonymous-Style Campaign Against Ukraine – Targets Poland and NATO

The pro-Russian cyber threat actor group, Killnet have been conducting attacks against Ukraine for several weeks and have stepped up their demands and threats against Ukraine and western Europe. Today, they released a video on social media, mirroring the ominous messaging of an Anonymous-style video with the Russian flag in the background. During the video, the group stated they would attack targets in Poland for their assistance to the Ukrainian government during the invasion. They recently also posted specific targeting information for the National Bank of Poland on their Telegram channel.

“…together with the Russian cyber army, we disabled 57 state websites of the Kiev regime, 19 websites of nationalist parties…”

The group also referred to the Colonial Pipeline attack in the US from May 2021.

[translated] “Let’s remember American gas company attack, which resulted in 40% paralyzed infrastructure of America for few days.”

23 March 2022 – 16:45 UTC

AnonGhost Claims to Hack Russian Street Lighting System and Drops Proofs of Access to Moxa Industrial Wireless Networking Infrastructure

AnonGhost known for their attacks against industrial control systems, continued their campaign against Russia by targeting МонтажРегионСтрой г. Рязань street light control system. They stated they successfully shutoff the street lights at 19:35 Moscow time and it was a “gorgeous show.”

Shortly before announcing the breach of the lighting contol panel, AnonGhost also provided proof of access to Moxa (moxa.com) industrial networking devices. They leaked proof of access to router information for a industrial wireless Moxa device, its associated OnCell specifications, along with defacement of the device’s name, description, and login message.

In addition to the proofs they linked to a pastebin file containing over 100 Russian Moxa IP addresses for additional targeting.

It’s unclear where the Moxa device compromise is physically located or whether the Moxa compromise provides direct access to the streetlight control system.

23 March 2022 – 02:44 UTC

BeeHive Cybersecurity Claims They Are Running Ransomware Campaigns Against Russian Targets

When one thought they only hijacked Discord users and trolled pro-Russian ‘hackers’ like @a_lead_1, BeeHive Cybersecurity claims they have been quiet because they are running ransomware operations against targets across Russia.

Oh, in case you guys were curious why we’ve been so quiet. May or may not have a new #ransomware operation running in Ru right now. Alas, we find allies quicker than Putin finds ways to invade Ukraine. We’ll have more details soon but…consider this the public disclosure.

This would not be the first Russia-specific ransomware variant to emerge. According to Trend Micro, RURansom was detected targeting Russian-specific devices with AES-CBC encryption and hard coded salt. Another ransomware variant recently detected, known as “Antiwar” appends the file extension, “putinwillburninhell” to encrypted files.

22 March 2022 – 19:14 UTC

ATW (Blue Hornet) Compromises Russia’s Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring Service with Bitbucket

The AgainstTheWest / Blue Hornet team has recently leaked several internal documents from Russia’s Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring service (spelled by the threat actors as ROSHYDRO). According to open sources, the monitoring service is hosted on the meteorf.ru domain. The data leaks consists of 45 PDF files containing historical software change descriptions and feature requests from the company’s internal software development tracking system. ATW refers to a superadmin account for the GIS FEB RAS Team on Bitbucket in the leak.

21 March 2022 – 22:44 UTC

ATW Returns to Campaign with Attacks Against Almaz-Antey

After a disruption in the ATW team’s cyber activities due to personal issues, the ATW/Blue Hornet team returns leaking a 9GB archive of data allegedly exfiltrated by breaching Almaz-Antey’s corporate networks. The data leak includes employee login data, multiple documents containing PII, confidential and classified intellectual property, schematics, and SQL database files.

Almaz-Antey (Russian: ОАО “Концерн ВКО “Алмаз-Антей”) is one of Russia’s largest defense and arms enterprises, known for the development of Russian anti-aircraft defense systems, cruise missiles, radar systems, artillery shells, and UAVs.

21 March 2022 – 15:26 UTC

Anonymous Targets Russian Software Developer, naumen.ru

Hacktivists from the Anonymous collective have leaked data exfiltrated from Naumen, a software vendor and cloud services provider in Moscow. The company markets itself as “world class IT solutions fully adapted to the Russian market” and lists several prominent international companies as partners. The leaked data consists of an SQL database containing thousands of usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords, and associated PII. The specific purpose and origins of the database from inside Naumen is unclear, but partner companies could experience supply chain / vendor risk issues.

21 March 2022 – 03:27 UTC

KelvinSec Targets Nestle for Continued Commercial Operations in Russia

The KelvinSec ‘hacking’ team have reportedly compromised Nestle in retaliation for continuing to operate and distribute their products in Russia. The group leaked multiple databases from Nestle consisting of customer entity data, orders, payment information, and passwords (10GB total). The group insisted its a “partial” database leak and more data may be released in the future.

Nestle defended its business decision after President Zelenskyy called the company out to protestors on Saturday night in Bern, Switzerland.

(Update 3/22 – 01:48 UTC) Anonymous issues warning and gives a number of US companies 48 hours notice to pull out of Russia or become targets of the #opRussia cyber offensive campaign. Example corporations include: Subway, Chevron, General Mills, Burger King, citrix, and CloudFlare.

20 March 2022 – 23:33 UTC

Anonymous Compromises Russian Social Media VK to Send Message to Millions

Anonymous accesses VK’s messaging platform and sends direct messages to over 12 million Russian users of the social media app. The message, written in Russian, speaks to the realities of the war in Ukraine, the demise of the Russian economy, and threatens that users using the Russian “Z” insignia on as their profile avatar will be targeted by international authorities.

VK users have shared proofs of the message received to confirm the campaign in VK occurred.

20 March 2022 – 15:32 UTC

GhostSec Leaks Military Asset Monitoring System and More from Russian Networks

The leak includes data exfiltrated from a military operational readiness monitoring website (orf-monitor.com), including inventory tracking of key Russian military assets; a leak of a Russian investment company that includes recent Chinese contract data; and lastly, technical data leaks from Russian Defense Contractor Kronshtadt, that includes computational specifications related to their UAVs, along with military operational doctrine, etc.

GhostSec teased on their Telegram channel they had more data coming and this archive they were sharing was a sample of a much bigger dataset.

20 March 2022 – 13:40 UTC

Honest Railworkers in Belarus Help Stop Lines Going to Ukraine

According to open source reporting and the hacktivist group known as Cyber Partisans, the railways going out of Belarus into Ukraine have stopped. Earlier in the campaign, Cyber Partisans disrupted rail operations in Belarus using cyber attacks against ticketing systems and switching systems; however, others report that the rails are inoperable due to “honest railworkers” who do not want to see Belarus military equipment transported into Ukraine for use in this war. (Source)

“I recently appealed to Belarusian railway workers not to carry out criminal orders and not transport Russian military forces in the direction of Ukraine. At the present moment, I can say that there is no railway connection between Ukraine and Belarus. I cannot discuss details, but I am grateful to Belarus’s railway workers for what they are doing” – Oleksandr Kamyshin, director of the Ukrzaliznytsya state railroad

20 March 2022 – 10:28 UTC

Arvin Club Takes Down STORMOUS Ransomware’s Tor Onion Service

Shortly after STORMOUS ransomware gang setup a Tor onion service, the Arvin Club ransomware group compromised their site and leaked SQL databases, information, and performance schemas. It’s unclear whether or not this attack occurred out of STORMOUS’s Russian allegiance or if Arvin merely wanted to teach the cyber criminals a lesson in setting up secure sites on the darknet.

The STORMOUS ransomware group had previously operated only on Telegram.

(UPDATE) As of 3/22 the Tor service is still offline.

20 March 2022 – 02:18 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Database from Russian Aerospace Company Utair

Hacktivists from the Anonymous collective have released the customer database for Russia’s Utair airlines. (Russian: ОАО «Авиакомпания «ЮТэйр»). The JSON database appears to have been collected long before the 2022 #opRussia campaign, as the MongoDB is dated 2019. There are records containing personal data for over 530,000 clients using Utair’s services.

18 March 2022 – 21:29 UTC

nB65 Leaks Data from Russian Space Agency

After a disappointing trolling exercise against Kaspersky, the nb65 hacktivist group returns with data leaks from Russia’s Space Agency, Roscosmos. The group claims they still have persistent access to the agency’s vehicle management system and leaked the IP of the compromised network to prove their access. The leaked data archive consists of over 360MB of user and operations manual, along with solar observatory logs.

Hours earlier, the group also claims to have compromised tensor.ru and leaked 1.6GB of compromised emails for a corporate mailbox for the Russian digital signature company.

18 March 2022 – 15:39 UTC

Russia Targets Ukraine Red Cross Website in Cyber Attack

The Ukrainian Red Cross reported their Internet web servers have been hacked, likely by Pro-Russian cyber threat actors. The website domain – redcross.org.ua – is currently offline with the statement “account disabled by administrator.”

The social media account for the Ukrainian Red Cross stated that no personal data of beneficiaries stored on the website were compromised by the cyber attack.

The Ukrainian Red Cross staff and volunteers are busy and actively providing medical aid and support to vulnerable and wounded Ukrainian civilians across the country as Russian military continue their barrage of cruise missile strikes.

17 March 2022 – 11:43 UTC

AnonGhost Leaks Screenshots of GNSS Satellite Hacks Along with IP Addresses

AnonGhost shared several screenshots as proof of attacks they conducted against Russia’s Trimble GNSS satellite interface. They claimed on social media that other “fake Anonymous” accounts had taken credit for the operation. They also leaked 48 unique IP addresses associated with the GNSS satellite systems. The group did not specify the nature of the attacks against the Russian assets.

17 March 2022 – 09:23 UTC

Anonymous Claims to Have Located Putin’s Bunker

Using OSINT analysis involving satellite imagery and topography and landmark comparisons like rivers and powerplants, the Anonymous community claims they have detected President Putin’s bunker. There no means to verify the accuracy of these assertions.

17 March 2022 – 03:58 UTC

Anonymous Leaks 79 GBs of Emails from R&D Department of Transneft – OMEGA

DDoSecrets released the data on behalf of Anonymous hackers operating in cyber campaigns against Russia. Anonymous compromised email inboxes of OMEGA Company, the R&D arm of Russia’s state-controlled pipeline company known as Transneft [Транснефть]. Transneft is the world’s largest oil pipeline company with over 70,000 kilometres (43,000 miles) of trunk pipelines and transports an estimated 80% of oil and 30% of oil products produced in Russia. The emails cover the accounts’ most recent activity, including after the introduction of US sanctions on February 25, 2022. Some of the emails reflect some of the effects of those sanctions.

16 March 2022 – 10:47 UTC

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Requests Information via Tor

Russia’s external intelligence agency has issued instructions on how to establish secure communcations via their Virutal Reception System (VRS) to relay any threats to the Russian Federation. The call for leads, found on svr.gov.ru, details how to install the Tor anonymous network, details the v3 .onion address of their secure communications system, and advises the informant using PGP in order to further encrypt the details of any messages provided.

“If you are outside Russia and have important information regarding urgent threats to the security of the Russian Federation, you can safely and anonymously share it with us via the virtual reception system (VRS) of the SVR over the TOR network.”

If you are in hostile environment and/or have reasons to worry about your security, do not use a device (smartphone, computer) registered to you or associated in any way with you or people from your personal settings for network access. Relate the importance of information you want to send us with the security measures you are taking to protect yourself!

15 March 2022 – 11:48 UTC

Pro-Russian Group Xaknet Threatens to Attack Critical Infrastructure Information Centers

“We cannot endlessly give you ‘lessons of politeness.’ We demand the cessation of hacker attacks against Russian infrastructures, we demand the cessation of the activities of information centers for the dissemination of fakes.

In case of refusal, we will be forced to use the most sophisticated methods, and reserve the right to act as the enemy does. Critical information infrastructure facilities will become a priority target for the group. All work will be aimed at the complete destablization of the activities of the aforementioned CIIs.”

It’s unclear from the threats what specific websites or services the cyber threat group considers critical infrastructure information services. The IT Army of Ukraine’s extensive information operations spread across most all social media platforms and information communication mediums across Russia.

15 March 2022 – 07:19 UTC

User on Telegram Leaks New Letter from FSB

A user on pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel (name redacted) has released a new letter, reportedly from an FSB agent, translated into English.

The temperature has really risen here, it’s hot and uncomfortable. I won’t be able to communicate for some time here in the future. I hope we can chat normally again in a few days. There are a lot of things that I have to share with you…
The questions are raised by the FSO (Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation, aka Putin’s Praetorian Guard) and the DKVR (Russian Military Counterintelligence Department). It is precisely the DKVR that is mounted on horseback and is looking for “moles” and traitors here (FSB) and in the Genstaff (General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) regarding leaks of Russian column movements in Ukraine. Now the task of each structure is to transfer the fault to others and to make the guilt of others more visible. Almost all members of the FSB are busy with this task at the moment.

The focus is on us more than others at the moment, due to the hellish circumstances regarding the intra-political situation in Ukraine: We (the FSB) have released reports that at least 2,000 trained civilians in every major city of Ukraine were ready to overthrow Zelensky (President of Ukraine). And that at least 5,000 civilians were ready to come out with flags against Zelensky at the call of Russia. You want to laugh ? We (FSB) were supposed to be the judges to crown Ukrainian politicians who were supposed to start tearing each other apart arguing for the right to be called “Russia’s allies.” We even set criteria on how to select the brightest of the most competent (among Ukrainian politicians). Of course, some concerns have been raised about the possibility that we may not be able to attract a large number of people (Ukrainian politicians) to Western Ukraine, to small towns and to Lvov itself. What do we actually have? Berdyansk, Kherson, Mariupol, Kharkiv are the most populated pro-Russian areas (and there is no support for Russia even there). A plan can fall apart, a plan can be wrong. A plan can give a result of 90%, even 50%, or 10%. And that would be a total failure. Here it is 0.0%.

There is also a question: “How did this happen?” This question is actually a (misleading) trap. Because 0.0% is an estimate derived from many years of work by very serious (high-ranking) officials.
And now it turns out that they are either agents of the enemy or simply incomprehensible (according to the FSO / DKVR who are now looking for “moles” within the FSB).

But the question does not end there. If they are so bad, then who appointed them and who controlled their work? It turns out that they are people of the same quality but of a higher rank. And where does this pyramid of responsibilities stop? At the boss (Putin).
And this is where the evil games begin: Our dear Александр Васильевич (Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov – Director of the whole FSB) cannot fail to understand how badly he got caught. (Bortnikov realizes the deep mess he is in now)

And our evil spirits from the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service – equivalent to the CIA) understand everything [and not only from these two organizations]. The situation is so bad that there are no limits to the possible variations (of events that will happen), but something extraordinary is going to happen.”

Shortly after a first letter from an FSB whistleblower surfaced around 5 March, Putin quietly placed his FSB chief, Sergei Beseda and his deputy on house arrest last Sunday. While telling the public he arrested them for embezzlement charges, according to open-source reports, the “real reason is unreliable, incomplete, and partially false information about the political situation in Ukraine” and Putin is holding them responsible for the Ukrainians’ success in the invasion thus far.

14 March 2022 – 12:00 UTC

Russian State Duma of the Federal Assembly Confirms Censorship of VPNs

Citing it was “a difficult task” Alexander Khinshtein, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, commented that Russia’s media and propaganda agency, Roskomnadzor has been tasked with blocking over two dozen VPNs [virtual private networks] across Russia. (Source)

We anticipate that number to increase as Putin continues to crack down on Russian citizens’ media consumption.

VPNs have been targeted by Russian authorities since 2017, when an initial VPN law was passed. In 2019 many of the VPN providers across Russia received compliance demands from Roskomnadzor representatives via email – captured in the image below.

The demand for VPNs in the country has reportedly increased by over 2,000% in the last month. Users on Telegram encourage widespread use of anonymity tools like VPNs and Tor, and share links to VPN services still in operation and accessible in the region. Many of the VPNs are available via Telegram directly and offer free trial subscriptions to Russian users.

14 March 2022

Russian Cyber Actors Setup IT Army of Russia Group

The collective of cyber threat actors self identifies as the “IT Army of Russia”, mirroring the IT Army of Ukraine Telegram initiative, and claims it has targeted critical Ukrainian cyber services with DDoS attacks. The group has less than a 100 subscribers and many of the members are affiliated with the Killnet forum.

The group recently posted a detailed dox containing personal information for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy [in Ukrainian: Володимир Олександрович Зеленський]. The dossier contains specific information such as his date of birth, passport number, car registration details, and familial associations.

13 March 2022 – 09:31 UTC

Anonymous Germany Exfiltrates Data from Russian Rosneft Operations in Germany

An Anonymous hacktivist group from Germany, referring to themselves as “AnonLeaks” had access to the networks of Russia’s Rosneft subsidiary in Deutchland for almost two weeks and exfiltrated over 20 terrabytes of corporate data. According to a preliminary review, the data consists of laptop backups, virtual disk images, excel files, work instructions, and other operational information for the refinery.

Anonymous Germany emphasizes they did not have access to critical infrastructure in Germany, nor was the intent of their operation to access critical infrastructure for the refinery or compromise it in any way.

Rosneft is Germany’s third largest petroleum refinery company, processing roughly 12.5 million tons of crude oil per year.

(Update) Details of the leaked data has appeared on a dedicated Tor darknet service setup by the hacktivists.

13 March 2022 – 07:19 UTC

nB65 Claims to Be Jonathan Scott, a US-based Malware Researcher

Since the invasion, a social media account reportedly affiliated with the group nB65 was extremely active in sharing their leaks and targets across Russian networks – including claims of accessing Roscomos Space Agency. Most recently, they stated they had access to Kaspersky’s source code, with many teasers in the hours leading up to a what amassed to a disappointing dump of publicly available code from the Russian antivirus software developer. The group essentially trolled Kaspersky and received heavy criticism from members of the information security research community.

The owner of the group’s Twitter account claimed today they were in real life, Jonathan Scott, a US-based Computer Science PhD student researching mobile spyware and IoT malware. Shortly after, the Twitter account for the group was deleted.

11 March 2022 – 06:25 UTC

GhostSec Claims to Access, Shutdown, and Deface Control Panel of Russian ICS via SCADA Attack

GhostSec continues their offensive against Russian critical infrastructure with attacks affecting industrial controls systems. Today, they claimed they successfully accessed an unknown Russian industrial control system, deface the control panel, and shut the system down. They also stated they deleted the backups to make restoring services more challenging.

They included the screenshot below which appears to correlate to a typical ICS system. The name or location of the network was not identified.

11 March 2022 – 01:34 UTC

BeeHive Cybersecurity Enters Campaign and Targets Pro-Russian Discord Users

A pro-Ukrainian group, known as “BeeHive Cybersecurity” claims to have attacked over 2,700 pro-Russian Discord users, compromising their accounts and defacing their profiles with statements about the realities in Ukraine posted in English, Ukrainian, and Russian.

The group insinuates that they “CnC [command and control] the platforms of the ignorant” and use compromised devices to help combat disinformation.

10 March 2022 – 12:30 UTC

KelvinSec Leaks Private Chats from Darknet Tor Service: Database Market

KelvinSec, a pro-Ukrainian cyber threat actor on the darknet, has leaked 3,178 files containing the private chats from DATABASE Market. DATABSE is a relatively newly-launched service on Tor, where carding and fraud cyber-criminals congregate and transact.

The service is allegedly hosted by IT Resheniya on the IP address 45.155.204.178. KelvinSec reported they infilitrated the market via an insecure direct object reference vulnerability, commonly called “IDOR” which gives an attacker access to the website’s hidden information.

The compromised Tor service is still active as of time of writing.

10 March 2022 – 11:24 UTC

DDoSecrets Leaks Over 800GB of Data from Russian Media Censor, Roskomnadzor

The whistleblower leak site, DDoSecrets has obtained 360,000 files from Роскомнадзор (Roskomnadzor) via hacktivists from the Anonymous campaign against Russia. Roskomnadzor is a Russian state-controlled agency responsible for monitoring, controlling and censoring Russian mass media. The agency is responsible for the recent crackdowns on digital bans of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The two part dataset totals over 800 GB including files, emails, and information critical about their operations.

10 March 2022 – 08:35 UTC

GhostSec Hits Hundreds of Printers Across Russia

GhostSec reportedly hacks hundreds of printers across Russia to spread the message about realities in Ukraine. They tagged on to the announcement an obscure 4chan meme, “Hey Russia do you liek mudkipz?” on their Telegram channel. The stated they are targeting Russian government and military networks for the printer exploit.

9 March 2022 – 20:05 UTC

Pro-Russian Group, devilix-EU Joins Campaign Against Ukraine and the US

Late last week, a new Pro-Russian persona appeared on social media and began sharing pro-Russia propaganda, Pro-Trump rhetoric, and counter #opRussia Anonymous content. Over the last five days, they’ve ramped up their attacks claiming to have compromised AWS instances, Microsoft IIS sysstems, and performed BGP hijacking with mentions of several US-based IP addresses.

The group makes further claims that they’re named after their own custom ransomware, “DEVILIX shark.”

DEVILIX named as me is one of the strongest viruses on the world DEVILIX shark is ransomware which can do anything we can create BotNet. where we want. Just a Simple but it’s not.

They most recently shared their thoughts about the cyber war in Russian, declaring that this was not about Ukraine and Russia, but the US and NATO and their intent to keep Russia and Ukraine divided.

Я вижу, что речь идет о двух сторонах, России и Украине. Почему мы разделены из-за политики? Разве вы не видите, что здесь делает Запад и хочет, чтобы мы были разделены. НАТО избежало конфликтов, и теперь привет! Слава России

[Google Translate]

I see that we are talking about two sides, Russia and Ukraine. Why are we divided because of politics? Don’t you see what the West is doing here and wants us to be divided. NATO has avoided conflicts, and now hello! Glory to Russia

8 March 2022 – 21:05 UTC

Anonymous Hacks Hundreds of Russian Security Cameras, Many Affiliated with Russian Government Ministries

Hacktivists from the Anonymous Collective successfully tapped the security camera feeds of hundreds of retail businesses, restaurants, schools, and government installations across Russia. They setup a website to share the leaked camera feeds — all to discover some where critical security offices. Anonymous also defaced security camera displays with the message:

Putin is killing children
352 Ukrainian civilians dead
Russia lied to 200rf.com
Slava Ukraini! Hacked by Anonymous

8 March 2022 – 18:34 UTC

nb65 Group Claims to Have Acquired Kaspersky’s Source Code

After keeping quiet for several days, the group sent out mysterious posts across social media claiming to have accessed Kaspersky source code and found “interesting relationships” in this code.

They also claimed it was “sloppier than Putin’s invasion.”

7 March 2022 – 17:31 UTC

22nd Member of Notorious TrickBot Gang Doxxed

The pro-Ukrainian affiliate of the Trickbot cybercriminal empire has leaked the personal identity of 22 key members of the gang along with private chats between group members. Since the 4th of March, DarkOwl has seen the following aliases mentioned: baget, strix, fire, liam, mushroom, manuel, verto, weldon, zulas, naned, angelo, basil, hector, frog, core, rocco, allen, cypher, flip, dar, and gabr.

7 March 2022 – 13:01 UTC

Digital Cobra Gang Claims 49 “A-Groups” Led by Conti and Cobra Are Attacking America Cyberspace

The Pro-Russian group entered the campaign shortly after Anonymous started #opRussia (28 Feb) with the statement:

“DIGITAL COBRA GANG DCG has officially declared cyber war on hackers who attacking Russia as well and to protect justice”

They’ve given little indication of success, other than inflated claims they have acquired over 92Tb data from US’s military personnel files but no proof has been published.

Earlier today, they posted that members of Conti were helping and 49 “A-team” groups were hacking Amera.

(9 March 2022) – US AWS and Azure cloud platforms have experienced higher than normal traffic on the network but no major disruptions.

7 March 2022 – 06:44 UTC

RedBanditsRU Leaks Russian Electrical Grid Source Code Data

The pro-Russian group, originally assembled to counter-hack Anonymous and cyber actors targeting Russian organizations, posted today that they are leaking the source code Rosseti Centre’s [mrsk-1[.]ru] electrical grid networking infrastructure. Rosseti Centre provides reliable electricity for more than 13 million people in the subjects of the Central Federal District of the Russian Federation.

The group is sharing this information because they believe Putin and his supporters are “leading this country to an apocalypse state.”

DarkOwl warns security researchers opening these archives should always use isolated sandbox environments in the event there is malware and viruses included in the leak.

7 March 2022 – 04:55 UTC

AgainstTheWest (ATW) Returns to the Fight and Drops Multiple Leaks of Russian Corporate Data

In the last 24 hours, ATW dropped URLs for at least 7 leaks corresponding to various Russian technical companies and organizations, reportedly breached by the cybercriminal group. ATW’s participation in the campaign has been controversial as they have had multiple dramatic departures and returns to the campaign and reports of “health issues” of some of the team’s members.

Security researchers reviewing the information from dataleaks last week calls into question the veracity of the information ATW is sharing. Checkpoint released analysis stating that after, “checking their claims deeper reveals that for many of the claims there are no solid proofs apart of very generic screenshots that are allegedly from the breached organizations.”

(Update 7 March 2022 – 18:36 UTC) The group also posted to their Telegram channel that they had successfully breached a Russian cybersecurity company that has been “hording” US-based government data, exposure of multiple SonarQube instances and requested someone get in touch with them immediately. It’s unclear if this is legitimate or just further ego inflation.

6 March 2022

Free Civilian Tor Service Leaks Entire DIIA Contents

Recently, the administrator of Free Civilian shared a post on their Tor service containing the entire Ukraine’s DIIA database of users. They stated the buyer of the database consented to the release, with the understanding some records were deleted. The downloads consist of 60+ archives containing gigabytes of data. The download links have been unstable since DarkOwl discovered them.

The administrator also expressed desire to have the ban on their “Vaticano” Raid Forums account lifted, claiming this leak proved the legitimacy of the information they shared back in January.

Recently, screenshots of an indictment for the alleged seizure of Raid Forums on VeriSign has been in circulation, after users spoke of rifts between pro-Ukrainian users and Russian hackers, potential FBI seizures, and the alleged hijacking the alias of former admin Omnipotent on Darknet World. Prominent users from the forum have setup RF2 and advised any old working Raidforums links are likely phishing logins for the FBI.

6 March 2022 – 18:43 UTC

Anonymous Continues Information Warfare Against Russian Media; Video Services Wink and ivi Stream Anti-War Messaging

After Putin’s overt authoritarian take on media sharing the realities of the war in Ukraine, Anonymous managed to hack Russian video services Wink and ivi to stream pro-Ukrainian messages and video of the conflict.

This weekend, Putin’s parliament passed a “fake-news” law imposing prison sentences for media using the words “war” or “invasion” prompting numerous western outlets to pull their journalists and suspend operation.

6 March 2022 – 15:39 UTC

AnonGhost Enters Campaign and Claims SCADA Attacks Against Multiple Russian Infrastructure Targets

This weekend, AnonGhost entered Anonymous’ #opRussia campaign with a vengence, and claims today they have hacked multiple Russian infrastructure control systems via SCADA attacks and “shut it down.”

They list the following targets:

Волховский РПУ> Volkhov RPU
Бокситогорский РПУ> Boksitogorsk RPU
Лужский РПУ> Luga RPU
Сланцевский РПУ> Slantsevsky RPU
Тихвинский РПУ> Tikhvinsky RPU
Выборгское РПУ> Vyborg RPU

This is after they leaked data from 9 Russian commercial servers hours earlier.

azovkomeks[.]ru
vserver24[.]ru
dvpt[.]ru
ach[.]gov[.]ru
itmo[.]ru
vpmt[.]ru
pvlt[.]ru
hwcompany[.]ru
corbina[.]ru

DarkOwl is in the process of pulling in this data to review and assess the contents of all of the databases.

The AnonGhost group is reportedly one of the more senior anonymous hacktivist teams in the underground, with reporting of the group going back to the early 2010s. According to open-source reporting, AnonGhost was led by Mauritania Attacker. In an online interview with a hacker’s blog in 2013, Mauritania Attacker claimed to be a 25 year old male from Mauritania who started hacking at a young age by joining TeaMp0isoN and ZCompany Hacking Crew (ZHC), two hacking groups known for their attacks of high-profile targets such as NATO, NASA, the UN, and Facebook. (Source)

For those who remember Stuxnet, SCADA type attacks are controversial as there is a fine line between disruption and destruction. Services knocked offline but able to be restored is disruptive and inconvient, causing delays in operation and psychological concern over the safety of such services. However, disruptions that lead to destructive events, e.g. hard disks wiped and unrecoverable, de-railed trains, power plant overheating resulting in explosions, & satellites falling out of the sky are considered serious and may be interpreted as an act of war and result in severe retaliation.

Yesterday, Putin declared western sanctions an act of war and uttered similar threats about hacking satellites earlier this week.

6 March 2022 – 14:52 UTC

GhostSec Returns with Leaks from Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) and Department of Information (DOI) FTP Server Data

Hours ago, an archive consisting of several gigabyte emerged from GhostSec reportedly containing information from Russia’s nuclear research and disinformation activities. GhostSec has been silent for most the last week, perhaps busy with this activity.

According to their website (jinr.ru), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research is an international intergovernmental organization established through the Convention signed on 26 March 1956 by eleven founding States and registered with the United Nations on 1 February 1957.

As of time of writing, the public facing website is online.

6 March 2022 – 12:34 UTC

Anonymous Dumps Leak of 139 Million Russian Email Addresses

An archive of over 139 Million email addresses, broken up into 15 separate files with mail_ru at the beginning of each file, lists the email addresses for presumed account holders for mail_ru services. VK (VKontakte) assimilated mail.ru email services into its internet services conglomerate in the fall of 2021.

The files included two additional HTML files with ominous warnings – possibly shared on the servers from which these leaks were obtained.

[image translation]

Russian soldiers!
If you think that you are going to an exercise, in fact you are being sent to Ukraine to DIE.

DarkOwl has not determined the veracity of this data, nor confirmed how these emails were obtained; some combolists of this nature are created as an aggregation of other leaked data.

As of time of writing, mail.ru’s public facing website is still online and operational.

5 March 2022 – 20:41 UTC

Anonymous Targets Russian FSB; Letter Appears from Possible FSB Whistleblower

The Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation [Федеральная служба безопасности (ФСБ)] is the principal security and intelligence agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB.

Earlier today, Anonymous hacktivists targeted the FSB (at the direction of the IT Army Ukraine) and managed to take the external facing website offline. Rumors on social media and chatrooms suggested Anonymous managed to “breach” the FSB’s server.

Shortly after the announcement of the website’s offline status (e.g. #TangoDown) a deep web paste emerged containing a list of 62 subdomains for the fsb.ru domain. This could be for additional targeting and exploitation.

The stability and alliances of members of the FSB are in question by threat intelligence and security researchers across the community. Last night, an alleged FSB whistle-blower letter surfaced (via the founder of http://gulagu.net) that damned Russia’s military performance in Ukraine and predicted a disaster for the RU in the next weeks and months. An English translation of the letter has appeared in the deep web (excerpt below).

To be honest, the Pandora’s box is open – a real global horror will begin by the summer – global famine is inevitable (Russia and Ukraine were the main suppliers of grain in the world, this year’s harvest will be smaller, and logistical problems will bring the catastrophe to a peak point). I can’t tell you what guided those at the top when deciding on the operation, but now they are methodically lowering all the dogs on us (the Service).

We are scolded for analytics – this is very in my profile, so I will explain what is wrong. Recently, we have been increasingly pressed to customize reports to the requirements of management – I once touched on this topic. All these political consultants, politicians and their retinue, influence teams – all this created chaos. Strong. Most importantly, no one knew that there would be such a war, they hid it from everyone.

And here’s an example for you: you are asked (conditionally) to calculate the possibility of human rights protection in different conditions, including the attack of prisons by meteorites. You specify about meteorites, they tell you – this is so, reinsurance for calculations, nothing like this will happen. You understand that the report will be just for show, but you need to write in a victorious style so that there are no questions, they say, why do you have so many problems, did you really work badly. In general, a report is being written that when a meteorite falls, we have everything to eliminate the consequences, we are great, everything is fine.

And you concentrate on tasks that are real – we don’t have enough strength anyway. And then suddenly they really throw meteorites and expect that everything will be according to your analytics, which was written from the bulldozer.

That is why we have a total piz_ets – I don’t even want to pick another word.

5 March 2022 – 16:37 UTC

Anonymous Claims to Breach Yandex (Russia’s Mail and Search Service); Leaks Account Credentials

DarkOwl discovered two leaks shared through the Anonymous hacktivist collective network consisting of over 5.2 Million user accounts’ email addresses and password combinations. We are in the process of analyzing this data leak to determine the veracity of its contents. 1.1 Million Yandex accounts were previously dumped in 2014. Many hackers are using #opRussia to opportunistically claim clout for breaches that did not occur, when in reality they are circulating old previously dumped data and/or verifying accounts by credential stuffing.

5 March 2022 – 15:23 UTC

Paypal Suspends Service in Russia

Paypal announced on LinkedIn they would be halting its operations in Russia; a statement released days after suspending signing up new users on the payment platform on Tuesday. Dan Schulman, CEO wrote:

We remain steadfast in our commitment to bring our unique capabilities and resources to bear to support humanitarian relief to those suffering in Ukraine who desperately need assistance. We will also continue to care for each other as a global employee community during this difficult and consequential time.

On Wednesday, 3 March, the IT Army of Ukraine launched a petition calling for all supporters to sign a petition on change.org:

[TRANSLATION]

While Ukraine protects its people and places, and Russia faces the radical consequences of its war crimes, the most popular payment service via PayPal is still available to the aggressor. This means that it also helps finance the bloody war against Ukraine through PayPal.

We are absolutely sure that modern technologies are a powerful response to tanks, grads and missiles. We call on the company to block its services in Russia via PayPal and launch them in Ukraine, as well as provide an opportunity to raise funds to restore justice and peace in our country and the world.

5 March 2022 – 15:03 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Private RocketChat Conversations from Russian Government Officials

Anonymous is targeting Russia by any means possible and managed to collect private chats between Russian officials on the messaging service, rocket.chat. After review, these chats are different from the ones dropped by @contileaks last week.

The chat includes the network ID, username, and “real name” of 14 members of the chat group. The domain associated with the leak corresponds to the official website of the Russian government and the Governor of the Moscow region.

5 March 2022 – 06:04 UTC

squad303 Sets Up SMS Messaging System to Text Random Russian Citizen Phone Numbers

With the lack of Russian media coverage of the invasion of Ukraine and the intentional misinformation spread by Putin’s disinformation agencies, a pro-Ukraine hacktivist collective, known as squad303 setup an SMS messaging system for citizens around the globe to use to randomly text Russian citizens a scripted message about the nature of world events.

The squad303 team also setup an API for more advanced users.

Update: As of 8AM UTC, 6 March 2022, the service had been used to send over 2 Million texts Russian mobile phone numbers.

The team also reports of suffering from heavy DDoS attacks from pro-Russian cyber actors.

5 March 2022 – 02:34 UTC

Anonymous Hackers Claim to Have Accessed Communication Data for a Russian Military Satellite

After nb65’s reported success accessing Roscosmos earlier this week, it appears that members of the Anonymous collective under the campaign #opRussia have ventured into breaching the communications of Russian military satellite for data collection. The satellite – designated COSMOS 2492 (aka glonass132) is likely active in geospatial intelligence collection over Ukraine for Russia. (note: the original indication of the connection occurred 4 March 2022 @ 09:35 by Anonymous collective member, @shadow_xor.)

DarkOwl also uncovered a leak shared by LulzSec member @shadow_xor titled, “Leak_RUSAT_shadow_xor.zip” which contains significant geopositioning data since the satellite’s launch in 2014. The hacker stated they could not change the coordinates of the satellite, but did capture orbital, passage, and communications data.

Our original reporting on this suggested the hackers were Russian-based, but further analysis only indicated that a number of Russian-based hackers supported the attack on COSMOS 2492.

4 March 2022 – 18:16 UTC

Putin Officially Bans Facebook in Russia

In order to combat the information operations campaign against them online, Putin ordered for ISPs to block Facebook servers and websites across Russia. Security researchers also note an uptick in Russian trolls on social media with bot accounts promoting Putin’s military operations in Ukraine.

Putin’s parliament also passed a law imposing prison terms of up to 15 years for individuals spreading intentionally “fake news” about the military. The terms “invasion” and “war” are no longer allowed in press and media coverage.

Several foreign and Western media outlets, including BBC, CNN, and Bloomberg, have temporarily suspended reporting on the war from Russia.

4 March 2022 – 09:44 UTC

NB65 Teases Information Security Community with Riddles on their Activities

NB65 – the pro-Ukrainian group who claimed responsibility for accessing and shutting down Russia’s spy satellites via SCADA vulnerabilities – teased the information security community that they been quiet cause they were parsing and analyzing numerous vulnerabilities in Russian cyber targets.

If we seem quiet, it’s because we have an olympic sized swimming pool worth of data and vulnerabilities. But here’s some fun that you can participate in…

DarkOwl discovered a post matching the target hidden in the riddle and the content suggests the group has access to RUNNET: Russia’s UNiversity Network.

4 March 2022

IT Army of Ukraine Calls for Volunteers to Support the Internet Forces of Ukraine

Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation steps up its information warfare against Putin’s propaganda by forming the Internet Forces of Ukraine (ITU). Forming a separate Telegram channel at the start of the month, the channel is dedicated to posting instructions and guidance for citizens around the world that want to aid Ukraine and lack an IT/cybersecurity background.

Друзі, наш ворог, окрім наявної війни у наших містах та селах, веде також інформаційну війну. Не вірте фейкам, не вірте брехні пропаганди путіна – ніякої капітуляції України НЕ БУДЕ!!! У нас потужна армія, ми сильні духом і нас підтримує весь світ! Тому, не ведіться на провокації і вірте в Україну. Поширюйте це серед рідних та близьких у соціальних мережах, щоб вони також не велись на нісенітниці кремля. Ми разом і ми переможемо!!🇺🇦

Friends, our enemy, in addition to the existing war in our cities and villages, is also waging an information war. Do not believe fakes, do not believe the lies of Putin’s propaganda – there will be no capitulation of Ukraine!!! We have a powerful army, we are strong in spirit and we are supported by the whole world! Therefore, do not be fooled by provocations and believe in Ukraine. Spread this to your family and friends on social networks, so that they also do not fall for the Kremlin’s nonsense. We are together and we will win!! 🇺🇦

4 March 2022 – 01:46 UTC

Trickbot Gang Members Doxxed and Links to FSB Confirmed

At 15:00 UTC, before DarkOwl could even finish analyzing the ContiLeaks, a Ukrainian-aligned underground account leaked details of key members of the infamous TrickBot gang. Over the course of the day at a cadence of every 2 hours, dossiers for the individuals appeared on social media. Private chats between members of the gang were included with each of the leaks. 7 male members and their aliases identified: baget, fire, strix, mushroom, manuel, verto, and liam. Twitter has since suspended the account.

3 March 2022 – 20:54 UTC

Russian-Aligned Hackers Target Anonymous Hacktivists in Canada

A pro-Russian cyber group using the name Digital Cobras, claims to have been targeting #opRussia hackers from the Anonymous collective across the US, UK, Greece, and Canada. Earlier today, they posted several names of individuals along with pictures of some of the alleged members of Anonymous.

They also claimed to have “hacked Anonymous’ servers” and downloaded over 260gb of their files and tools. They also claimed to have full access of the administration of Tor Project, including their crypto accounts.

Anonymous does not possess servers or centrally locate their information or tools as it is an organic decentralized collective of hacktivists around the world. Similarly, the Tor Project is run by a network of volunteers.

It is very likely this group is designed to spread disinformation and FUD.

3 March 2022

Size of Zeronet Anonymous Network Increases Since Invasion

In the week since the Putin launched an invasion against the Ukrainian people, DarkOwl has noticed an increase of 385 Zeronet domains in the last week and a near 20% increase in the network’s activity. Zeronet has been historically most heavily used by Chinese threat actors. The trend in “new domain” activity appears to have started on or about February 27th, within hours after the IT Army of Ukraine rallied the underground.

The Tor Project has reported significant increases in the number of unique addresses on Tor on the same day.

3 March 2022 – 17:10 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Database Containing Bank Account Holders Information

bkdr – member of the Anonymous hacktivist collective – released an Excel spreadsheet containing the personal information of over 8,700 business bank account holders in Russia. Full names, passport, DoBs, account standing, etc are included in the file.

3 March 2022 – 15:40 UTC

Pro-Russian Cyber Team, Killnet Claims To Hack Vodafone Services in Ukraine

Killnet, a Pro-Russian organized threat actor has claimed they were successful in attacking Vodafone’s telecommunications services across Ukraine. The group shared links to the vodafone.ua website (as offline) and network graphs proving the website suffered an outage.

The group also claims to have attacked “Anonymous” networks directly, prompting criticism as the Anonymous hacktivist has no central severs or repositories.

[Google Translate]

Cellular communication services under the Vodafone trademark on the territory of Ukraine are provided by the partner of Vodafone Group plc, PRO “VF Ukraine”

⚠ OUR ATTACK WAS REPELLED [REFLECTED] AFTER 4 HOURS.

3 March 2022 – 05:22 UTC

Anonymous Breaches Private Server in Roscosmos and Defaces Website

v0g3lSec – member of the Anonymous hacktivist collective – claims to have infiltrated private servers at the Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos and exfiltrated files from their Luna-Glob moon exploration missions. The archive consists of over 700 MBs. Many of the files are drawings, executables, and technical documents dating back to 2011. A scientific review of the content would be needed to assess the value of the information collected.

In addition the website for the Space Research Institute (IKI) Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) was also defaced by the same group.

3 March 2022 – 01:11 UTC

Anonymous Leaks Data from Rosatom, Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation

According to DarkOwl’s preliminary review of the 74 files, the leak appears to be a mixture of budget data, conference materials, powerpoint presentations, and technical files dating back to 2013. There is random mixture of information included that it is unclear whether this was obtained directly from a breach of the corporation’s servers, an employee at the organization, or collected via OSINT and compiled for use in #opRussia.

“There is no place for dictators in this world. You can’t touch the innocent, Putin. No secret is safe. State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom has been hacked!”

2 March 2022 – 19:55 UTC

ATW Quits Campaign – Cites Conflict with Anonymous, Attribution, and Twitter Suspension

Drama in the group started yesterday with AgainstTheWest claiming Anonymous was taking credit for their successes in the cyber war against Russia. They briefly turned their attention to China announcing several new victims, including the Chinese Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence organization. After their suspension from Twitter earlier today, they announced retirement claiming they had no means for communicating with the public. (Analysts note rebrand to BlueHornet occurred shortly after their announcement)

2 March 2022 – 19:09 UTC

Conti Leak Source Code, Panel, Builder, Decrypter Appear on Darknet Forum

Less than 48 hours after a pro-Ukrainian leaked the infrastructure of the CONTI gang’s operation, including botnet IP addresses and source code executables, users begin circulating the ransomware gang’s critical data across popular darknet forums and discussion boards.

2 March 2022 – 16:35 UTC

Leak Documents Surface Proving War Against Ukraine was Approved on 18 January

Anonymous hackers released photographs of captured documents from Russian troops titled, “WORKING MAP”, and authored by the commander of Russia’s Bomb Battery of the Black Sea Fleet. The maps and documents affirm to the public that the invasion of Ukraine was approved on January 18th with intention to seize the country sometime between 20 February and 06 March 2022. Liveuamap, under intermittent DDoS since this started, confirmed the data.

2 March 2022 – 13:52 UTC

XSS Admin Reports XMPP Jabber Service Ransomed and Heavy DDoS Attacks

A darknet forum popular with the Russian-speaking community has been experiencing technical issues, suffering from Jabber service outages and heavy DDoS attacks. The forum is well known in the darknet for malware discussions and coordination of attacks. The admin shared a post that the jabber service was hit with ransomware and the contents of the chats wiped from the services. They nonchalently suggested users register and continue using the service.

[Translated]

The server didn’t work yesterday. Because of ransom (which, by the way, is prohibited here) we were listed in a spamhouse. Instead of reporting the violation, the “brilliant” spamhouse immediately leafed through us. In principle, for many years I got used to their “adequacy”. I’m not surprised at anything. We have more than 21,000 users, and no one is able to check everyone. To do this, in fact, they came up with feedback contacts (xmpp, e-mail), they are listed everywhere.

Why, I wonder, they don’t block gmail.com ? So many, so to speak, violators of law and order use it, and nothing, for some reason they are not immediately listed.

In parallel with this, a powerful DDoS attack was conducted on us.

Our XMPP project is not commercial, completely free and subsidized. I’ve never understood the point of attacking toads.

At the moment, the functionality has been restored.

An unpleasant moment. Backups according to the law of meanness turned out to be broken. The last one alive was a week ago. Suddenly someone has lost contacts or a toad has disappeared, re-register.

2 March 2022 – 10:33 UTC

Leak Appears with Russian Air Force Officer’s Information

Anonymous leaked another database containing the personal information for over 300,000 of Russia’s military personnel and civilian citizens. The archive, titled “Translated Base Database” contains 35 separate database files containing personal details of the individuals. Information includes: full name, date of birth, age, passport number, address, occupation, etc.

1 March 2022 – 20:46 UTC

Russian Criminal Gang TheRedBanditsRU Recruits on Social Media – Offers Payments for Affiliates

The RedBandits openly recruit “affiliates for certain jobs” stating they did not want white hats, but that they want to “speak to exploit Devloplers, Spammers (phishing skills, vishing etc), Pentesters. We’re building an army!” They incentivize skilled hackers to join their cause for monetary gain, claiming partners would be paid well and to apply directly via qTox.

Earlier today, the group claimed that they did not agree with Putin as a leader nor of his invasion of Ukraine, but will protect him as a citizen of Russia.

“War is good for no one, come, take my hand, make money help your family”

1 March 2022 – 12:57 UTC

STORMOUS Ransomware Group Aligns With Russia

The STORMOUS ransomware group, which has been targeting international victims with their ransomware strain for months, claimed their alliance with the Russian government and threatens greater attacks against Ukraine.

The STORMOUS team has officially announced its support for the Russian governments. And if any party in different parts of the world decides to organize a cyber-attack or cyber-attacks against Russia, we will be in the right direction and will make all our efforts to abandon the supplication of the West, especially the infrastructure. Perhaps the hacking operation that our team carried out for the government of Ukraine and a Ukrainian airline was just a simple operation but what is coming will be bigger.

1 March 2022 – 09:26 UTC

Ukrainian Paper Leaks Personal Data for 120,000 Russian Military Personnel

In an effort to target the Russian soldiers invading Ukraine, the Centre for Defence Strategies in Ukraine has acquired the names and personal data of 120,000 servicemen who are fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainian newspaper, Ukrayinska Pravda has leaked the details of the soldiers which could be one of the biggest information warfare campaigns using doxing mid-military conflict, ever seen.

The doxxed soldiers are likely to face increased engagement on social media and direct phishing attacks.

1 Mar 2022 – 00:38 UTC

NB65 Takes on Russia’s Satellite Technology

nB65 claims that they successfully accessed Russia’s Roscosmos Space Agency and deleted the WS02, ‘rotated’ the credentials and shut down the server. They did not provide any leaks with the social media announcement.

The Russian Space Agency sure does love their satellite imaging. Better yet they sure do love their Vehicle Monitoring System.

Network Battalion isn’t going to give you the IP, that would be too easy, now wouldn’t it? Have a nice Monday fixing your spying tech. Glory to Ukraine.

28 February 2022 – 23:54 UTC

ATW Targets Russia’s Electrical Grid

AgainstTheWest Leaks Information from Russia’s PromEngineering corporation. Archives of corporate emails between employees, clients, vendors, as well as blueprints and engineering documentation for power stations around Russia are included in the leak.

28 February 2022 – 22:00 UTC

CONTI’s Entire Infrastructure Leaked

Does this signal the end of CONTI’s reign as leading RaaS?

Ukrainian aligned affiliate decides to destroy CONTI ransomware gang’s operation by exfiltrating and sharing 141 additional JSON data files of private Jabber chats from 2020, details of their server architecture, their sendmail phishing campaign data information, command and control botnet architecture, and ransomware executables (password protected). Analysis confirms that the gang uses BazarLoader backdoor for installing persistent malware on infected machines.

DarkOwl analysts also noted from leaked Jabber messages that RaaS affiliates were persistent at determining how to evade AV/EDR protection systems like Sophos and Carbon Black. Stating that they had setup sales calls and demos with Carbon Black and Sophos AV providers’ sales teams using proxy companies to gain more information, test the product and attempt to find specifics of the product’s AV/EDR bypass mechanisms.

This reminds us all the importance of vetting and verifying all commercial in-bounds for requests for demos and sales information, especially when it might present an opportunity to learn critical corporate intelligence.

The affiliate leaking the details wrote how this war against their people and Ukraine was breaking their heart.

My comments are coming from the bottom of my heart which is breaking over my dear Ukraine and my people. Looking of what is happening to it breaks my heart and sometimes my heart wants to scream.

28 February 2022 – 21:41 UTC

STORMOUS Ransomware Hits Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine

The Pro-Russian STORMOUS ransomware gang claims to have attacked Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mfa.gov.ua using their custom ransomware. The group posts victims’ information on their Telegram channel, posting in both English and Arabic. The group stated the Ukraine government network “fragile” and called for DDoS attacks them.

Their network is fragile – their various data has been stolen and distributed according to their phone numbers, email, accounts and national card numbers with an internal network hacked and access to most essential files. This is with placing denial attacks on their main site !

28 February 2022 – 18:00 UTC

China’s Huawei Steps in to Assist Russia with ISP Network Instability

According to Chinese deep web forums, Huawei is reportedly building a mobile broadband in Russia to help with internet outages. As of 26 February, at least 50,000 technical experts will be trained in networking and securty in Russia’s R&D centers.

28 February 2022 – 12:00 UTC

Russian Gas Station Pumps Hacked

Video of disabled electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in Russia surface, displaying error status and the following warning:

”Putin is a dick”, “Glory to Ukraine”, ”Glory to our heroes”,” death to our enemies”

27 February 2022 – 23:06 UTC

Anonymous for Ukraine Leaks Customer Data from Sberbank Russia

While Anonymous leaked the files, the credit for the hack goes to Hacktivist group, Georgia Hackers Society. The two text files (bygng.txt & bankmatbygng.txt) appear to be personal data from the financial institution with the bankmat file containing 4,568 records.

27 February 2022 – 21:00 UTC

CONTI RaaS Suffers for Professing Their Allegiance to the Russian Federation

DarkOwl just discovered 393 JSON files containing private Jabber chats from the ransomware group since January 2021 leaked online. Many of CONTI’s affiliates were displeased with the group’s alliance with Russia.

27 February 2022 – 19:00 UTC

ATW Claims to Take Down CoomingProject Ransomware Group

AgainstTheWest assesses “CoomingProject are actually one of the dumbest “threat” groups online.” AgainstTheWest statement on Twitter:

“RIP CoomingProject. All data on them is being passed to relevant authorities in France.”

27 February 2022 – 16:54 UTC

Cyberpartisans Take Belarusian Railway’s Data-Processing Network Offline

The hacktivist group of cyber specialists located in Belarus managed to force the railway switches to manual control mode, to significantly slow down the movement of trains. The webservers for the railway’s domains (pass.rw.by, portal.rw.by, rw.by) are also offline.

The rail services are being essentially held hostage until Russian troops leave Belarus and there is peace in Ukraine.

27 February 2022 – 11:00 UTC

AgainstTheWest Ransomware Gang Enters the Campaign

AgainstTheWest (ATW) claims to have attacked Russia’s Department of Digital Development and Communications of the Administration of the Pskov Region with their own custom “wiper” malware. All data has been reportedly saved and deleted.

27 February 2022 – 09:00 UTC

Anonymous Attacks Russian Critical Infrastructure

Tvingo Telecom offers fiber-optic networking, internet and satellite services. Tvingo Telecom is a major provider to Russian clients.

27 February 2022 – 00:00 UTC

GhostSec Leaks More Data and Claims Attacks Against Belarusian Cybercriminals, GhostWriter

GhostSec is active in the Anonymous cyber war against Russia and released a sample of databases stolen from additional government and municipality sites across Russia (economy.gov.ru and sudak.rk.gov.ru).

They state on their Telegram channel they have been conducting attacks against “Russian hackers” and the “hacker group GhostWriter” (a.k.a. UNC1151).

26 February 2022 – 18:00 UTC

IT ARMY of Ukraine Now Active on Telegram

A Telegram Channel titled “IT ARMY of Ukraine” appeared earlier today to help coordinate cyber activities against Russia. The channel has already accumulated over 96K followers. Posts are shared in Ukrainian and English containing target server IP addresses and media for mass distribution on social media.

Videos of what events are really happening across Ukraine have appeared on intercepted Russian State Television channels.

В найближчу годину буде одне із найголовніших завдань!

26 February 2022 – 16:00 UTC

Anonymous Hackers Interrupt Russian State Television

Multiple reports across underground chatrooms suggest Russian television was allegedly briefly interrupted to play Ukrainian music and display national images. (Source)

Ukraine’s telecommunications’ agency also announced that Russia’s media regulator’s site was down as well.

26 February 2022 – 09:00 UTC

Russia Restricts Facebook and Twitter to Control Information

Open source internet monitoring reporting organizations discovered Twitter has been blocked by multiple ISPs across Russia. Ukraine’s government is regularly posting on social media to show the Russian people they are still fighting in the invasion. Cybercriminals and hacktivist campaigns also disrupt Russia’s information operations by calling out disinformation bots and taking critical communications sites offline. Twitter has reportedly blocked account registrations from IPs originating in the Russian Federation.

Russia’s state-controlled television station, RT, is still offline.

26 February 2022 – 01:00 UTC

Hackers Leak Data from Belarusian Weapons Manufacturer Tetraedr on the Darknet

Anonymous Liberland and the Pwn-Bär Hack Team announce the start of #OpCyberBullyPutin and leak a two-part archive (200GB total) of confidential employee correspondences from prominent defense contractor and radar manufacturer, Tetraedr in Belarus. The first part is the most recent 1,000 emails from each employee inbox, in .EML format. The second part is a complete archive of each inbox in .PST format.

The hacktivists stated they successfully attacked the company through an unpatched ProxyLogon security vulnerability.

25 February 2022 – 23:30 UTC

Russian Military Radio Frequencies Hijacked

Ukrainian radio frequency (RF) hackers intercepted Russian military numbers stations UVB-76, frequency 4625KHz, and trolled Russia communications by playing Swedish pop group Caramella Girls’ Caramelldansen on top of the radio waves.

The group also successfully intercepted frequencies utilized by Russian strategic bomber planes.

25 February 2022

CoomingProject Ransomware Group Announces Support for Russia

Another ransomware gang sides with Russia officially declaring war against anyone conducting cyber attacks against the Russian government on their Telegram channel.

“Hello everyone this is a message we will help the Russian government if cyber attacks and conduct against Russia”

25 February 2022 – 21:00 UTC

Russia’s Gasprom Energy Corporation Knocked Offline

Headquartered in St. Petersburg, Gasprom (ПАО “Газпром”) is the largest natural gas transmission company in Eastern Russia. The company is mostly owned by the Russian government even though the shares are traded publicly.

The Anonymous hacktivist collective, operating their campaign against Russia via the hashtag #OpRussia, has claimed responsibility.

25 February 2022 – 20:00 UTC

Anonymous Hackers Leak Database for Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD)

Russia’s gov.ru and mil.ru website server authentication data, including hundreds of government email addresses and credentials, surface on transient deep web paste sites and Telegram channels. Another leak consisting of 60,000 Russian government email addresses is also now in circulation.

GhostSec, also participating in Anonymous’s cyberwar against Russia, #OpRussia, claimed all subdomains for Russia’s military webservers were offline hours earlier as of 11:00 UTC.

Over around 100+ subdomains for the russian military were hosted on this IP (you may check DNSdumpster for validation) now all downed. In Support of the people in Ukraine WE STAND BY YOU!

25 February 2022

CONTI’s decision to side with Russia has dire consequences for the RaaS Gang

The ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang CONTI (a.k.a. CONTI News) has officially sided with the Russian Federation against “Western warmongers” in the conflict.

Many of their affiliate partners are reportedly in disagreement – siding with Ukraine – which became evident once certain private chats were leaked on their internal affiliate platform on social media. It’s uncertain how these political divisions will impact the effectiveness of the ransomware gang’s campaigns. Conti revised their WARNING statement claiming they do “not ally with any government and we condemn the ongoing war.”

25 February 2022 – 16:30 UTC

Hundreds of Russian IP Addresses Appear on Deep Web for Targeting

Over 600 IP addresses correlating to key Russian web services emerge on transient paste sites and underground hacker forums. (Source DarkOwl Vision)

25 February 2022 – 05:00 UTC

Anonymous Threatens to Take Russian Industrial Control Systems Hostage

The hacker group known as Anonymous stepped up its participation in defending Ukrainians through its cyber war with Russia. In an ominous video posted to Twitter, the group called for UN to establish a “neutral security belt” between NATO and Russia to ease tensions. They elevated their influence by threatening to “take hostage industrial control systems” against Russia. Expect Us. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

“If tensions continue to worsen in Ukraine, then we can take hostage… industrial control systems.” Expect us. Operation #Russia Engaged

24 February 2022 – 19:00 UTC

Free Civilian Tor Service Announces 54 New Ukrainian Government Database Leaks

The administrator of the Free Civilian Tor Service – who DarkOwl analysts believe is the Raid Forums threat actor, Vaticano – updated their database leaks service, stating they had confidential data for dozens of Ukrainian government services. DarkOwl analyzed these databases closely and confirmed the threat actor likely exfiltrated the data in December 2021. (Source)

24 February 2022 – 17:00 UTC

Russia’s FSB Warns of Potential Attacks against Critical Infrastructure as a result of Ukraine Operations

The National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NCSCI) released an official statement warning citizens of Russia of imminent cyber attacks and for the country to brace for the disruption of important digital information resources and services in response to the on-going special military operation in Ukraine.

“Attacks can be aimed at disrupting the functioning of important information resources and services, causing reputational damage, including for political purposes” – NCSCI

24 February 2022 – 05:00 UTC

Cryptocurrency Markets Crash in Wake of Invasion

Bitcoin cryptocurrency fell below $35,000 USD for the first time since January in reaction to the Russian troops crossing over the Ukraine border. Ethereum fell more than 12% in the last 24 hours.

According to open-source reporting, the collective cryptocurrency market has plummeted over $150 billion dollars in value since the tensions began.

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[DEVELOPING] Darknet Economy Surges Around Abortion Rights

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on July 1, 2022. Posted in Blog.

SCOTUS members credit card information continues to be doxxed

July 1, 2022

The recent doxxing of Supreme Justices – presumably in retribution for the Roe v Wade rulings – has spread widely across social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and more.

While all members of the Supreme Court have been doxxed to some degree in the past, this latest round of public information sharing contains Credit Card information for at least four Justices.

Many posts circulating on the darknet, deep web, and paste sites include other associated PII (as pictured above), which together form a comprehensive doxx of the targeted Justices that could be exploited for social engineering attacks, fraud and more.

SIEGEDSEC Targets Pro-Life State Governments

27 June 2022

Over the weekend cyber hacktivists enraged about the SCOTUS decision, decided to direct their anger towards their keyboards and targeted the networks of pro-life state governments, e.g. Kentucky and Arkansas. The group claimed to have accessed and exfiltrated several gigabytes of sensitive data, including employee PII from state government servers. The cyber threat group, SiegedSec, who we featured earlier this month, has been recently emboldened by their involvement in the Russia-Ukraine cyber war and stated on their Telegram channel, the attacks against Kentucky and Arkansas are just the beginning with planned continued attacks against pro-life organizations and states with anti-abortion regulations.

“THE ATTACKS WILL CONTINUE!” – SiegedSec

Source: Telegram

SCOTUS Overturns Roe v. Wade

24 June 2022

On Friday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court uploaded their controversial decision on the case titled, DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL. v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION ET AL; a decision which effectively removed one’s constitutional right to an abortion as provided by the long-standing 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent. The decision sparked widespread protests around the country and conflicts between activists and law enforcement.

Original Report

21 June 2022

As a result of the recent political landscape regarding Roe v. Wade, our analysts reviewed the topic of abortion and observed a surge in darknet economies providing abortion medications and home kits on underground marketplaces.

Background and Political Context

The historical January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which legally protected one’s rights to an abortion at the Federal level, is on a precipitous demise in a radical shift in political power across the United States. In a draft majority opinion that was leaked out of the Supreme Court to Politico in early May, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court justices are very likely to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade and a subsequent 1992 decision — Planned Parenthood v. Casey, with Justice ALITO stating, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

Figure 1: Source POLITICO

If the position of the draft opinion goes ahead as written – which some legal experts predict might be officially published as early as this week – federal protections for one’s right to an abortion will immediately end and the issue will be tossed back for decision at the individual state level. With recent extreme state-legislative decisions such as the Texas Heartbeat Act criminalizing abortions any time after six weeks of pregnancy, 23 states have some form of restrictive abortion-related legislation in place. 19 states have protected the right to abortion by codifying it into their state laws, Colorado and California have established themselves as “sanctuary states” for women’s reproductive health.

According to the American Pregnancy Association, an abortion is defined as the early termination of a pregnancy and is induced by a clinical surgical procedure or the administration of drugs to remove the embryo and placenta from the female’s uterus. Two drugs associated with the “chemical abortion pill regimen” are oral Mifepristone (Mifeprex) and Misoprostol (Cytotec) used in conjunction to stop the production of pregnancy related hormones and induce contractions of the uterus to expel the embryo.

Impacts Seen on the Darknet

Within a week of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion, DarkOwl analysts observed a noticeable volume of information related to medical abortions materialize – including offers for chemical abortion drugs for sale across the darknet.

Chatter on darknet discussion forums and deep-web adjacent chat platforms foster creating an online community to support US-based individuals’ access to abortion, calling it the “Underground Abortion Railroad” to help connect women with abortion and transportation providers and avoid criminal prosecution.

One forum user identified themselves from Europe and offered to stock up on abortion medications and emergency contraception pills such as “Plan B” from their local pharmacies, offering to ship them at fair market price to those in the United States who cannot access them legally through non-darknet sites.

Another user in a popular darknet forum mentioned a reliable marketplace selling Misoprostol, described as “28 Pills 200MG Safe Home Abortion Method.” The vendor of the marketplace commented on the thread that they don’t actually sell the pills anymore because there were not enough buyers, but would be willing to change their position and offer them again if there was demand.

Monitors on the darknet marketplace suggested has yet to offer a “Safe Home Abortion Method Kit” as mentioned in the thread or abortion-related pills on their site. The same vendor also offers a variety of illegal drugs and narcotics as well, including Cocaine, Percocet, Xanax, weight loss treatments, and Freebase.

Figure 2: Source Dread Darknet Discussion Forum

DarkOwl continues to observe other sources of underground abortion services on offer in its Vision database with multiple advertisements for Misoprostol and Mifeprex, and access to (purportedly) safe abortion services. One supplier recommended those in need of abortion pills contact them via XMPP with OMEMO for a direct, private sale.

Another classified-style advertisement describes the at-home abortion treatment in detail and the medications used, with pricing, ranging from $7 to $16 USD for the abortion-related medications. Multiple forms of contact information was also included.

Other drugs offered for sale on the same classified-advertisement forum have been affiliated with scammers that have no intention of providing the services or goods on offer. Tragically, there is increased risk that darknet scammers will exploit the current political abortion issue in the US for financial gain like they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drugs offered for sale on darknet marketplaces

Figure 3: Source DarkOwl Vision

Some darknet forum users point readers to “offshore pharmacy sites” where abortion-related medication could be purchased, mentioning a clinic taking online consultations in India among others. A quick OSINT search revealed numerous Surface Web domains offering abortion-related medications for purchase. How those sites will operate regarding shipping the drugs to customers in states who have banned abortions once Roe is overturned is yet to be determined.

Overall, opinions on the darknet about abortion are mixed with strong opinions on both sides of the issue. Members of right-wing aligned Telegram channels spin abortion as murder and celebrate the Supreme Court’s position.

Figure 4: Source DarkOwl Vision

While other users support less government over individual choices regardless and view the decision as a potential turning point for the loss of other individual rights.

“I do believe everyone should have a choice, it’s a sensitive topic, but I will stand on democracy, taking peoples choices away is not democracy.” – Dread User

Figure 5: Source DarkOwl Vision

A controversial pro-choice group, Ruth Sent Us (RSU), named after late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, recently admitted to publishing on social media the home addresses of Chief Justice John Roberts alongside five other conservative associate justices: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The group claimed the information was publicly available and never encouraged violence against any of the justices.

The release of such information has fueled on-going deep web forum debates about the topic with some stating such information releases violates 18 USC 1503, which “prohibits ‘endeavors to influence, intimidate or impede… officers of [the] court’.” Despite the online debate, a 26-year old man, Nicholas John Roske, likely relied on such leaked information to target Justice Kavanaugh last week. Roske was arrested for attempted murder after arriving at Kavanuagh’s home with a Glock 17 handgun, ammunition, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, and duct tape, that he told police he planned to use to break into Kavanaugh’s house and kill him. Other left-leaning U.S. politicians have also been targeted in their homes since the draft opinion leaks with users on Telegram calling them “pro-abortion death cult democrats.”

Figure 6: Source Telegram

DarkOwl analysts have not yet observed abortion pills such as Mifepristone and Misoprostol widely available on principal decentralized darknet markets, but they are available for purchase via threads in discussion forums, as well as classified-style advertisements on transient paste services.

Closing Thoughts

Users across darknet forums have voiced interest in abortion-related pills and services following the leaked Supreme Court documents and advocate for organized protests in support of and against the potential ruling. Once the U.S. Supreme Court officially issues their ruling, we anticipate a more concerted response from darknet marketplaces in offers for abortion related drugs and services. The darknet will also continue to be a resource for activists to organize political protests and circulate sensitive information related to the abortion debate.

Irrespective of which side of the debate one stands, the darknet will continue to fuel the controversy both in support of and criticism of a woman’s right to abortion. In a world of increased digital surveillance and the fundamental privacy-centric nature of Tor and similar anonymous platforms, individuals will seek out like-minded communities on the darknet for social activism related to the topic. DarkOwl predicts an increased use of Tor to organize political protests and circulate sensitive information related to the abortion debate.

Curious about darknet marketplaces or something you read? Interested in learning more? Contact us to find out how darknet data applies to your use case.

DarkOwl and Forensic IT Partner to Enhance Proactive Darknet Intelligence

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on May 6, 2024. Posted in Press Releases.

May 06, 2024

Partnership advances Forensic IT’s cybersecurity offerings, adding enriched monitoring of deep, dark web and dark web adjacent sites to help deliver a comprehensive view of risk

DarkOwl, the leading provider of darknet data, is thrilled to announce its partnership with Forensic IT, a leading cybersecurity firm in Australia specializing in forensic investigations and cyber incident response. This partnership combines DarkOwl’s extensive darknet intelligence capabilities with Forensic IT’s expertise in cyber forensics to offer comprehensive cyber incident response services and digital forensics to businesses and organizations.

DarkOwl’s platform, with unparalleled access to the darknet, aggregates data from the darknet, providing insights into emerging threats, leaked credentials, and potential vulnerabilities that may pose risks to organizations. DarkOwl collects and organizes data in near real-time, empowering businesses to conduct in-depth investigations and proactively defend against potential cyber threats. Forensic IT provides a wealth of expertise in digital forensics, incident response, and cybersecurity consulting. Forensic IT is a trusted partner for businesses Australia-wide, seeking to enhance their cybersecurity posture and respond effectively to cyber incidents – from courtroom analysis to cyber incident response. Their highly skilled experts deliver unmatched digital investigation.

Because the darknet serves as a sanctuary for illicit activities, insight into its activities is essential for a comprehensive view of cyber risk and digital footprints. It is an increasingly vital component for organizations with forward-thinking strategies. By joining forces, Forensic IT aims to offer a holistic approach to cyber incident response, provided clients the full picture of their potential risk.

Luke McCarthy, Director of Forensic IT, states, “Forensic IT’s partnership with DarkOwl is an exciting step forward in our objective to provide the best possible proactive Dark Web Intelligence to our clients in Australia. By integrating DarkOwl’s advanced tools into our Dark Web Monitoring service, we are able to deliver an even more comprehensive and robust solution, ensuring that our clients are better informed of potential threats than ever before.” CEO of DarkOwl, Mark Turnage, adds, “We are excited to partner with Forensic IT to deliver comprehensive cybersecurity solutions to their clients and help them in their mission by utilizing the strengths of both companies. Combining our strengths will enable organizations to stay ahead of ever-evolving cyber threats.”

About Forensic IT
Forensic IT is a specialised cyber security firm with expertise in Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR). We regularly work with law enforcement, investigators, government agencies and commercial organisations to bridge critical expertise gaps to safeguard clients’ environments and manage cyber incidents, including in Operational Technology / Industrial Control Systems (OT/ICS) environments. To learn more, visit www.forensicit.com.au.

About DarkOwl
DarkOwl uses machine learning and human analysts to collect automatically, continuously, and anonymously, index and rank darknet, deep web, and high-risk surface net data that allows for simplicity in searching. DarkOwl is unique not only in the depth and breadth of its darknet data, but also in the relevance and searchability of its data, its investigation tools, and its passionate customer service. DarkOwl data is ethically and safely collected from the darknet, allowing users secure and anonymous access to information and threats relevant to their mission. For more information, visit www.darkowl.com.

[Podcast Transcription] Demystifying Dark Web Research for Enterprise and Law Enforcement

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on May 2, 2024. Posted in Blog.

May 02, 2024

DarkOwl Analyst, Steph Shample, joins Authentic8’s Needle Stack Podcast to discuss dark web research and all its facets. From AI and other trends on the dark web to operational security, learn how to turn on the light beneath the surface of the internet.

Key Takeaways

AI and other dark web trends
Operational security in dark web research
How to search an unindexed environment

The links to the podcast, YouTube Channel, and the transcription can all be found below.

Transcription

Jeff: Welcome to Needlestack. I’m your host, Jeff Phillips.

Shannon: And I’m Shannon Reagan. Today, we are talking to Steph S., Senior Intelligence Analyst at DarkOwl. Steph, thanks for joining us.

Steph: Hi, Shannon. Hi, Jeff. Thank you so much for having me and for having DarkOwl. We’re so excited to be here.

Jeff: Well, let’s start with that, Steph. Um, to kick things off, can you tell us a little bit about, uh, DarkOwl for those that don’t know?

Steph: Absolutely, we are the world leading data provider of the dark web, deep and dark web as well as dark web adjacent technology. So think telegram discord those chat platforms. Also, the markets and forums that you see frequently in the news ransomware victim blogs where they advertise. Other general markets that sell malware, drugs, animals on the dark web.

So, we have a mixed manual and automated collection to safely get that, scrape that information, and then put it in a very friendly user interface or an API if you need. That way you can enrich that information with ClearNet, information from social media, all kinds of different enrichment that you can do to best paint the picture of where your exposure is on What precautions and mitigations you need to take.
So it’s just a fascinating company. Truly. It’s really cool.

Shannon: It is very cool. I think Jeff and I are pretty jazzed about dark owl. This might seem like a silly question to you. Um, but what is your perspective of why? Companies, you know, need dark web intelligence, if not maybe going into the dark web directly.

Steph: Yeah, I get that. And no, I truly stand by no silly, no stupid questions. A lot of people really only know the dark web as it pertains to ransomware, right? They see, okay, ransomware is being announced on here, but there is so much more and there always has been so much more on there. So the dark web is not indexable, right?

You can’t Google on it. So you really do have to know a little bit more navigation of where you’re going, what you’re looking for. Why you should have it is because everybody these days is very, very concerned about privacy. So we all want to be online and be connected and have that social aspect. But we also want to try to reduce, you know, what we’re leaking, what we’re exposing.

Unfortunately, with everything these days, um, you know, phishing, Ransomware social engineering. There are so many ways that malicious actors infiltrate an organization or an entity and then sell or monetize that information, or they do it for their own notoriety. You as an organization have got to be aware of what’s out there.

You can’t just Google yourself or your organization and find all of the threats. When you’re caught up in data breaches that are sold online and then cross sold on a market, right? To maximize profit, you’ve got to take a look at what actors are doing with their IP addresses, how they’re innovating and just making their operations more quick, more quick, uh, more efficient.

They’re streamlining them. You’ve got to have the dark web piece of information because they’re very open and talk a lot on there. They train on another. They share in addition to saying. Yeah. I’m going to move my C2 from this provider to that, right? Or don’t message me on this platform anymore. I view it as unsecure.

Let’s all move to telegram discord. You’ve got to keep yourself informed on the dark web. I respect and realize it is not for everybody, but if you do have a presence on there, if you have an incident, you really do need that piece of information or you’re seriously lacking a part of the picture. Follow

Shannon: up to that for those that companies that aren’t, um, kind of I’m going to be chatting more about that. Um, either they may be put into a dedicated effort to understanding the information that is out there on the dark web, either they don’t aren’t staffed with the right people to do it. They maybe don’t have the right tools to do it. What advice do you have for people that think this isn’t for me?

Steph: Sure, yeah, I would say, take a look, right?

Take a look at any dark web service provider. Start a trial, start a conversation, go install tor, right? It’s really easy to do that. Tor is open source. You can download it and just self teach, right? So many people these days want to spend so much time on social media or posting pictures or what have you.
Great. But there is a way for self empowerment to go educate yourself, type, uh, type something into a tour browser, take a look at what. People are using the dark web for, and educate yourself, you know, and if you don’t want to do that, then maybe look on LinkedIn or other social media, or just contact a company who does have dark web coverage and truly educate yourself before you make that final decision of, meh, I don’t need this.

Jeff: By the way, for some of our audience, I like to, I don’t know if I like to do this stuff, but TTPs, right? Tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Steph: Yeah, call me out. I’m going to throw every acronym in the book at you tactics, techniques, and procedures. So, for instance, I’m an Iran analyst by trade and Iran was really big about using European VPNs in their malicious operations.

So they would use namely Germany and the Netherlands constantly abuse when the European Union started to crack down on that. They moved to. Japanese infrastructure. That is a tactic technique and procedure that I observed. And then we put out in the researcher community, like, Hey, be aware, you know, you’re going to start to shift.

Jeff: Thank you for that. Um, of course, uh, pretty hot topic these days on the OSINT front, um, is AI. I guess AI is a hot topic on every front, but in specific to us, can you tell us a little bit about any AI trends you’re seeing on the, on the dark web when it comes to AI?

Steph: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s just like you said, everyone’s like, I want AI, but they don’t really know what AI is, but they want it.

Actors have embraced it and are successfully using it. So one use case that we are seeing constantly right now, fishing templates, right? Um, AI is enabling them to write a little cleaner. So there’s not as many English mistakes, grammar mistakes, what have you. And then previously, you know, you can code and you can automate and do all the things to really streamline your operation.

So previously actors would only be able to get those templates to maybe tens or hundreds of companies or organizations that they were trying to infiltrate. Now with AI, you’re getting up to. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, so they can work faster, get more. And it’s harder to tell who wrote this. You know, usually.

The joke is, of course, the Nigerian prince, or you get this email that’s riddled with so many grammatical mistakes. You’re like, really? But now that’s no longer the case. It’s not as easy to tell. And that’s probably the forefront of AI right now and how malicious actors are using them. It’s increasing their operation space.

Shannon: When we were talking ahead of the call, you mentioned that you have a linguistics background, maybe related to, you know, the AI space, you know, that there is such an element of writing and language as part of that. How, uh, Does linguistics play a role in OSINT or, you know, threat intelligence?

Steph: Of course. I’m so glad that there’s a space for that, right? So I think in tech, in AI, whatever you wanna call it, cyber tech, what have you, there is this misconception that you have to be a hardcore programmer, ones and zeros, coding, all the things, right? That there’s no space for other people. And I want to dispel that myth so, so, so much. Linguistics, especially. So, I started translating, you know, of course, and then French and Spanish and saying, you know, this is what they’re doing, et cetera, et cetera. That is happening online, right? Yes. Technology and the Internet. A lot of is in English 80%. I’ll give you guys that. But think of now, if you have kids or little cousins, little nieces and nephews, right?
Number one, how can you even understand what they’re saying in the tech jargon and neologism now take that and try to translate from a Spanish little kid or a Persian little kid, right? Or even a Persian actor. So, you have to really be able to understand the nuance of language. If they’re circum locating around an operation, you know, if they say, hey, I’m going to buy this video game from you on steam or a gaming platform. It’s 1400 dollars. Are you good with that? And you’re like, yeah, What kind of video game is 1400 right now? There’s someone malware, right? Gotta pick out the nuance of the language. Translation will never go away. Yes, automation will help it. We’ll streamline it, make it faster. But humans always need that niche and always have to analyze the language, analyze the sentiment.

Those very, very fine things that You’ve got to have a background of, and you’ve got to understand with AI, it’s coming into tune as well. So, you know, word clouds, for instance, it’s a really great way to capture. We have so much data from AI word clouds come out. And let’s say it’s a protest, right?
Protests are taking place. So the word cloud comes back, and Berlin is in huge letters, whereas Munich and other cities are smaller. So, you know, it’s like, okay, well, how is this represented? Does this mean I should pay attention to it? Does this mean it’s an anomaly? Should I throw it out? There are so many different ways to involve linguistics translation and just divergent translation. Thinking into this field. So whatever your background is, welcome come and also learn another language because cognitively speaking, I can’t even espouse the benefits enough. I will nerd out with you on a separate podcast.

Shannon: As a former creative writing major, I will welcome you into those.

Steph: Foreign language, linguistics for life.

Jeff: That’s funny. Can I just be a wannabe? Cause you know, I don’t know. It’s a little late to learn a new language

Shannon: anytime.

Jeff: Well, you have, um, a lot of passion about shining a light on the dark web. Um, obviously it’s, so it’s great that you’re a dark owl. Um, do you think shining that light and, and putting out more dark web education can actually start to have an impact or mitigate some of the threats or the particular threat actors?

Steph: It’s a great question. Uh, we are seeing reflections of security and clampdowns shape actors and where they’re moving what they’re doing, how they’re communicating. So I do think that if we keep this up. Yes, absolutely. And public education for cyber cybersecurity, you know, your 2 year old has an iPad.
Your grandmother’s on Facebook. The entire spectrum of humanity is tech enabled. We need to protect them. They don’t know if they’re exposing themselves. Then you’ve got the people who use the same password for their corporate account versus again, personal accounts. There’s a lot of education to do. And I say all that because passwords are sold on the dark web, right?

Repeatedly passwords are then put to paste sites and, and put monetized that data, They’ll just put it on a free pay site for other people to use in their operations. I do think it’s a slow process. It’s slower than we would want. And that is tough because tech is so dynamic and move so quickly, but we cannot stop trying to educate and elucidate and really raise the problems of, Hey, this is not going to [00:11:00] stop.
This is happening in the background and you’ve got to pay attention.

Jeff: You know, follow up when we were talking earlier, you mentioned, I believe the way you portrayed it was that with all that focus and attention on the dark web that you’re seeing them start to migrate to other platforms and other venues.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steph: Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, dark web, the. onion sites are markets and forums, and you can basically go on. I’ll use dread as an example. Dread is basically the reddit of the dark web, right? It’s the same thing threads, forums, advice, communities, like minded people. So, dread, you can go on there and just find something that, you know, I want to sell malware.

I am, I’m looking for this. I’m having trouble developing this part of it of my malware operation or this code or whatever. Um, so it’s really just essential to. Follow that and follow the actors and they have openly stated, you know, think of Alphabay and Silk Road, those markets that went down. Think of recent ransomware groups have also gone down, right?

You’ve been arrested, taken offline. Those groups are talking, they are sharing in telegram in discord. And then, of course, on talks, which is primarily used for ransomware comms, but it is growing in popularity. Talks is just a peer to peer messaging system. Direct messaging. They are using more opsec. They are saying, do not post on this forum.

We think there’s a law enforcement presence. Contact me on telegram. They are using more controls on Telegram. So you can shape a channel that only you, the admin can post and nobody else can. So we’re definitely seeing them paying attention to what’s happening in the security and law enforcement world and applying that to where they’re moving more secure messaging platforms, direct messages versus public.

Shannon: It is tough to, you know, it feels like an arms race, like that. You’re always, you know, we’re all just chasing each other around the internet.

Jeff: I like that we’re all just chasing each other around the,

Steph: it was awesome.

Shannon: I do wanna talk about tools in a minute, but with [00:13:00] the constant changes in technology and uh, keeping up with threat actors. Is there any advice that you have, particularly for training or, um, you know, recommended forums and platforms that, you know, like dread on the dark web for threat actors?

Like, where do you find the kind of, um, threat intelligence folks getting the most value out of information sharing among other professionals?

Steph: Absolutely. So the two main ones that have really emerged are task forces and trust groups, honestly. So let’s start with task forces. We realize that it’s got to be Government, private and academia has to all participate to best shape and fight the threats we’re facing.

So find someone who’s in your geographical area of interest, right? If you have an interest in China, if you have an interest in Russia, find groups there, use LinkedIn, use all of those and then it’s usually private signal groups, or maybe a private WhatsApp group and there’s a lot of, you know, just that are shared in their talk amongst practitioners and the task forces really bring all 3 perspectives of those industries that are necessary.

Trust groups are. I know this won’t be popular, but analysts are skeptical by nature. Hi. Um, you know, we don’t trust anybody, but when you have a trust group that starts up, so for instance, when Afghanistan fell in 2021 and they were using Snapchat as well as some other hidden, um, underground communications to avoid the Taliban, to get people out of country who were very much in danger, a trust group started up with that for, you know, Operations, getting people to safe houses, monitoring what the Taliban were doing on Twitter, as well as other places.

It was similar with when Russia invaded Ukraine. Okay, find analysts, you know, who has on the ground experience, who has language experience, who has tech experience, especially, you know. What are the Russians using? What are they going after? So task forces and trust groups are one thing. GitHub. I would suggest combing that left and right.

Then I also really want to highlight. There are quite a few really great open source organizations out there. You know, I follow China, so I need to understand how to get behind the firewall. If I can, how do I pick up information or open source information on WeChat, QQ, et cetera, um, the digital Sherlock program handled that.

They have a by area, um, by area of operation, AOR, uh, program that you can do for free. All you have to do is apply, state why you need it. So there’s a lot of free open source training. You can never go wrong with the SANS course. They just do it. Started a cybercrime one, which I’m super excited to take.
It’s to 500 level, so I’m gonna wait on that. But yeah, , um, the tech. And then also, I’m not gonna shy away from things like Coursera or Udemi. There’s plenty of baseline foundational classes that you can do on there. You don’t need to say, be a coder yourself, but maybe you wanna understand why your malicious actor is doing what they’re doing on the dark web.

Take a while, one, understand what’s happening, an object versus a whatever. Right. Immerse yourself and use those free resources, YouTube, Coursera, Udemy, work training, trust groups to really flesh out an area and flesh out expertise and share information.

Shannon: That’s great. Okay. Aside from groups, what are, uh, some of the tools with the right know how that you think are really valuable to, you know, dark web threat intelligence understanding?

Steph: Big that, uh, when I first got started years and years and years ago, and it’s still around dark dot fail, type that in your, in your tour browser, honestly. This is a, I give anybody who’s like, I’m curious about the dark web, but I’m also afraid, right? Understood. There are risks. Dark. fail is, is like a how to, it’s like lower than a one on one course, right?

Basically it gives you every listing of, okay, here’s a popular market. This is its onion site because onion sites are now at 57 characters. If I’m not mistaken, they used to be 22. We can memorize that. And it’s not like a google. com or it’s not like a authenticate. com. The URL doesn’t make sense. The onion ones are obfuscated for a reason.

Dark. fail lists them, lists if they’re up and down, lists if they’re temporarily unavailable, gives you the mirrors or the clear net site equivalents. And then another one I really love is ransomlook. io. That’s, of course, for ransomware, but that site also is amazing. Open source, type that in your browser.
It gives you every single ransomware group that’s out there, right? What their blog looks like, what are some of their latest victims is their server up and running. In some cases, where do they host their server? So there’s no perfect way to index the dark web. But there are starting points. Those 2 that I just named to really get you started.
And then that curiosity will take…

Shannon: over. I think that’s great to just recognize, you know, even like a tool like dark L is that, you know, a lot of the work can be done for you, but you can still utilize, you know, the intelligence and the information.

Steph: Yeah. And go, you know, whatever your provider is. We like analysts love writing and blogging and be like, this is what I discovered, right?

Go check out blogs from any company that has a dark web focused. If you’re curious, if you’re curious, they have wonderful insight, wonderful how to’s. And then generally they keep it short and sweet, right? Because we’re all busy. We don’t have enough hours in the day. So we’re not going to give you a PhD level thesis of this dark web actor.

We’re going to give you the nitty gritty. Here’s some IOCs, here’s some mitigation, Good luck, right? That’s what we’re going to try to do. So

Jeff: yeah, IOC indicator of compromise. There’s my value. Acronym value. That’s my value. You’re a cyber security linguist, Jeff. Or a linguist. Well, Steph, thank you for joining us today. And thank you to dark owl for letting you join us today. That was great. Much appreciated. Uh, and thank you to our audience for joining us. You can view transcripts and episode info on our website, authentic8.com slash needle stack. That’s authentic with the number eight and be sure to let us know your thoughts on social at needlestack pod and to like, and subscribe wherever you’re listening today and please tune in again next time for needle stack.

Steph: Thank you guys so much.

Learn more about the DarkOwl and Authentic8 partnership here.

Threat Intelligence RoundUp: April

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on May 1, 2024. Posted in Blog.

May 01, 2024

Our analyst team shares a few articles each week in our email newsletter which goes every Thursday. Make sure to register! This blog highlights those articles in order of what was the most popular in our newsletter – what our readers found the most intriguing. Stay tuned for a recap every month. We hope sharing these resources and news articles emphasizes the importance of cybersecurity and sheds light on the latest in threat intelligence.

1. Malicious PowerShell script pushing malware looks AI-written – Bleeping Computer

A March 2024 email campaign targeting German organizations was possibly authored by initial access broker TA547 AKA Scully Spider. The script loads the Rhadamanthys infostealer, which can steal cookies, browser and clipboard information, and more system metadata. As the security community studied the malicious code that is used in the script, they noted a hashtag used in coding comments, along with very verbose comments, indicating that AI or a non-human entity possibly authored the code. Read article.

2. U.S. Treasury Sanctions Iranian Firms and Individuals Tied to Cyber Attacks – The Hacker News

The US Treasury sanctioned several Iranian individuals and front companies who have been targeting the US on behalf of the Iranian Government. Their operations used spear phishing and social engineering to target US military veterans, US defense contractors, and other US government entities. Full article here.

3. UnitedHealth confirms it paid ransomware gang to stop data leak – Bleeping Computer

United Health publicly admitted that they paid BlackCat/AlphV ransomware actors in February 2024 to prevent the sale of private healthcare data to criminal actors. Payment activity was confirmed by the public transaction on the blockchain as a Bitcoin payment to the wallet used by BlackCat ransomware gang was visible. Read article.

4. Indian Government Rescues 250 Citizens Forced into Cybercrime in Cambodia – The Hacker News

India’s government issued a public statement and update about the rescue of 250 Indian nationals who went to Cambodia under the pretense of employment but were then forced to participate in cybercrime. In what some dubbed “cyber slavery”, organized crime groups are luring people to Cambodia and other countries with false employment opportunities, and then forcing them to create thousands of social media accounts to use for various purposes, such as gambling, crypto fraud, romance schemes, and more. If the trapped individuals didn’t meet their quota of accounts created, the cybercrime groups denied them food and sleep. Other hotspots observed for this kind of activity include Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines. Read more.

5. DPRK hacking groups breach South Korean defense contractors – Bleeping Computer

Targeting technological information, North Korean hacking groups including Lazarus and Kimsuky used extant vulnerabilities to plant malware that sent data back to their cloud servers and was used by the North Korean government. One group accessed the account of an employee who worked with defense subcontractors, while another took advantage of an email server vulnerability. Read more.

6. US Health Dept warns hospitals of hackers targeting IT help desks – Bleeping Computer

The US Department of Health and Human Services issued a public warning this week, concerning social engineering techniques used by threat actors to go after IT desks of the health sector. In these operations, threat actors will call health organizations using a local number of the area they are targeting. They’ll provide details of the organization which are stolen, providing actual corporate ID and/or social security numbers procured in malicious cyber operations. By providing this real information to the IT department, they appear legitimate and then the helpdesk enrolls the threat actor device into corporate multi-factor authentication, allowing deep access to corporate information. Malicious actors then change ACH information regarding payments gain access to corporate email accounts and continue social engineering. Read more.

7. Russia charges suspects behind theft of 160,000 credit cards – Bleeping Computer

Six Russian individuals were recently charged by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office. The men were charged with skimming 160,000 carss — using malware to steal credit card and other payment details – throughout the past seven years. The group didn’t use the stolen cards instead selling them on various dark web platforms for profit. Article here.

8. Cybercriminals Targeting Latin America with Sophisticated Phishing Scheme – The Hacker News

ZIP files are currently being used to deliver malicious files which appear as an invoice, targeting Spanish-speakers in LATAM. The files redirect the user to another domain, newly set up by the malicious actors. This redirection activates a script that then takes metadata from systems and checks for anti-virus software, collecting system information to use and further malicious operations. Read article here.

9. Scammers offer cash to phone carrier staff to swap SIM cards – SC Media

Cyber actors are cold-contacting employees of various US cell phone companies and offering them cash in exchange for their participation in SIM swapping operations. In SIM swapping incidents, actors fool a wireless carrier, such as Verizon or T-Mobile (who were both targeted in this latest campaign) into rerouting services to a device controlled by the criminals themselves. Once the “swap” is completed, the victims lose access to most personal accounts and personal data attached to the cell phone account is also stolen and used in other malicious operations. Read more.

Make sure to register for our weekly newsletter to get access to what our analysts are reading on a weekly basis.

Utilizing DarkOwl’s Darknet Data for Enhanced Darknet Monitoring of Leaked Credentials

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 30, 2024. Posted in Products and Use Cases.

DarkOwl’s robust darknet data enables our customer, Silobreaker, to provide their customers enriched monitoring of deep, dark web and dark web adjacent sites to help identify risk at scale and drive better decision-making.

Want to understand how DarkOwl darknet data can provide your organization with more robust threat intelligence? Contact us.

Unveiling Insurance Fraud on the Dark Web

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 25, 2024. Posted in Blog.

April 25, 2024

Cyber Insurance has become a hot topic in recent years. As DarkOwl has previously documented, frequent attacks against organizations mean that there is ever increasing demand for coverage which assists in reducing the negative financial impacts and risks of conducting activities on the internet.

One of the things that cyber insurance can cover is extortion payments associated with ransomware attacks. As ransomware attacks are expected to continue to increase during 2024, with more and more groups adopting double-extortion techniques, it is prudent for organizations to explore their insurance options.

However, insurance carriers are not immune from cyberattacks and can also fall victim to attacks and credential loss. As a third-party supplier, their data can also be exposed through the ransomware attacks of their customers. In this blog we explore this exposure.

Ransomware

The term “Insurance” appears in over 100,000 documents linked to ransomware activity in DarkOwl’s Vision platform. Ransomware groups such as CL0P, Medusa, BlackBasta and 0mega to name just a few have published documents from victims which include insurance information.

The Dunghill Leak group, published on their leak site details of a UK-based transportation company called Go-Ahead Group who they alleged they had obtained data from. They provided descriptions of the data as well as sample images of the documents. They claimed that this included details of insurance claims made by the company. One of the sample documents they provided appears to be related to medical insurance.

Figure 1: Stolen document from Go-Ahead Group

Insurance carriers and providers themselves are also not immune from ransomware attacks. The ransomware group BlackBasta posted information relating to an insurance marketing firm named LeClair. They provide marketing services to insurance brokers. All of the data relating to this organization was published on the leak site of BlackBasta and according to the site has been viewed over 3000 times.

Figure 2: LeClair sample data on BlackBast leak site

Another insurance provider, Delaware Life Insurance Company appeared to be a victim of the group Ransom House. All data relating to this organization was disclosed including a file tree of all documents obtained. The group claimed to have stolen 1.4TB of data from the organization as well as being able to download this is full they also provided proof which contains confidential documents, health records, and pricing information.

Figures 3 and 4: RansomHouse Leak site and proof of documents listed

The CL0p ransomware group, when posting data for one of their victims, a university, detailed that the victim had used their insurance company to negotiate. They stated that they were cheap and the negotiator was bad. Despite the claim that the university offered to pay $950,000 the full data was still leaked. This highlights how insurance providers interact with ransomware groups and their review of the activity.

Figure 5: Post on CL0p leak site from DarkOwl Vision

Leaks

Insurance companies can also appear in other types of data leaks, with information relating to the insurance provider appearing in leaks. This can include email addresses, locations, passwords, and names of employees.

The leak etenders.gov.za, of a government service in South Africa which documents tenders for government initiatives, included information relating to insurance providers including their telephone numbers and email address.

Figure 6: etenders.gov.za leak

Data purported to be from Farm Bureau Insurance – Tennessee was posted on the Telegram channel BF Repo V3 Files, a backup repository for data leaks from BreachForums, on January 20, 2024. Data exposed included full names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, vehicle information, and dates of birth. The leak appeared to include customer information and the cars that had been insured and the broker.

Figure 7: fbitn.com data leak

The naz.api is reported to be one of the largest credential stuffing lists released and was originally posted in September 9, 2023 on well known darkweb forum BreachForums. According to that post, the database was created by extracting data from stealer logs, and contains over 1 billion unique records of saved logins and passwords in users’ browsers. Infostealer logs are files produced when a trojan is installed on a system that collects information from the infected system.

Searching though this data, almost 700 results were identified which included the statefarm.com domain, indicating that these records likely belong to employees of StateFarm. The data included websites that the addresses had visited as well as the password associated with this account. These types of leaks could give threat actors access to accounts which may lead to a network intrusion and highlight why it is so important for organizations and individuals to practice good password hygiene.

Insurance Fraud

It would be remiss to review insurance on the darknet and not touch on insurance fraud. Although we do not always see the direct activity of fraud, we do see guides and tutorials being offered as well as documentation being sold that can assist an individual in conducting insurance fraud.

Figure 8: Guide for sale on the dark web

Posts on Telegram offer insurance documents for sale, likely to be used to conduct fraud operations.

Figure 9: Telegram channel Skimming Central

As well as actors claiming they are able to produce car insurance documents so individuals do not need to insure their cars.

Figure 10: Post on Telegram channel Bazaar Lounge

A post on the dark web marketplace nifheim.world offers insurance documents as well as other counterfeit documents.

Figure 11: Post on Nifheim.world

Conclusion

Although cyber security insurance is an ever growing business, adopted to protect organizations from the financial and reputational damage a cyberattack can cause, insurance companies themselves are not immune from the threat of cyber attacks. Whether it be data leaks, ransomware attacks, or the continued threat of insurance fraud, insurance companies too need to be vigilant to the threat of attacks to ensure they protect themselves and their customers. As insurance covers large swaths of our lives from our vehicles, houses, sentimental items and health they can hold sensitive information on their customers, it is therefore imperative that this data is secured.

Curious how DarkOwl can help? Contact Us.

Cybercriminal Arrests and Disruptions: 2023 Look Back

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 23, 2024. Posted in Blog.

April 23, 2024

Although cyber actors continue to successfully target victims globally, extorting and fraudulently obtaining large sums of money, Law enforcement are becoming increasingly adept at capturing these cybercriminals and holding them to justice.

Throughout 2023 there were a number of notable arrests and prosecutions. In this blog, DarkOwl analysts summarize what are arguably the biggest law enforcement actions of 2023 globally.

Conor Brian Fitzpatrick AKA POMPOMPURIN

In March 2023, an individual named Conor Fitzpatrick was arrested by the FBI in upstate New York. He was accused of being the administrator of popular dark web forum BreachForums.

Fitzpatrick was charged with hacking, wire fraud, and possession of child abuse imagery. He admitted to the majority of these offenses upon his arrest and was facing up to 40 years in prison. In January 2024, he was sentenced to 20 years’ supervised release. Fitzpatrick will have no access to the internet for the first year of his home confinement and must register with state sex offender registries.

Prosecutors said the following:

“By creating a platform for hackers and fraudsters to connect and conduct business, the defendant made it possible for BreachForums members to commit exponentially more crimes and more sophisticated crimes than any could have done alone.”

However, soon after Fitzpatrick’s arrest, BreachForum was back up, being run by his reported partner Baphomet. It remains to be seen how this will continue.

The Hive Ransomware Gang’s Takedown

In January 2023, the FBI announced they had successfully disrupted the Hive Ransomware group that has targeted more than 1,500 victims in over 80 countries around the world, including hospitals, school districts, financial firms, and critical infrastructure.

Since 2022, the FBI had successfully infiltrated the servers for the group and was able to provide decryption keys to their victims. This led to them, in partnership with European partners successfully seizing the infrastructure used by the group. Unlike disruptions which were attempted by Law Enforcement later in 2023 and into 2024, this appeared to disrupt the group.

In December 2023, French authorities arrested a Russian national in Paris for allegedly helping the Hive ransomware gang with laundering their victims’ ransom payments. They also seized €570,000 worth of cryptocurrency. This highlights that even after infrastructure is seized, authorities globally will continue to hunt the individuals perpetrating the crimes.

Denis Gennadievich Kulkov

Kulkov was identified as the mastermind behind the Try2Check credit card checking operation. In May 2023, the DOJ unsealed an indictment charging Kulkov with access device fraud, computer intrusion, and money laundering in connection with his operation of Try2Check, the primary service offering “card-checking” to cybercriminals in the stolen credit card trade. Kulkov reportedly earned over $18 million from the scheme.

According to the DOJ:

`“The Try2Check platform catered to cybercriminals who purchased and sold stolen credit card numbers in bulk on the Internet, offering criminals the ability to quickly determine what percentage of the cards were valid and active. As such, Try2Check was a primary enabler of the trade in stolen credit card information, processing at least tens of millions of card numbers every year.”`

Despite being wanted by the U.S. Secret Service, he remains in Russia, beyond U.S. authorities’ reach.

Interpol’s Arrests in Africa

In April 2023, Interpol’s Africa Cyber Surge II operation led to the arrest of multiple individuals and the seizure of assets worth millions across Africa. These operations targeted groups involved in various cyber crimes including business email compromise (BEC), romance scams, and credit card fraud. They were also able to seize, or takedown infrastructure linked to the group’s operations.

The operation led to the following:

Cameroon: 3 suspects arrested for $850,000 online art scam.
Nigeria: 1 individual arrested for defrauding a Gambian victim.
Mauritius: 2 money mules arrested linked to messaging platform scams.
Gambia: 185 malicious IPs taken down through proactive measures and partnerships.
Cameroon: 2 darknet sites shut down by authorities.
Kenya: 615 malware hosters taken down by authorities.

Ragnar Locker Ransomware

In October 2023, Europol announced that it had disrupted the infrastructure associated with the Ragnar Locker Ransomware group. In addition, French authorities arrested a key individual linked to the gang, who was said to be a central developer. Further individuals were also interviewed in Spain and Latvia. Two suspects associated with the ransomware crew were previously arrested from Ukraine in 2021. A year later, another member was apprehended in Canada.

This highlights that the most effective way to take down a ransomware group is not just to seize the infrastructure but also arrest the individuals behind it.

Warzone RAT Malware Operation

In February 2023, the FBI announced that it had dismantled the Warzone RAT operation, arresting two individuals associated with the malware – in Nigeria and Malta. They also indicated that they had seized multiple domains.

The Warzone RAT malware, was a Remote Access Trojan (RAT), which enabled cybercriminals to browse victims’ file systems, take screenshots, record keystrokes, steal victims’ usernames and passwords, and watch victims through their web cameras, without their knowledge or permission.

Operation ‘SpecTor’

In May 2023, the FBI spearheaded 288 arrests across multiple countries, taking down the dark web Monopoly marketplace responsible for selling drugs. It was reported to be the largest international operation against darknet trafficking of fentanyl and opioids. The operation also seized 117 firearms, 850 kilograms of drugs that include 64 kilograms of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics, and $53.4 million in cash and virtual currencies.

Lapsus$ Arrests

In August 2023, two teenagers in the United Kingdom were found guilty of conducting cyberattacks against Uber, Nvidia, Rockstar Games, and Okta, among others as part of the criminal gang Lapsus$. Arion Kurtaj, an 18 year old from the UK was sentenced to indefinite detention in a hospital.

As well as hacking major companies he was also accused of blackmailing employees and causing millions worth of damage to the companies that he targeted. He also leaked data that he had stolen from them. Another individual was also found guilty of similar charges but could not be named due to his age. This case highlighted that young individuals that are perpetrating hacking crimes results in difficulty prosecuting them because of their juvenile status.

Conclusion

Only some of the law enforcement action that took place in 2023 are described in this blog. Law enforcement are becoming more and more successful in their operations against cybercriminals both in terms of arrests and seizure of infrastructure – including on the dark web.

However, events this year (2024) have already shown that some law enforcement action is not enough to take down groups, particularly ransomware groups. Notable activity against BlackCat/ALPHV and LockBit have shown to only take the groups out for a matter of days, when no arrests take place. BlackCat are reported to have recently conducted an exit scam after a high-profile ransomware was paid, and Lockbit seem intent on revenge after their recent skirmish with the law.

It is unlikely that law enforcement will be able to eradicate cybercrime and the game whack-a-mole will continue. However, the events of 2023 show that the law enforcement bodies globally are taking action and standing up to the criminals creating dire consequences for some, which will hopefully deter future threat actors.

Interested in learning how DarkOwl can help with our darknet use case? Contact us!

Cracking the Code: Exploring the Sophistication of CAPTCHAs

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 18, 2024. Posted in Blog.

April 18, 2024

The darknet has long been a place for criminal actors to operate with the hope of anonymity – they utilize forums to discuss nefarious and extremist activities, use marketplaces to buy and sell illicit goods, and more. In efforts to stop security researchers and law enforcement from accessing and scraping information from these sites threat actors are using increasingly sophisticated methods. In this blog, we explore some of the more complex CAPTCHAs we have seen threat actors using on darknet sites. Could you solve them?

What is a CAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. This is done in order to deter Bots and Spam from accessing certain portions of online content. The acronym loosely comes from the phrase; “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

The tool was developed by two groups working in tandem in the late 90s and was put to the task of protecting sites soon after. The first form required a user to enter a sequence of letters and numbers in a distorted image. Since then, comparable tools like Cloudflare and others have been employed for similar reasons, and CAPTCHAs have continued to develop and become more complex. Google’s reCAPTCHA and the independent hCaptcha have emerged as the most commonly used tools to ensure that the person on the other end of the browser is human.

CAPTCHAs on the Darknet

The black markets and community platforms on the darknet have developed a lot of different versions of these CAPTCHAs, which are also sometimes known as “Turing Tests” and have become pretty ingenious with their various methods of preventing automated traffic on their sites.

Some of the puzzles are colorful, funny or intentionally misleading, and have definitively become a way that the various Markets and darknet operators express themselves; but not all are created equally. Some require logic, needing a human to parse out directions in the text, while others are simple. Typically, the more advanced the CAPTCHA, the more involved the other protocols of a darknet market or forum will be. Often times, they are also multi-layered, using the usual method of geometric or graphical interfaces to confuse a would-be bot attacker alongside text and other information that explains what to do. Over time, when the CAPTCHA fails to do its job, it is improved, upgraded and deployed to prevent their sites from getting crawled.

Of course, not all sites on the darknet are in English. There are many sites which represent countries across the globe, and many of the CAPTCHAS function in the native languages of the market. An emerging trend around the darknet are CAPTCHAS intentionally implemented in different languages so that the user must manually adjust to be able to access what’s on the other side.

Examples

In the following section, we explore some of the more interesting CAPTCHAs frequently found on the darknet.

The below image from the Russian market, OMG!OMG!, requires the user to input the characters shown in the box, in the traditional way that CAPTCHAs have operated. However, this site is Russian and it therefore requires you to input your response in the Cyrillic language. If the user is not a Russian native or resident, this will require them to change their keyboard settings or copy their input from a Cyrillic character tool.

The following CAPTCHA asks the “human” to pick the odd one out. It shows various images on a confusing background. In this case, the plant would be the odd one out as all the others are animals. This appeared on the site RuTOR.

The marketplace Kerberos requires you to complete two puzzles, one asks you to identify what is in the image from a selection of answers in a drop-down menu, to make this more difficult the pixels in the image constantly change. The other asks you to select the correct characters from a phrase, again using a drop-down menu. You have to complete this in a given amount of time otherwise the CAPTCHA will expire, and you will have to start over again.

The below CAPTCHA from the seized and now-defunct Kingdom Marketplace asks you to fill in the characters in the image, but it also highlights the characters that should appear in the URL to ensure that you are not on a scam site and that you are not being phished.

Another methodology that has been adopted by darknet operators is asking you to fill in the characters, but it will highlight which character to enter based on the box that you are filling in – meaning that the characters are not sequential as shown in the image below.

Another example is shown below where the circle will move to different characters as you enter in more. In some cases, you are able to correct your work, other times you have to reload the CAPTCHA, but these more interactive versions are fairly commonplace among the various dark web sites, many of which are tailored versions of each other.

The below image shows an example of a CAPTCHA that requires you to solve a math problem in order to be admitted into the site. More and more sites are using sometimes quite complex math problems to make it more difficult for bots to enter the site.

Others focus more on images. Asking you to identify which image is missing. In the below image, in order to enter the site you have to figure out which hieroglyph is missing.

Another, from AlphaBay, will test how good you are at telling the time, but complicates the task by adding shapes to the clock face that make it very difficult to see the accurate time. You are also only given 1 minute to complete the test before it will reset.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have shown you the wide range of CAPTCHAs that are used across darknet sites to protect them. CAPTCHAs are used to ensure that bots are not entering a site, usually for the purposes of crawling the site or to flood the site for malicious purposes or to ensure access, such as with ticket purchasing bots. They are widely utilized on the dark web to not only protect the sites from DDOS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attack) but also to protect the users and the information on those sites from security researchers and law enforcement. This can make it particularly difficult for some users to access the darknet.

The team at DarkOwl routinely deals with these CAPTCHAs and are able to access the dark web in order to assist those who seek to protect their information and bring an end to online criminal activity.

Learn more how DarkOwl’s expertise in the darknet can help your organization. Contact Us.

DarkOwl Returns to The International Cybersecurity Forum

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 16, 2024. Posted in Blog.

April 16, 2023

At the end of March, DarkOwl participated in FIC, The International Cybersecurity Forum, in Lille, France for the second year in a row.

Now in its 16th year, FIC proudly asserts itself as the preeminent gathering in the realm of digital security and trust. Positioned as a cornerstone event in the European cybersecurity landscape, FIC distinguishes itself by fostering an inclusive environment that unites every facet of the cybersecurity ecosystem. From end consumers to service providers, law enforcement agencies to academic institutions and consultants, FIC’s scope encompasses them all.

With a dual mission, FIC addresses the operational hurdles of cybersecurity while also championing the development of a digital future aligned with European values and interests. This holistic approach ensures that attendees and sponsors gain comprehensive insights into the state of cybersecurity in Europe and have the opportunity to glean knowledge from industry luminaries.

At FIC, the over 20,000 attendees have unparalleled access to both end-users and providers of solutions and services, facilitating discussions on both tactical challenges and strategic imperatives in cybersecurity.

“Ready for AI?”

The theme of FIC 2023, was “Ready for AI?”. According to a recent report by Forbes, the artificial intelligence (AI) market is projected to reach $407 billion by 2027 and 64% of businesses expect AI to increase overall productivity.

To build relationships and trust, and share the value and essential need of darknet data for any cybersecurity posture, David Alley, CEO of DarkOwl FZE based in Dubai and Magnus Svärd, Director of Strategic Partnerships, based out of DarkOwl’s headquarters in Denver, CO, represented DarkOwl at FIC.

In addition to networking and conversations at the booth, top minds of the space have the platform to share thought leadership, innovations and the latest in the cyber security space. Speakers were present from all across Europe and the world: France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, the United States, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Canada, Singapore, Poland, Norway, Romania, Mexico, South Africa, China, Thailand, and more. Topics ranged from industrial infrastructure cybersecurity, quantum-resistant cryptography, identity security, international cybersecurity law, AI and counterterrorism, digital crime, social engineering, cybercrime trends, trust and safety in the cloud, and many more. Many of the presentations throughout the three days were not just thought leadership, but also practical presentations – showing the “how to.”

David and Magnus both expressed that they experienced “non-stop traffic” and kept busy on the show floor throughout the event meeting new prospects and showcasing our industry leading darknet platform, Vision UI, and meeting with several current clients and partners. With many current clients present, the DarkOwl team was able to spend time understanding how we can best optimize and elevate our current partnerships and how we can continue to provide the most value as their darknet data provider, focusing on continuing to build up our customer relationships and building trust. The DarkOwl team is confident there will be many follow ups and successful connections coming from our participation at FIC and looks forward attending The International Cybersecurity Forum in 2025.

DarkOwl looks forward to continuing their presence at several international events in the future. You can see what conferences we will be attending coming up and request time to chat with us here.

Tax Season Alert: How Cybercriminals Target Your Taxes and What You Can Do About It

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 15, 2024. Posted in Blog.

April 15, 2024

As the tax deadline fast approaches, it is important for us all to be aware of the risks that are posed to us by cyber criminals at this time of year. Whether it be identity theft from tax forms, targeting of tax filing providers, or fraudulent returns, there are a number of ways that the tax system can be exploited for criminal financial gain.

As we do each year, DarkOwl analysts have reviewed the activity of cyber criminals on the dark web and dark web adjacent sites and messaging platforms to highlight some of the activities cyber criminals are participating in.

Selling Tax Refund Methodologies

Fraudsters on the dark web will sell step by step guides on how to conduct specific types of identity fraud. The below advertisement from Telegram is soliciting users to contact an individual to buy a tax refund methodology that allegedly bypasses the ID.ME facial recognition verification method that has recently been implemented by the IRS as a fraud prevention method.

DarkOwl analysts have also noted several instances where the technology vendor, ID.ME, has been targeted on stealer log marketplace websites like 2Easy or Russian Market, which may allow threat actors to access accounts of users for fraudulent purposes, as stealer logs usually contain usernames, passwords and session cookies.

Another Telegram post claims to provide buyers with a guide to obtain a Federal Tax refund claiming to offer advice on what bank account you should cash out to and what method to use. They claim that a refund will be guaranteed.

Phishing Templates

ID.ME is commonly targeted across the darknet. DarkOwl analysts have observed fraudsters selling phishing admin panels for sites like ID.ME, PayPal, and USPS on Telegram as well, meaning that they are able to collect the data of unsuspecting victims who believe they are adding their credentials to a legitimate site. Access to these accounts could mean that a threat actor is able to steal someone’s identity whether that be for tax fraud or other types of financial fraud.

Selling Tax Forms

DarkOwl analysts identified threat actors on the popular carding forum 2crd and found an actor advertising counterfeit identification documents, and also included tax return information and common tax forms which could be used to impersonate an individual. It is unclear if these documents are fraudulent in nature or had been stolen from a legitimate owner.

Similar postings were found on another site, ProCRD, offering W2 forms with a 1040 and full info. These documents are being sold for as little as $10. These appear to be sold as part of Fullz, which is a term used by dark web actors to indicate they have the full information for an individual – this usually includes financial information and identity details to be used to conduct identity fraud or financial crime.

A post on a Telegram channel claimed to have W2 forms, tax returns, and pay stubs for sale as well as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information used to conduct fraud. DarkOwl analysts note this advertisement relates to an automated Telegram bot where one can purchase these illicit items. Telegram bots are an effective way to sell illicit items on Telegram because it maintains a certain level of anonymity between the seller and end user.

Another Telegram advertisement was identified which sells similar products, but notes all of the sensitive documents being sold are from other countries like the UAE and European countries. This highlights that it is not just the US that is subject to this type of fraud.

A third similar example from Telegram is shown below. It is important to note, as shown in all of these examples that tax forms are typically sold with other identity fraud products like fullz, credit card numbers, etc. This allows the fraudsters to be more convincing in their fraudulent activities as they have more information which makes them appear legitimate.

The tax fraud community is considerable on Telegram, a search across DarkOwl’s dark web collection for the mention of “tax refund” on Telegram resulted in nearly 100,000 hits. However, Telegram fraudsters will typically also advertise across the darknet and deep web from sites like Royal or Russian Market to ProCRD or WWH Club – often moving to private messaging on Telegram for security.

Telegram is a major medium/vehicle for all types of identity fraud in 2024 because the platform allows for increased security, anonymity (between sellers and end users), as well as more efficient transactions through automated chat bots, rather than processing transactions directly on a .onion site. DarkOwl analysts therefore identify a large amount of this activity on Telegram but cross over from other dark web sites highlighting that similar communities are active on both.

Tax Filing Providers

Many individuals will use services in order to file their taxes, as it often removes some of the stress associated with tax season, and hopefully ensures that you maximize your return. However, these organizations are also targeted at this time of year.

A review of Stealer Logs collected by DarkOwl highlighted several instances in the last several months where credentials for these organizations were stolen. Allowing actors to access sensitive information and conduct fraudulent filings.

There are also Telegram channels which offer buyers the chance to obtain tax refunds through TurboTax.

Ransomware

Ransomware attacks continue to be prevalent in 2024, with many companies subject to attack, one group PLAY, like many other groups, post their victims details on their leak site as well as details about what information they have relating to them.

In almost all of the posts relating to their victims the group claim to have information relating to taxes, likely both the company taxes as well as employees’ details. Some of them also claim to have evidence of tax evasion.

If/when these details are released by the ransomware group that information can be used by other threat actors to conduct other types of fraud.

Conclusion

Tax season is just another thing that can be used by threat actors to commit fraud against individuals and companies. However, financial fraud can be committed at any time of the year and it is important to protect your personal information by practicing good cyber hygiene, do not reuse passwords, and be vigilant to phishing and malvertising campaigns.

Learn more about how DarkOwl can help your organization detect and investigate fraud by contacting us here.

Q1 2024: Product Updates and Highlights

Written by DarkOwl Content Team on April 11, 2024. Posted in Blog.

April 11, 2024

Read on for highlights from DarkOwl’s Product Team for Q1, including new exciting product features. The team is starting the new year off strong and looks forward to an exciting 2024!

Enhanced Forum Structuring

The team made upgrades to forum structuring within the platform, empowering users with unparalleled insights into darknet forums. This latest development enables users to navigate darknet conversations in a structured manner, presenting discussions in chronological order for accurate and effortless reconstruction. The upgraded search capabilities further empower users to pinpoint relevant information swiftly, facilitating comprehensive analysis.

Access to forum data in a structured format is particularly crucial for organizations seeking to bolster their cybersecurity defenses and proactively address emerging threats.

Figures 1 and 2 (left to right): Previous view of a thread versus new enhanced view

Last month, the DarkOwl Marketing team sat down with DarkOwl’s Director of Client Engagement, Caryn Farino and Product Manager, Josh Berman to learn more. You can read that interview here.

Access the Darknet Safely and Securely Directly from DarkOwl Vision

This quarter the team released “Direct to Darknet” within Vision UI in partnership with Authentic8, a leading provider of cloud-based secure browsing solutions. This feature allows users to further investigate Vision UI search results on forums, marketplaces, and other Onion sites. This can be helpful for an investigation to view the original website, view images or advertisements that may be on the sites, take a screenshot for reporting, and more. By combining DarkOwl’s comprehensive darknet database and monitoring capabilities with Authentic8’s Silo cloud browser, which is known for its secure browsing environment, organizations will gain unprecedented visibility and protection against cyber threats surfacing on the darknet.

Figures 3 and 4 (left to right): Vision UI result and associated darknet result for guns in Miami

Context and Enrichments

The team has significantly increased context information for leaks, actors, ransomware, and has added features to make doing research easier than ever.

On the new Leak Explore page, customers can see information about our leak dataset and get information about an individual leak. Customers can look for a leak that we have in our system, see if it’s relevant to them, pivot to the filetree or original posting, and look at the underlying data. We highlight some of leaks we collected this quarter in the next section – all of the information highlighted below is taken directly from this feature.

Tox ID search and Compare features (Tools/CVEs) have been added to Actor Explore profiles. The compare feature on the Tools and CVEs page allows users to see commonalities between actor groups, including timelines and any commonalities between actor groups.

Site Context on Ransomware search results provide site names, relevant dates, cipher information, and pivoting options to Actor Explore or further research, all provided by the DarkOwl analyst team.
The DarkOwl analyst team has added several new Search Block translations in Arabic, Russian, and Chinese languages.

More Vision UI Updates

Multi-Factor Authentication login option for customers
Alert section enhancements to delete single alerts and display Category in the main table. This makes alerts easier to use and more functional. “Category” has been added as a new column on the Alerts page to more effectively use these tags to organize alerts. One way to use these tags is to classify alerts by organization or category such as “Credentials,” to view related alerts from multiple monitors together.

Collection Stats

This quarter showed tremendous growth in data collection. The team had 5% growth quarter over quarter in added Tor documents, 27% growth in I2P documents, 31% growth in ZeroNet documents, 15% growth in records from Telegram, to highlight a few.

Highlights

Chat platform collection continues to grow as darknet threat actors migrate to darknet adjacent sites. Currently, the platform has coverage of more than 22,000 channels across multiple chat platforms.

The team added 117 data leaks this quarter alone, many of which were requests from customers, which the team always prioritizes. A select few of those are highlighted in the next section – all gathered from the DarkOwl analyst team.

Actor Explore continues to grow – with a total of 307 actor profiles able to searched, compared, and researched within the platform.

Leaks of Interest Collected

As mentioned, the descriptions below are all available in our Leak Context product feature.

Naz.api

The naz.api leak was made available on BreachForums, on January 15, 2024. According to the post, it is a 35 GB collection of public URLs, usernames and passwords. The post also notes that it was originally on xkey.info but was taken down for allegedly not being the real naz.api leak. naz.api is one of the largest credential stuffing lists originally posted in September 9, 2023 by 0x64. According to that post, the database was created by extracting data from stealer logs, and contains over 1 billion unique records of saved logins and passwords in users’ browsers. The post also notes that the original naz.api dataset was donated to 0t.rocks. Infostealer logs are files produced when a trojan is installed on a system that collects information from the infected system. Depending on the infostealer malware, the extracted data can include system information and browser session data (including autofills, credentials, financial information, cookies, browser history, etc.). Some malware will also capture stored local files and install keylogging on the system to exfiltrate data outside of the browser sessions.

USA 500K SSN

Data purported to be of US Social Security numbers was posted on LeakBase, a hacking forum, on September 11, 2023. Data exposed includes full names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and physical addresses. Analyst Note: Three leaks with “500K SSN” included in the leak name were identified during a recent review, with each leak containing the same data format. These leaks may have been parsed from a larger historical leak and reposted in several parts. For this data leak, DarkOwl noted references to the same sample data dating back to December 2021, supporting this leak contains older content. Notwithstanding, given the presence of social security numbers, the recirculation of this data is of concern.

DC Health Link

Data purported to be from DC Health Link was posted on BreachForums, a hacking forum, on July 22, 2023. According to the post, this breach occurred in March 2023. Data exposed includes member names and IDs, policy information, social security numbers, full names, dates of birth, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, employment information, genders, medical records, and other personal identifiers such as ethnicity and citizenship status. Analyst Note: Review of the original post on Breach Forums on March 9, 2023, indicates the original leaker was thekilob. This is further supported by commentary in the Telegram Channel, BreachForums Chat, where they indicate thekilob was removed as a reference from the original post. Analyst Note 2: DC Health Link made a public statement about the breach on their website on March 14, 2023, detailing information about the breach.

AT&T

Data purported to be from AT&T was posted on BreachForums, a hacking forum, on March 17, 2024. According to the post, AT&T’s database was hacked by ShinyHunters in 2021 and contains 70 million lines. Data exposed includes names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, social security numbers, and dates of birth. Analyst Note: According to the information provided in the post, in order to link the SSN and DOB for each record, one will need to grep and replace the encrypted values for these fields in the master file with unencrypted value of these fields provided in a separate file. Analyst Note 2: DarkOwl notes to replicate this connection in the raw indexed files, a search will need to be run using the encrypted value in quotes as the keyword to locate both documents in the leak (i.e. “1lpxFgIp7MlY” would result in both the document that contains the full record with the SSN encrypted value and the file which contains the decrypted SSN value). Analyst Note 3: A high level review of the data indicates the data is from customers in the United States. Analyst Note 4: Research in DarkOwl Vision indicates the data was initially posted for auction on August 22, 2021, for $80,000.