Andrew Appel and Susan Greenhalgh have a blog post on the insecurity of ES&S’s software authentication system:

It turns out that ES&S has bugs in their hash-code checker: if the “reference hashcode” is completely missing, then it’ll say “yes, boss, everything is fine” instead of reporting an error. It’s simultaneously shocking and unsurprising that ES&S’s hashcode checker could contain such a blunder and that it would go unnoticed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s federal certification process. It’s unsurprising because testing naturally tends to focus on “does the system work right when used as intended?” Using the system in unintended ways (which is what hackers would do) is not something anyone will notice.

Also:

Another gem in Mr. Mechler’s report is in Section 7.1, in which he reveals that acceptance testing of voting systems is done by the vendor, not by the customer. Acceptance testing is the process by which a customer checks a delivered product to make sure it satisfies requirements. To have the vendor do acceptance testing pretty much defeats the purpose.

Operation Dianxun Overview

In a recent report the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) Strategic Intelligence team disclosed an espionage campaign, targeting telecommunication companies, named Operation Diànxùn.

The tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used in the attack are like those observed in earlier campaigns publicly attributed to the threat actors RedDelta and Mustang Panda. Most probably this threat is targeting people working in the telecommunications industry and has been used for espionage purposes to access sensitive data and to spy on companies related to 5G technology.

While the initial vector for the infection is not entirely clear, the McAfee ATR team believes with a medium level of confidence that victims were lured to a domain under control of the threat actor, from which they were infected with malware which the threat actor leveraged to perform additional discovery and data collection. It is our belief that the attackers used a phishing website masquerading as the Huawei company career page.

Defensive Architecture Overview

So, how can I defend my organization as effectively as possible from an attack of this type, which involves different techniques and tactics and potential impact? To answer this question, we believe it is necessary to have a multi-layer approach and analyze the various steps, trying to understand the best way to deal with them one by one with an integrated security architecture. Below is a summary of how McAfee’s Security Architecture helps you to protect against the tactics and techniques used in Operation Dianxun.

The goal is to shift-left and block or identify a threat as soon as possible within the Kill Chain to limit any further damage. Shifting-left starts with MVISION Insights, which proactively collects intelligence on the threat and provides details on the indicators of compromise and the MITRE techniques used in the attack. MVISION Insights combines McAfee’s Threat Intelligence research with telemetry from your endpoint controls to reduce your attack surface against emerging threats. MVISION Insights tracks over 800+ Advanced Persistent Threat and Cyber Crime campaigns as researched by McAfee’s ATR team, including Operation Dianxun, sharing a quick summary of the threat, providing external resources, and a list of known indicators such as files, URLs, or IP addresses.

As a threat intelligence analyst or responder, you can drill down into the MVISION Insights interface to gather more specific information on the Operation Dianxun campaign, verify the associated severity, check for geographical prevalence and links to other sources of information. Moreover, MVISION Insights provides useful information like the McAfee products coverage with details of minimum AMCore version; this kind of information is handy to verify actual defensive capabilities within the enterprise and could raise the risk severity in case of weak coverage.

Additional information is available to further investigate on IoCs and MITRE Techniques associated to the campaign. IoCs can be also exported in STIX2 format to be ingested in other tools for automating responses or updating defenses.

The first step ahead of identification is to ensure our architecture can stop or identify the threat in the initial access vector. In this case, the initial delivery vector is a phishing attack so the web channel is therefore fundamental in the initial phase of the infection. McAfee Web Gateway and MVISION UCE provide multi-layer web vector protection with URL Reputation check, SSL decryption, and malware emulation capabilities for analyzing dangerous active Web content.

MVISION UCE also includes the capabilities of Remote Browser Isolation (RBI), the only solution that can provide 100% protection during web browsing. Remote Browser Isolation is indeed an innovative new technology that contains web browsing activity inside an isolated cloud environment in order to protect users from any malware or malicious code that may be hidden on a website. RBI technology provides the most powerful form of web threat protection available, eliminating the opportunity for malicious code to even touch the end user’s device.

The green square around the page means that the web content is isolated by RBI and provided safely through a rendered dynamic visual stream which delivers full browsing experience without risk of infection.

The second phase of exploitation and persistence results from execution on the victim endpoint of Flash-based artifacts malware and, later, DotNet payload. McAfee Endpoint Security running on the target endpoint protects against Operation Dianxun with an array of prevention and detection techniques. ENS Threat Prevention and ATP provides both signature and behavioral analysis capability which proactively detects the threat. ENS also leverages Global Threat Intelligence which is updated with known IoCs. For DAT based detections, the family will be reported as Trojan-Cobalt, Trojan-FSYW, Trojan-FSYX, Trojan-FSZC and CobaltStr-FDWE.

While the execution of the initial fake Flash installer acts mainly like a downloader, the DotNet payload contains several functions and acts as a utility to further compromise the machine. This is a tool to manage and download backdoors to the machine and configure persistence. Thus, the McAfee Endpoint Security Adaptive Threat Protection machine-learning engine triggers detection and blocks execution on its behavior-based analysis.

The last phase of the attack involves creating a backdoor for remote control of the victim via a Command and Control Server and Cobalt Strike Beacon. In this case, in addition to the detection capabilities present at the McAfee Endpoint Security level, detections and blocking features that can be activated on a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System solution such as McAfee NSP are important. NSP includes a Callback Detection engine and is able to detect and block anomalies in communication signals with C2 Servers.

Investigation and Threat Hunting with MVISION EDR

We demonstrated above how a well defended architecture can thwart and counteract such an attack in each single phase. McAfee Web Gateway and MVISON Unified Cloud Edge can stop the initial entry vector, McAfee Endpoint Protection Platform can block the dropper execution or disrupt the following malicious activities but, only by using MVISION EDR, can you get extensive visibility on the full kill chain.

On MVISION EDR we have the threat detection on the monitoring dashboard for the two different stages and processes of the attack.

Once alerted, the security analyst can dig into the Process Activity and understand behavior and indicators relative to what happened like:

The initial downloader payload flashplayer_install_cn.exe is executed directly by the user and spawned by svchost.exe.

At first it connects back to hxxp://update.flach.cn registering to the c2 and creates a new executable file, flash.exe, in the Windows/temp folder.

Then the sample checks the time and the geolocalization of the infected machine via a request to http://worldclockapi.com.

Next, it connects back to the fake Huawei website “hxxp:\update.careerhuawei.net” used for the initial phishing attack.

Finally, to further completion, you can also use MVISION EDR to search the indicators of compromise in Real-Time or Historically (up to 90 days) across the enterprise systems.

Looking for other systems with evidence of connection to the fake Huawei website:

HostInfo hostname, ip_address and NetworkFlow src_ip, proto, time, process, md5, user where NetworkFlow dst_ip equals “8.210.186.138”

Looking for indicators of the initial downloader payload linked to this campaign.

HostInfo and Files name, full_name, create_user_name, sha1, md5, sha256 where Files sha256 equals “422e3b16e431daa07bae951eed08429a0c4ccf8e37746c733be512f1a5a160a3” or Files sha256 equals “8489ee84e810b5ed337f8496330e69d6840e7c8e228b245f6e28ac6905c19f4a ” or Files sha256 equals “c0331d4dee56ef0a8bb8e3d31bdfd3381bafc6ee80b85b338cee4001f7fb3d8c” or Files sha256 equals “89a1f947b96b39bfd1fffd8d0d670dddd2c4d96f9fdae96f435f2363a483c0e1” or Files sha256 equals “b3fd750484fca838813e814db7d6491fea36abe889787fb7cf3fb29d9d9f5429” or Files sha256 equals “9ccb4ed133be5c9c554027347ad8b722f0b4c3f14bfd947edfe75a015bf085e5” or Files sha256 equals “4e7fc846be8932a9df07f6c5c9cbbd1721620a85c6363f51fa52d8feac68ff47” or Files sha256 equals “0f2e16690fb2ef2b5b4c58b343314fc32603364a312a6b230ab7b4b963160382” or Files sha256 equals “db36ad77875bbf622d96ae8086f44924c37034dd95e9eb6d6369cc6accd2a40d” or Files sha256 equals “8bd55ecb27b94b10cb9b36ab40c7ea954cf602761202546f9b9e163de1dde8eb” or Files sha256 equals “7de56f65ee98a8cd305faefcac66d918565f596405020178aee47a3bd9abd63c” or Files sha256 equals “9d4b4c39106f8e2fd036e798fc67bbd7b98284121724c0f845bca0a6d2ae3999” or Files sha256 equals “ac88a65345b247ea3d0cfb4d2fb1e97afd88460463a4fc5ac25d3569aea42597” or Files sha256 equals “37643f752302a8a3d6bb6cc31f67b8107e6bbbb0e1a725b7cebed2b79812941f” or Files sha256 equals “d0dd9c624bb2b33de96c29b0ccb5aa5b43ce83a54e2842f1643247811487f8d9” or Files sha256 equals “260ebbf392498d00d767a5c5ba695e1a124057c1c01fff2ae76db7853fe4255b” or Files sha256 equals “e784e95fb5b0188f0c7c82add9a3c89c5bc379eaf356a4d3876d9493a986e343” or Files sha256 equals “a95909413a9a72f69d3c102448d37a17659e46630999b25e7f213ec761db9e81” or Files sha256 equals “b7f36159aec7f3512e00bfa8aa189cbb97f9cc4752a635bc272c7a5ac1710e0b” or Files sha256 equals “4332f0740b3b6c7f9b438ef3caa995a40ce53b3348033b381b4ff11b4cae23bd”

Look back historically for domain name resolution and network connection to the involved indicators.

Summary

To defeat targeted threat campaigns like Operation Dianxun, defenders must build an adaptive and integrated security architecture which will make it harder for threat actors to succeed and increase resilience in the business. This blog highlights how to use McAfee’s security solutions to prevent, detect and respond to Operation Dianxun and attackers using similar techniques.

McAfee ATR is actively monitoring this campaign and will continue to update McAfee Insights and its social networking channels with new and current information. Want to stay ahead of the adversaries? Check out McAfee Insights for more information.

The post McAfee Defender’s Blog: Operation Dianxun appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

In this report the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) Strategic Intelligence team details an espionage campaign, targeting telecommunication companies, dubbed Operation Diànxùn.

In this attack, we discovered malware using similar tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to those observed in earlier campaigns publicly attributed to the threat actors RedDelta and Mustang Panda. While the initial vector for the infection is not entirely clear, we believe with a medium level of confidence that victims were lured to a domain under control of the threat actor, from which they were infected with malware which the threat actor leveraged to perform additional discovery and data collection. We believe with a medium level of confidence that the attackers used a phishing website masquerading as the Huawei company career page to target people working in the telecommunications industry.

We discovered malware that masqueraded as Flash applications, often connecting to the domain “hxxp://update.careerhuawei.net” that was under control of the threat actor. The malicious domain was crafted to look like the legitimate career site for Huawei, which has the domain: hxxp://career.huawei.com. In December, we also observed a new domain name used in this campaign: hxxp://update.huaweiyuncdn.com.

Moreover, the sample masquerading as the Flash application used the malicious domain name “flach.cn” which was made to look like the official web page for China to download the Flash application, flash.cn. One of the main differences from past attacks is the lack of use of the PlugX backdoor. However, we did identify the use of a Cobalt Strike backdoor.

 

By using McAfee’s telemetry, possible targets based in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US were discovered in the telecommunication sector. We also identified a strong interest in German, Vietnamese and India telecommunication companies. Combined with the use of the fake Huawei site, we believe with a high level of confidence that this campaign was targeting the telecommunication sector. We believe with a moderate level of confidence that the motivation behind this specific campaign has to do with the ban of Chinese technology in the global 5G roll-out.

 

Activity linked to the Chinese group RedDelta, by peers in our industry, has been spotted in the wild since early May 2020. Previous attacks have been described targeting the Vatican and religious organizations.

In September 2020, the group continued its activity using decoy documents related to Catholicism, Tibet-Ladakh relations and the United Nations General Assembly Security Council, as well as other network intrusion activities targeting the Myanmar government and two Hong Kong universities. These attacks mainly used the PlugX backdoor using DLL side loading with legitimate software, such as Word or Acrobat, to compromise targets.

While external reports have given a new name to the group which attacked the religious institutions, we believe with a moderate level of confidence, based on the similarity of TTPs, that both attacks can be attributed to one known threat actor: Mustang Panda.

Coverage and Protection

We believe the best way to protect yourself from this type of attack is to adopt a multi-layer approach including MVISION Insights, McAfee Web Gateway, MVISION UCE and MVISION EDR.

MVISION Insights can play a key role in risk mitigation by proactively collecting intelligence on the threat and your exposure.

McAfee Web Gateway and MVISION UCE provide multi-layer web vector protection with URL Reputation check, SSL decryption, and malware emulation capabilities for analyzing dangerous active Web content such as Flash and DotNet. MVISION UCE also includes the capabilities of Remote Browser Isolation, the only solution that can provide 100% protection during web browsing.

McAfee Endpoint Security running on the target endpoint protects against Operation Dianxun with an array of prevention and detection techniques. ENS Threat Prevention and ATP provides both signature and behavioral analysis capability which proactively detects the threat. ENS also leverages Global Threat Intelligence which is updated with known IoCs. For DAT based detections, the family will be reported as Trojan-Cobalt, Trojan-FSYW, Trojan-FSYX, Trojan-FSZC and CobaltStr-FDWE.

As the last phase of the attack involves creating a backdoor for remote control of the victim via a Command and Control Server and Cobalt Strike Beacon, the blocking features that can be activated on a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System solution such as McAfee NSP are important, NSP includes a Callback Detection engine and is able to detect and block anomalies in communication signals with C2 Servers.

MVISION EDR can proactively identify persistence and defense evasion techniques. You can also use MVISION EDR to search the indicators of compromise in Real-Time or Historically (up to 90 days) across enterprise systems.

Learn more about Operation Diànxùn, including Yara & Mitre ATT&CK techniques, by reading our technical analysis and Defender blog. 

Summary of the Threat

We assess with a high level of confidence that:

• Recent attacks using TTPs similar to those of the Chinese groups RedDelta and Mustang Panda have been discovered.
• Multiple overlaps including tooling, network and operating methods suggest strong similarities between Chinese groups RedDelta and Mustang Panda.
• The targets are mainly telecommunication companies based in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. We also identified a strong interest in German and Vietnamese telecommunication companies.

We assess with a moderate level of confidence that:

• We believe that this espionage campaign is aimed at stealing sensitive or secret information in relation to 5G technology.

PLEASE NOTE:  We have no evidence that the technology company Huawei was knowingly involved in this Campaign.

McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) is actively monitoring this threat and will update as its visibility into the threat increases.

The post Operation Diànxùn: Cyberespionage Campaign Targeting Telecommunication Companies appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of employees at mobile stores who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that anyone could use to silently intercept text messages intended for other mobile users.

Security researcher “Lucky225” worked with Vice.com’s Joseph Cox to intercept Cox’s incoming text messages with his permission. Lucky225 showed how anyone could do the same after creating an account at a service called Sakari, a company that helps celebrities and businesses do SMS marketing and mass messaging.

The “how they did it” was sickeningly simple. It cost just $16, and there was precious little to prevent someone from stealing your text messages without your knowledge. Cox writes:

Sakari offers a free trial to anyone wishing to see what the company’s dashboard looks like. The cheapest plan, which allows customers to add a phone number they want to send and receive texts as, is where the $16 goes. Lucky225 provided Motherboard with screenshots of Sakari’s interface, which show a red “+” symbol where users can add a number.

While adding a number, Sakari provides the Letter of Authorization for the user to sign. Sakari’s LOA says that the user should not conduct any unlawful, harassing, or inappropriate behavior with the text messaging service and phone number.

But as Lucky225 showed, a user can just sign up with someone else’s number and receive their text messages instead.

Lucky told KrebsOnSecurity that Sakari has since taken steps to block its service for being used with mobile telephone numbers. But he said Sakari is just one part of a much larger, unregulated industry that can be used to hijack SMS messages for many phone numbers.

“It’s not a Sakari thing,” Lucky225 replied when first approached for more details. “It’s an industry-wide thing. There are many of these ‘SMS enablement’ providers.”

The most common way thieves hijack SMS messages these days involves “sim swapping,” a crime that involves bribing or tricking employees at wireless phone companies into modifying customer account information.

In a SIM swap, the attackers redirect the target’s phone number to a device they control, and then can intercept the target’s incoming SMS messages and phone calls. From there, the attacker can reset the password of any account which uses that phone number for password reset links.

But the attacks Lucky225 has been demonstrating merely require customers of any number of firms to sign a sworn “letter of authorization” or LOA stating that they indeed do have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the targeted number.

Allison Nixon is chief research officer at Unit221B, a New York City-based cyber investigations firm. An expert on SIM-swapping attacks who’s been quoted quite a bit on this blog, Nixon said she also had Lucky225 test his interception tricks on her mobile phone, only to watch her incoming SMS messages show up on his burner phone.

“This basically means the only thing standing between anyone and the equivalent of a SIM swap is a forged LOA,” Nixon said. “And the ‘fix’ put in seems to be temporary in nature.”

The interception method that Lucky225 described is still dangerously exposed by a number of systemic weaknesses in the global SMS network, he said.

Most large and legacy telecommunications providers validate transfer requests related to their customers by consulting NPAC, or the Number Portability Administration Center. When customers want to move their phone numbers — mobile or otherwise — that request is routed through NPAC to the customer’s carrier.

That change request carries what’s known as an ALT-SPID, which is a four-digit number that enables NPAC to identify the telecommunications company currently providing service to the customer. More importantly, as part of this process no changes can happen unless the customer’s carrier has verified the changes with the existing customer.

But Lucky225 said the class of SMS interception he’s been testing targets a series of authentication weaknesses tied to a system developed by NetNumber, a private company in Lowell, Mass. NetNumber developed its own proprietary system for mapping telecommunications providers that is used by Sakari and an entire industry of similar firms.

NetNumber developed its six-digit ALT SPIDs (NetNumber IDs) to better organize and track communications service providers that were all using other numbering systems (and differing numbers of digits). But NetNumber also works directly with dozens of voice-over-IP or Internet-based phone companies which do not play by the same regulatory rules that apply to legacy telecommunications providers.

“There are many VoIP providers that offer ‘off net’ ‘text enablement’,” Lucky225 explained. “Companies such as ZipWhip that promise to let you ‘Text enable your existing business phone number’ so that customers can text your main business line whether it be VoIP, toll-free or a landline number.”

As Lucky225 wrote in his comprehensive Medium article, there are a plethora of wholesale VoIP providers that let you become a reseller with little to no verification, many of them allow blanket Letters of Authorization (LOAs), where you as the reseller promise that you have an LOA on file for any number you want to text enable for your resellers or end-users.

“In essence, once you have a reseller account with these VoIP wholesalers you can change the Net Number ID of any phone number to your wholesale provider’s NNID and begin receiving SMS text messages with virtually no authentication whatsoever. No SIM Swap, SS7 attacks, or port outs needed — just type the target’s phone number in a text box and hit submit and within minutes you can start receiving SMS text messages for them. They won’t even be alerted that anything has happened as their voice & data services will continue to work as usual. Surprisingly, despite the fact that I publicly disclosed this in 2018, nothing has been done to stop this relatively unsophisticated attack.”

NetNumber declined to comment on the record, but instead referred to a statement from the CTIA, a trade association representing the wireless industry, which reads:

“After being made aware of this potential threat, we worked immediately to investigate it, and took precautionary measures. Since that time, no carrier has been able to replicate it. We have no indication of any malicious activity involving the potential threat or that any customers were impacted. Consumer privacy and safety is our top priority, and we will continue to investigate this matter.”

Lucky225 told KrebsOnSecurity many of the major mobile companies have moved to ensure none of their customers can be affected by changes requested through NetNumber or its partners. But he suspects some of the smaller wired and wireless telecommunications firms may still be vulnerable.

“I’m pretty sure it’s only the big carriers that they’re protecting now,” he said. “But there’s just so much we don’t know about what they patched because everyone is being so tight lipped about this right now.”

Nixon said it’s time for federal regulators to step up and protect consumers.

“Its clear this is a lot of foundational infrastructure mucky muck and some fundamental changes are going to need to happen here,” she said. “Regulators really need to get involved.”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Given the potentially broad impact of fraudsters abusing this and other weaknesses in the vast mobile ecosystem to completely subvert the security of SMS based communications and multi-factor authentication, it’s probably a good idea to rethink your relationship to your phone number. It’s now plainer than ever how foolish it is to trust SMS for anything.

My advice has long been to remove phone numbers from your online accounts wherever you can, and avoid selecting SMS or phone calls for second factor or one-time codes. Phone numbers were never designed to be identity documents, but that’s effectively what they’ve become. It’s time we stopped letting everyone treat them that way.

Any online accounts that you value should be secured with a unique and strong password, as well the most robust form of multi-factor authentication available. Usually, this is a mobile app like Authy or Google Authenticator that generates a one-time code. Some sites like Twitter and Facebook now support even more robust options — such as physical security keys.

Removing your phone number may be even more important for any email accounts you may have. Sign up with any service online, and it will almost certainly require you to supply an email address. In nearly all cases, the person who is in control of that address can reset the password of any associated services or accounts– merely by requesting a password reset email.

Unfortunately, many email providers still let users reset their account passwords by having a link sent via text to the phone number on file for the account. So remove the phone number as a backup for your email account, and ensure a more robust second factor is selected for all available account recovery options.

Here’s the thing: Most online services require users to supply a mobile phone number when setting up the account, but do not require the number to remain associated with the account after it is established. I advise readers to remove their phone numbers from accounts wherever possible, and to take advantage of a mobile app to generate any one-time codes for multifactor authentication.

A little over a year ago, the FBI and law enforcement partners overseas seized WeLeakInfo[.]com, a wildly popular service that sold access to more than 12 billion usernames and passwords stolen from thousands of hacked websites. In an ironic turn of events, a lapsed domain registration tied to WeLeakInfo let someone plunder and publish account data on 24,000 customers who paid to access the service with a credit card.

For several years, WeLeakInfo was the largest of several services selling access to hacked passwords. Prosecutors said it had indexed, searchable information from more than 10,000 data breaches containing over 12 billion indexed records — including names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts.

For a small fee, you could enter an email address and see every password ever associated with that address in a previous breach. Or the reverse — show me all the email accounts that ever used a specific password (see screenshot above). It was a fantastic tool for launching targeted attacks against people, and that’s exactly how the service was viewed by many of its customers.

Now, nearly 24,000 WeLeakInfo’s customers are finding that the personal and payment data they shared with WeLeakInfo over its five-year-run has been leaked online.

In a post on the database leaking forum Raidforums, a regular contributor using the handle “pompompurin” said he stole the WeLeakInfo payment logs and other data after noticing the domain wli[.]design was no longer listed as registered.

“Long story short: FBI let one of weleakinfo’s domains expire that they used for the emails/payments,” pompompurin wrote. “I registered that domain, & was able to [password] reset the stripe.com account & get all the Data. [It’s] only from people that used stripe.com to checkout. If you used paypal or [bitcoin] ur all good.”

Cyber threat intelligence firm Flashpoint obtained a copy of the data leaked by pompompurin, and said it includes partial credit card data, email addresses, full names, IP addresses, browser user agent string data, physical addresses, phone numbers, and amount paid. One forum member commented that they found their own payment data in the logs.

According to DomainTools [an advertiser on this site] Wli[.]design was registered on Aug. 24, 2016 with Dynadot, the domain registrar which also was used to register WeLeakInfo.com. On March 12, wli[.]design was moved to another registrar — Namecheap.

Pompompurin released several screenshots of himself logged in to the WeLeakInfo account at stripe.com, an online payment processor. Under “management and ownership” was listed a Gerald Murphy from Fintona, U.K.

Shortly after WeLeakInfo’s domain was seized by authorities in Jan. 2020, the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested two individuals in connection with the service, including a 22-year-old from Fintona.

PLENTY OF TIME FOR OPSEC MISTAKES

It’s been a tough few months for denizens of various hacking forums, which are finding themselves on the defensive end of a great many attacks testing the security of their aliases and operational security lately. Over the past few weeks three of the longest running and most venerated Russian-language online forums serving thousands of experienced cybercriminals have been hacked.

In two of the intrusions (against the Russian hacking forums “Mazafaka” and “Verified”) — the attackers made off with the forums’ user databases, including email and Internet addresses and hashed passwords.

“Members of all three forums are worried the incidents could serve as a virtual Rosetta Stone for connecting the real-life identities of the same users across multiple crime forums,” a recent story here explained.

An exposure of 15 years worth of user data from a forum like Mazafaka is a big risk for registrants because investigators often can use common registration details to connect specific individuals who might have used multiple hacker handles over the years.

Many of the domains from the email addresses listed in the Maza dump date to the early 2000s, back when budding cybercriminals typically took fewer precautions to obfuscate or separate the myriad connections to their real-life identities online.

The biggest potential gold mine for de-anonymizing Maza members is the leak of user numbers for ICQ, an instant messaging service formerly owned by AOL that was widely used by cybercrime forum members up until around 2010. That’s about when AOL sold the platform in 2010 to Russian investor DST for $187.5 million.

Back then, people often associated their ICQ numbers to different interests, pursuits and commerce tied to their real life identities. In many cases, these associations are on public, Russian language forums, such as discussion sites on topics like cars, music or programming.

In a common inadvertent exposure, a cybercriminal happens to make an innocuous post 15 years ago to a now-defunct Russian-language automobile forum.

That post, preserved in perpetuity by sites like archive.org, includes an ICQ number and says there’s a guy named Sergey in Vladivostok who’s selling his car. And the profile link on the auto forum leads to another now-defunct but still-archived personal site for Sergey.

Interestingly, services like WeLeakInfo can just as easily be used against cybercriminals as by them. For example, it’s likely that the database for the automobile forum where Sergey posted got compromised at some point and is for sale on sites like WeLeakInfo (there are active competitors).

Ditto for any other forum where Sergey used the same email address or password. When researchers start finding password re-use across multiple email addresses that all follow a pattern, it becomes much easier to tie Sergey from Vladivostok to his cybercriminal and real-life identities.

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