Visa and MasterCard are sending confidential alerts to financial institutions across the United States this week, warning them about more than 200,000 credit cards that were stolen in the epic data breach announced last week at big-three credit bureau Equifax. At first glance, the private notices obtained by KrebsOnSecurity appear to suggest that hackers initially breached Equifax starting in November 2016. But Equifax says the accounts were all stolen at the same time — when hackers accessed the company’s systems in mid-May 2017.

Both Visa and MasterCard frequently send alerts to card-issuing financial institutions with information about specific credit and debit cards that may have been compromised in a recent breach. But it is unusual for these alerts to state from which company the accounts were thought to have been pilfered.

In this case, however, Visa and MasterCard were unambiguous, referring to Equifax specifically as the source of an e-commerce card breach.

In a non-public alert sent this week to sources at multiple banks, Visa said the “window of exposure” for the cards stolen in the Equifax breach was between Nov. 10, 2016 and July 6, 2017. A similar alert from MasterCard included the same date range.

“The investigation is ongoing and this information may be amended as new details arise,” Visa said in its confidential alert, linking to the press release Equifax initially posted about the breach on Sept. 7, 2017.

The card giant said the data elements stolen included card account number, expiration date, and the cardholder’s name. Fraudsters can use this information to conduct e-commerce fraud at online merchants.

It would be tempting to conclude from these alerts that the card breach at Equifax dates back to November 2016, and that perhaps the intruders then managed to install software capable of capturing customer credit card data in real-time as it was entered on one of Equifax’s Web sites.

Indeed, that was my initial hunch in deciding to report out this story. But according to a statement from Equifax, the hacker(s) downloaded the data in one fell swoop in mid-May 2017.

“The attacker accessed a storage table that contained historical credit card transaction related information,” the company said. “The dates that you provided in your e-mail appear to be the transaction dates. We have found no evidence during our investigation to indicate the presence of card harvesting malware, or access to the table before mid-May 2017.”

Equifax did not respond to questions about how it was storing credit card data, or why only card data collected from customers after November 2016 was stolen.

In its initial breach disclosure on Sept. 7, Equifax said it discovered the intrusion on July 29, 2017. The company said the hackers broke in through a vulnerability in the software that powers some of its Web-facing applications.

In an update to its breach disclosure published Wednesday evening, Equifax confirmed reports that the application flaw in question was a weakness disclosed in March 2017 in a popular open-source software package called Apache Struts (CVE-2017-5638). 

“Equifax has been intensely investigating the scope of the intrusion with the assistance of a leading, independent cybersecurity firm to determine what information was accessed and who has been impacted,” the company wrote. “We know that criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability. The vulnerability was Apache Struts CVE-2017-5638. We continue to work with law enforcement as part of our criminal investigation, and have shared indicators of compromise with law enforcement.”

The Apache flaw was first spotted around March 7, 2017, when security firms began warning that attackers were actively exploiting a “zero-day” vulnerability in Apache Struts. Zero-days refer to software or hardware flaws that hackers find and figure out how to use for commercial or personal gain before the vendor even knows about the bugs.

By March 8, Apache had released new versions of the software to mitigate the vulnerability. But by that time exploit code that would allow anyone to take advantage of the flaw was already published online — making it a race between companies needing to patch their Web servers and hackers trying to exploit the hole before it was closed.

Screen shots apparently taken on March 10, 2017 and later posted to the vulnerability tracking site xss[dot]cx indicate that the Apache Struts vulnerability was present at the time on annualcreditreport.com — the only web site mandated by Congress where all Americans can go to obtain a free copy of their credit reports from each of the three major bureaus annually.

In another screen shot apparently made that same day and uploaded to xss[dot]cx, we can see evidence that the Apache Struts flaw also was present in Experian’s Web properties.

Equifax has said the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July 2017, suggesting either that the company’s Web applications were still unpatched in mid-May or that the attackers broke in earlier but did not immediately abuse their access.

It remains unclear when exactly Equifax managed to fully eliminate the Apache Struts flaw from their various Web server applications. But one thing we do know for sure: The hacker(s) got in before Equifax closed the hole, and their presence wasn’t discovered until July 29, 2017.

Update, Sept. 15, 12:31 p.m. ET: Visa has updated their advisory about these 200,000+ credit cards stolen in the Equifax breach. Visa now says it believes the records also included the cardholder’s Social Security number and address, suggesting that (ironically enough) the accounts were stolen from people who were signing up for credit monitoring services through Equifax.

Equifax also clarified the breach timeline to note that it patched the Apache Struts flaw in its Web applications only after taking the hacked system(s) offline on July 30, 2017. Which means Equifax left its systems unpatched for more than four months after a patch (and exploit code to attack the flaw) was publicly available.

I cannot recall a previous data breach in which the breached company’s public outreach and response has been so haphazard and ill-conceived as the one coming right now from big-three credit bureau Equifax, which rather clumsily announced Thursday that an intrusion jeopardized Social security numbers and other information on 143 million Americans.

WEB SITE WOES

As noted in yesterday’s breaking story on this breach, the Web site that Equifax advertised as the place where concerned Americans could go to find out whether they were impacted by this breach — equifaxsecurity2017.com —
is completely broken at best, and little more than a stalling tactic or sham at worst.

In the early hours after the breach announcement, the site was being flagged by various browsers as a phishing threat. In some cases, people visiting the site were told they were not affected, only to find they received a different answer when they checked the site with the same information on their mobile phones.

Others (myself included) received not a yes or no answer to the question of whether we were impacted, but instead a message that credit monitoring services we were eligible for were not available and to check back later in the month. The site asked users to enter their last name and last six digits of their SSN, but at the prompting of a reader’s comment I confirmed that just entering gibberish names and numbers produced the same result as the one I saw when I entered my real information: Come back on Sept. 13.

Who’s responsible for this debacle? Well, Equifax of course. But most large companies that can afford to do so hire outside public relations or disaster response firms to walk them through the safest ways to notify affected consumers. In this case, Equifax appears to have hired global PR firm Edelman PR.

What gives me this idea? Until just a couple of hours ago, the copy of WordPress installed at equifaxsecurity2017.com included a publicly accessible user database entry showing a user named “Edelman” was the first (and only?) user registered on the site.

I reached out to Edelman for more information and will update this story when I hear from them.

EARLY WARNING?

In its breach disclosure Thursday, Equifax said it hired an outside computer security forensic firm to investigate as soon as it discovered unauthorized access to its Web site. ZDNet published a story Thursday saying that the outside firm was Alexandria, Va.-based Mandiant — a security firm bought by FireEye in 2014.

Interestingly, anyone who happened to have been monitoring look-alike domains for Equifax.com prior to yesterday’s breach announcement may have had an early clue about the upcoming announcement. One interesting domain that was registered on Sept. 5, 2017 is “equihax.com,” which according to domain registration records was purchased by an Alexandria, Va. resident named Brandan Schondorfer.

A quick Google search shows that Schondorfer works for Mandiant. Ray Watson, a cybersecurity researcher who messaged me this morning on Twitter about this curiosity, said it is likely that Mandiant has been registering domains that might be attractive to phishers hoping to take advantage of public attention to the breach and spoof Equifax’s domain.

Watson said it’s equally likely the equihax.com domain was registered to keep it out of the hands of people who may be looking for domain names they can use to lampoon Equifax for its breach. Schondorfer has not yet returned calls seeking comment.

EQUIFAX EXECS PULL GOLDEN PARACHUTES?

Bloomberg moved a story yesterday indicating that three top executives at Equifax sold millions of dollars worth of stock during the time between when the company says it discovered the breach and when it notified the public and investors.

Shares of Equifax’s stock on the New York Stock Exchange [NSYE:EFX] were down more than 13 percent at time of publication versus yesterday’s price.

The executives reportedly told Bloomberg they didn’t know about the breach when they sold their shares. A law firm in New York has already announced it is investigating potential insider trading claims against Equifax.

CLASS ACTION WAIVER?

Yesterday’s story here pointed out the gross conflict of interest in Equifax’s consumer remedy for this breach: Offering a year’s worth of free credit monitoring services to all Americans via its own in-house credit monitoring service.

This is particularly rich because a) why should anyone trust Equifax to do anything right security-wise after this debacle and b) these credit monitoring services typically hard-sell consumers to sign up for paid credit protection plans when the free coverage expires.

I have repeatedly urged readers to consider putting a security freeze on their accounts in lieu of or in addition to accepting these free credit monitoring offers, noting that credit monitoring services don’t protect you against identity theft (the most you can hope for is they alert you when ID thieves do steal your identity), while security freezes can prevent thieves from taking out new lines of credit in your name.

Several readers have written in to point out some legalese in the terms of service the Equifax requires all users to acknowledge before signing up for the service seems to include legal verbiage suggesting that those who do sign up for the free service will waive their rights to participate in future class action lawsuits against the company.

KrebsOnSecurity is still awaiting word from an actual lawyer who’s looking at this contract, but let me offer my own two cents on this.

Update, 9:45 p.m. ET: Equifax has updated their breach alert page to include the following response in regard to the unclear legalese:

“In response to consumer inquiries, we have made it clear that the arbitration clause and class action waiver included in the Equifax and TrustedID Premier terms of use does not apply to this cybersecurity incident.”

Original story:

Equifax will almost certainly see itself the target of multiple class action lawsuits as a result of this breach, but there is no guarantee those lawsuits will go the distance and result in a monetary windfall for affected consumers.

Even when these cases do result in a win for the plaintiff class, it can take years. After KrebsOnSecurity broke the story in 2013 that Experian had given access to 200 million consumer records to Vietnamese man running an identity theft service, two different law firms filed class action suits against Experian.

That case was ultimately tossed out of federal court and remanded to state court, where it is ongoing. That case was filed in 2015.

To close out the subject of civil lawsuits as a way to hold companies accountable for sloppy security, class actions — even when successful — rarely result in much of a financial benefit for affected consumers (very often the “reward” is a gift card or two-digit dollar amount per victim), while greatly enriching law firms that file the suits.

It’s my view that these class action lawsuits serve principally to take the pressure off of lawmakers and regulators to do something that might actually prevent more sloppy security practices in the future for the victim culpable companies. And as I noted in yesterday’s story, the credit bureaus have shown themselves time and again to be terribly unreliable stewards of sensitive consumer data: This time, the intruders were able to get in because Equifax apparently fell behind in patching its Internet-facing Web applications.

In May, KrebsOnSecurity reported that fraudsters exploited lax security at Equifax’s TALX payroll division, which provides online payroll, HR and tax services. In 2015, a breach at Experian jeopardized the personal data on at least 15 million consumers.

CAPITALIZING ON FEAR

Speaking of Experian, the company is now taking advantage of public fear over the breach — via hashtag #equifaxbreach, for example — to sign people up for their cleverly-named “CreditLock” subscription service (again, hat tip to @rayjwatson).

“When you have Experian Identity Theft Protection, you can instantly lock or unlock your Experian Credit File with the simple click of a button,” the ad enthuses. “Experian gives you instant access to your credit report.”

First off, all consumers have the legal right to instant access to their credit report via the Web site, annualcreditreport.com. This site, mandated by Congress, gives consumers the right to one free credit report from each of the three major bureaus (Equifax, Trans Union and Experian) every year.

Second, all consumers have a right to request that the bureaus “freeze” their credit files, which bars potential creditors or anyone else from viewing your credit history or credit file unless you thaw the freeze (temporarily or permanently).

I have made no secret of my disdain for the practice of companies offering credit monitoring in the wake of a data breach — especially in cases where the breach only involves credit card accounts, since credit monitoring services typically only look for new account fraud and do little or nothing to prevent fraud on existing consumer credit accounts.

Credit monitoring services rarely prevent identity thieves from stealing your identity. The most you can hope for from these services is that they will alert you as soon as someone does steal your identity. Also, the services can be useful in helping victims recover from ID theft.

My advice: Sign up for credit monitoring if you can (and you’re not holding out for a puny class action windfall) and then freeze your credit files at the major credit bureaus (it is generally not possible to sign up for credit monitoring services after a freeze is in place). Again, advice for how to file a freeze is available here.

Whether you are considering a freeze, credit monitoring, or a fraud alert (another, far less restrictive third option), please take a moment to read this story in its entirety. It includes a great deal of information that cannot be shared in a short column here.

Equifax, one of the “big-three” U.S. credit bureaus, said today that a data breach at the company may have affected 143 million Americans, jeopardizing consumer Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver’s license numbers.

In a press release today, Equifax [NYSE:EFX] said it discovered the “unauthorized access” on July 29, after which it hired an outside forensics firm to investigate. Equifax said the investigation is still ongoing, but that the breach also jeopardized credit card numbers for roughly 209,000 U.S. consumers and “certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers.”

In addition, the company said it identified unauthorized access to “limited personal information for certain UK and Canadian residents,” and that it would work with regulators in those countries to determine next steps.

“This is clearly a disappointing event for our company, and one that strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do. I apologize to consumers and our business customers for the concern and frustration this causes,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard F. Smith in a statement released to the media, along with a video message. “We pride ourselves on being a leader in managing and protecting data, and we are conducting a thorough review of our overall security operations.”

Equifax said the attackers were able to break into the company’s systems by exploiting an application vulnerability to gain access to certain files. It did not say which application or which vulnerability was the source of the breach.

Equifax has set up a Web site — https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com — that anyone concerned can visit to see if they may be impacted by the breach. The site also lets consumers enroll in TrustedID Premier, a 3-bureau credit monitoring service (Equifax, Experian and Trans Union) that is also operated by Equifax.

According to Equifax, when you begin, you will be asked to provide your last name and the last six digits of your Social Security number. Based on that information, you will receive a message indicating whether your personal information may have been impacted by this incident. Regardless of whether your information may have been impacted, the company says it will provide everyone the option to enroll in TrustedID Premier. The offer ends Nov. 21, 2017.

ANALYSIS

A time of publication, the Trustedid.com site Experian was promoting for free credit monitoring services was only intermittently available, likely because of the high volume of traffic following today’s announcement.

Several readers who have taken my advice and placed security freezes (also called a credit freeze) on their file with Equifax have written in asking whether this intrusion means cybercriminals could also be in possession of the unique PIN code needed to lift the freeze.

So far, the answer seems to be “no.” Equifax was clear that its investigation is ongoing. However, in a FAQ about the breach, Equifax said it has found no evidence to date of any unauthorized activity on the company’s core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases.

I have long urged consumers to assume that all of the personal information jeopardized in this breach is already compromised and for sale many times over in the cybercrime underground (because it demonstrably is for a significant portion of Americans). One step in acting on that assumption is placing a credit freeze on one’s file with the three major credit bureaus and with Innovis — a fourth bureau that is often used by businesses but overlooked by consumers.

For more information on the difference between credit monitoring and a security freeze (and why consumers should take full advantage of both) can be found in this story.

I have made no secret of my disdain for the practice of companies offering credit monitoring in the wake of a data breach — especially in cases where the breach only involves credit card accounts, since credit monitoring services typically only look for new account fraud and do little or nothing to prevent fraud on existing consumer credit accounts.

The fact that the breached entity (Equifax) is offering to sign consumers up for its own identity protection services strikes me as pretty rich. Typically, the way these arrangements work is the credit monitoring is free for a period of time, and then consumers are pitched on purchasing additional protection when their free coverage expires. In the case of this offering, consumers are eligible for the free service for one year.

However, the company appears to be metering how many consumers can sign up for the service at one time, offering the service to many of those affected at a future “designated enrollment date.”

That the intruders were able to access such a large amount of sensitive consumer data via a vulnerability in the company’s Web site suggests that Equifax may have fallen behind in applying security updates to its Internet-facing Web applications. Although the attackers could have exploited an unknown flaw in those applications, I would fully expect Equifax to highlight this fact if it were true — if for no other reason than doing so might make them less culpable and appear as though this was a crime which could have been perpetrated against any company running said Web applications.

This is hardly the first time Equifax or another major credit bureau has experienced a breach that impacted a significant number of Americans. In May, KrebsOnSecurity reported that fraudsters exploited lax security at Equifax’s TALX payroll division, which provides online payroll, HR and tax services.

In 2015, a breach at Experian jeopardized the personal data on at least 15 million consumers. Experian also for several months granted access to its databases to a Vietnamese man posing as a private investigator in the U.S. In reality, the guy was running an identity theft service that let cyber thieves look up personal and financial data on more than 200 million Americans.

My take on this: The credit bureaus — which make piles of money by compiling incredibly detailed dossiers on consumers and selling that information to marketers — have for the most part shown themselves to be terrible stewards of very sensitive data, and are long overdue for more oversight from regulators and lawmakers.

It’s unclear why Web applications tied to so much sensitive consumer data were left unpatched, but a lack of security leadership at Equifax may have been a contributing factor. Until very recently, the company was searching for someone to fill the role of vice president of cybersecurity, which according to Equifax is akin to the role of a chief information security officer (CISO).

The company appears to have announced the breach after the close of the stock market on Thursday. Shares of Equifax closed trading on the NSYE at $142.72, up almost one percent over Wednesday’s price.

This is a developing story. Updates will be added as needed.

Further reading:

Are Credit Monitoring Services Really Worth It?

Report: Everyone Should Get a Security Freeze

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Security Freeze

In early August 2017, FBI agents in Las Vegas arrested 23-year-old British security researcher Marcus Hutchins on suspicion of authoring and/or selling “Kronos,” a strain of malware designed to steal online banking credentials. Hutchins was virtually unknown to most in the security community until May 2017 when the U.K. media revealed him as the “accidental hero” who inadvertently halted the global spread of WannaCry, a ransomware contagion that had taken the world by storm just days before.

Relatively few knew it before his arrest, but Hutchins has for many years authored the popular cybersecurity blog MalwareTech. When this fact became more widely known — combined with his hero status for halting Wannacry — a great many MalwareTech readers quickly leapt to his defense to denounce his arrest. They reasoned that the government’s case was built on flimsy and scant evidence, noting that Hutchins has worked tirelessly to expose cybercriminals and their malicious tools. To date, some 226 supporters have donated more than $14,000 to his defense fund.

At first, I did not believe the charges against Hutchins would hold up under scrutiny. But as I began to dig deeper into the history tied to dozens of hacker forum pseudonyms, email addresses and domains he apparently used over the past decade, a very different picture began to emerge.

In this post, I will attempt to describe and illustrate more than three weeks’ worth of connecting the dots from what appear to be Hutchins’ earliest hacker forum accounts to his real-life identity. The clues suggest that Hutchins began developing and selling malware in his mid-teens — only to later develop a change of heart and earnestly endeavor to leave that part of his life squarely in the rearview mirror.

GH0STHOSTING/IARKEY

I began this investigation with a simple search of domain name registration records at domaintools.com [full disclosure: Domain Tools recently was an advertiser on this site]. A search for “Marcus Hutchins” turned up a half dozen domains registered to a U.K. resident by the same name who supplied the email address “surfallday2day@hotmail.co.uk.”

One of those domains — Gh0sthosting[dot]com (the third character in that domain is a zero) — corresponds to a hosting service that was advertised and sold circa 2009-2010 on Hackforums[dot]net, a massively popular forum overrun with young, impressionable men who desperately wish to be elite coders or hackers (or at least recognized as such by their peers).

The surfallday2day@hotmail.co.uk address tied to Gh0sthosting’s initial domain registration records also was used to register a Skype account named Iarkey that listed its alias as “Marcus.” A Twitter account registered in 2009 under the nickname “Iarkey” points to Gh0sthosting[dot]com.

Gh0sthosting was sold by a Hackforums user who used the same Iarkey nickname, and in 2009 Iarkey told fellow Hackforums users in a sales thread for his business that Gh0sthosting was “mainly for blackhats wanting to phish.” In a separate post just a few days apart from that sales thread, Iarkey responds that he is “only 15” years old, and in another he confirms that his email address is surfallday2day@hotmail.co.uk.

A review of the historic reputation tied to the Gh0sthosting domain suggests that at least some customers took Iarkey up on his offer: Malwaredomainlist.com, for example, shows that around this same time in 2009 Gh0sthosting was observed hosting plenty of malware, including trojan horse programs, phishing pages and malware exploits.

A “reverse WHOIS” search at Domaintools.com shows that Iarkey’s surfallday2day email address was used initially to register several other domains, including uploadwith[dot]us and thecodebases[dot]com.

Shortly after registering Gh0sthosting and other domains tied to his surfallday2day@hotmail.co.uk address, Iarkey evidently thought better of including his real name and email address in his domain name registration records. Thecodebases[dot]com, for example, changed its WHOIS ownership to a “James Green” in the U.K., and switched the email to “herpderpderp2@hotmail.co.uk.”

A reverse WHOIS lookup at domaintools.com for that email address shows it was used to register a Hackforums parody (or phishing?) site called Heckforums[dot]net. The domain records showed this address was tied to a Hackforums clique called “Atthackers.” The records also listed a Michael Chanata from Florida as the owner. We’ll come back to Michael Chanata and Atthackers at the end of this post.

DA LOSER/FLIPERTYJOPKINS

As early as 2009, Iarkey was outed several times on Hackforums as being Marcus Hutchins from the United Kingdom. In most of those instances he makes no effort to deny the association — and in a handful of posts he laments that fellow members felt the need to “dox” him by posting his real address and name in the hacking forum for all to see.

Iarkey, like many other extremely active Hackforums users, changed his nickname on the forum constantly, and two of his early nicknames on Hackforums around 2009 were “Flipertyjopkins” and “Da Loser“.

Happily, Hackforums has a useful feature that allows anyone willing to take the time to dig through a user’s postings to learn when and if that user was previously tied to another account.

This is especially evident in multi-page Hackforums discussion threads that span many days or weeks: If a user changes his nickname during that time, the forum is set up so that it includes the user’s most previous nickname in any replies that quote the original nickname — ostensibly so that users can follow along with who’s who and who said what to whom.

In the screen shot below, for instance, we can see one of Hutchins’ earliest accounts — Da Loser — being quoted under his Flipertyjopkins nickname.

Both the Da Loser and Flipertyjopkins identities on Hackforums referenced the same domains in 2009 as theirs — Gh0sthosting — as well as another domain called “hackblack.co[dot]uk.” Da Loser references the hackblack domain as the place where other Hackforums users can download “the sourcecode of my IE/MSN messenger password stealer (aka M_Stealer).”

In another post, Da Loser brags about how his password stealing program goes undetected by multiple antivirus scanners, pointing to a (now deleted) screenshot at a Photobucket account for a “flipertyjopkins”:

Another screenshot from Da Loser’s postings in June 2009 shows him advertising the Hackblack domain and the Surfallday2day@hotmail.co.uk address:

An Internet search for this Hackblack domain reveals a thread on the Web hosting forum MyBB started by a user Flipertyjopkins, who asks other members for help configuring his site, which he lists as http://hackblack.freehost10[dot]com.

Poking around the Web for these nicknames and domains turned up a Youtube user account named Flipertyjopkins that includes several videos uploaded 7-8 years ago that instruct viewers on how to use various types of password-stealing malware. In one of the videos — titled “Hotmail cracker v1.3” — Flipertyjopkins narrates how to use a piece of malware by the same name to steal passwords from unsuspecting victims.

Approximately two minutes and 48 seconds into the video, we can briefly see an MSN Messenger chat window shown behind the Microsoft Notepad application he is using to narrate the video. The video clearly shows that the MSN Messenger client is logged in to with the address “hutchins22@hotmail.com.”

To close out the discussion of Flipertyjopkins, I should note that this email address showed up multiple times in the database leak from Hostinger.co.uk, a British Web hosting company that got hacked in 2015. A copy of that database can be found in several places online, and it shows that one Hostinger customer named Marcus used an account under the email address flipertyjopkins@gmail.com.

According to the leaked user database, the password for that account — “emmy009” — also was used to register two other accounts at Hostinger, including the usernames “hacker” (email address: flipertyjopkins@googlemail.com) and “flipertyjopkins” (email: surfallday2day@hotmail.co.uk).

ELEMENT PRODUCTS/GONE WITH THE WIND

Most of the activities and actions that can be attributed to Iarkey/Flipertyjopkins/Da Loser et. al on Hackforums are fairly small-time  — and hardly rise to the level of coding from scratch a complex banking trojan and selling it to cybercriminals.

However, multiple threads on Hackforums state that Hutchins around 2011-2012 switched to two new nicknames that corresponded to users who were far more heavily involved in coding and selling complex malicious software: “Element Products,” and later, “Gone With The Wind.”

Hackforums’ nickname preservation feature leaves little doubt that the user Element Products at some point in 2012 changed his nickname to Gone With the Wind. However, for almost a week I could not see any signs of a connection between these two accounts and the ones previously and obviously associated with Hutchins (Flipertyjopkins, Iarkey, etc.).

In the meantime, I endeavored to find out as much as possible about Element Products — a suite of software and services including a keystroke logger, a “stresser” or online attack service, as well as a “no-distribute” malware scanner.

Unlike legitimate scanning services such as Virustotal — which scan malicious software against dozens of antivirus tools and then share the output with all participating antivirus companies — no-distribute scanners are made and marketed to malware authors who wish to see how broadly their malware is detected without tipping off the antivirus firms to a new, more stealthy version of the code.

Indeed, Element Scanner — which was sold in subscription packages starting at $40 per month — scanned all customer malware with some 37 different antivirus tools. But according to posts from Gone With the Wind, the scanner merely resold the services of scan4you[dot]net, a multiscanner that was extremely powerful and popular for several years across a variety of underground cybercrime forums.

According to a story at Bleepingcomputer.com, scan4you disappeared in July 2017, around the same time that two Latvian men were arrested for running an unnamed no-distribute scanner.

[Side note: Element Scanner was later incorporated as the default scanning application of “Blackshades,” a remote access trojan that was extremely popular on Hackforums for several years until its developers and dozens of customers were arrested in an international law enforcement sting in May 2014. Incidentally, as the story linked in the previous sentence explains, the administrator and owner of Hackforums would play an integral role in setting up many of his forum’s users for the Blackshades sting operation.]

According to one thread on Hackforums, Element Products was sold in 2012 to another Hackforums user named “Dal33t.” This was the nickname used by Ammar Zuberi, a young man from Dubai who — according to this this January 2017 KrebsOnSecurity story — may have been associated with a group of miscreants on Hackforums that specialized in using botnets to take high-profile Web sites offline. Zuberi could not be immediately reached for comment.

I soon discovered that Element Products was by far the least harmful product that this user sold on Hackforums. In a separate thread in 2012, Element Products announces the availability of a new product he had for sale — dubbed the “Ares Form Grabber” — a program that could be used to surreptitiously steal usernames and passwords from victims.

Element Products/Gone With The Wind also advertised himself on Hackforums as an authorized reseller of the infamous exploit kit known as “Blackhole.” Exploit kits are programs made to be stitched into hacked and malicious Web sites so that when visitors browse to the site with outdated and insecure browser plugins the browser is automatically infected with whatever malware the attacker wishes to foist on the victim.

In addition, Element Products ran a “bot shop,” in which he sold access to bots claimed to have enslaved through his own personal use of Blackhole:

A bit more digging showed that the Element Products user on Hackforums co-sold his wares along with another Hackforums user named “Kill4Joy,” who advertised his contact address as kill4joy@live.com.

Ironically, Hackforums was itself hacked in 2012, and a leaked copy of the user database from that hack shows this Kill4Joy user initially registered on the forum in 2011 with the email address rohang93@live.com.

A reverse WHOIS search at domaintools.com shows that email address was used to register several domain names, including contegoprint.info. The registration records for that domain show that it was registered by a Rohan Gupta from Illinois.

I learned that Gupta is now attending graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is studying computer engineering. Reached via telephone, Gupta confirmed that he worked with the Hackforums user Element Products six years ago, but said he only handled sales for the Element Scanner product, which he says was completely legal.

“I was associated with Element Scanner which was non-malicious,” Gupta said. “It wasn’t black hat, and I wasn’t associated with the programming, I just assisted with the sales.”

Gupta said his partner and developer of the software went by the name Michael Chanata and communicated with him via a Skype account registered to the email address atthackers@hotmail.com.

Recall that we heard at the beginning of this story that the name Michael Chanata was tied to Heckforums.net, a domain closely connected to the Iarkey nickname on Hackforums. Curious to see if this Michael Chanata character showed up somewhere on Hackforums, I used the forum’s search function to find out.

The following screenshot from a July 2011 Hackforums thread suggests that Michael Chanata was yet another nickname used by Da Loser, a Hackforums account associated with Marcus Hutchins’ early email addresses and Web sites.

BV1/ORGY

Interesting connections, to be sure, but I wasn’t satisfied with this finding and wanted more conclusive evidence of the supposed link. So I turned to “passive DNS” tools from Farsight Security — which keeps a historic record of which domain names map to which IP addresses.

Using Farsight’s tools, I found that Element Scanner’s various Web sites (elementscanner[dot]com/net/su/ru) were at one point hosted at the Internet address 184.168.88.189 alongside just a handful of other interesting domains, including bigkeshhosting[dot]com and bvnetworks[dot]com.

At first, I didn’t fully recognize the nicknames buried in each of these domains, but a few minutes of searching on Hackforums reminded me that bigkeshhosting[dot]com was a project run by a Hackforums user named “Orgy.”

I originally wrote about Orgy — whose real name is Robert George Danielson — in a 2012 story about a pair of stresser or “booter” (DDoS-for-hire) sites. As noted in that piece, Danielson has had several brushes with the law, including a guilty plea for stealing multiple firearms from the home of a local police chief.

I also learned that the bvnetworks[dot]com domain belonged to Orgy’s good friend and associate on Hackforums — a user who for many years went by the nickname “BV1.” In real life, BV1 is 27-year-old Brendan Johnston, a California man who went to prison in 2014 for his role in selling the Blackshades trojan.

When I discovered the connection to BV1, I searched my inbox for anything related to this nickname. Lo and behold, I found an anonymous tip I’d received through KrebsOnSecurity.com’s contact form in March 2013 which informed me of BV1’s real identity and said he was close friends with Orgy and the Hackforums user Iarkey.

According to this anonymous informant, Iarkey was an administrator of an Internet relay chat (IRC) forum that BV1 and Orgy frequented called irc.voidptr.cz.

“You already know that Orgy is running a new booter, but BV1 claims to have ‘left’ the hacking business because all the information on his family/himself has been leaked on the internet, but that is a lie,” the anonymous tipster wrote. “If you connect to http://irc.voidptr. cz ran by ‘touchme’ aka ‘iarkey’ from hackforums you can usually find both BV1 and Orgy in there.”

TOUCHME/TOUCH MY MALWARE/MAYBE TOUCHME

Until recently, I was unfamiliar with the nickname TouchMe. Naturally, I started digging into Hackforums again. An exhaustive search on the forum shows that TouchMe — and later “Touch Me Maybe” and “Touch My Malware” — were yet other nicknames for the same account.

In a Hackforums post from July 2012, the user Touch Me Maybe pointed to a writeup that he claimed to have authored on his own Web site: touchmymalware.blogspot.com:

If you visit this domain name now, it redirects to Malwaretech.com, which is the same blog that Hutchins was updating for years until his arrest in August.

There are other facts to support a connection between MalwareTech and the IRC forum voidptr.cz: A passive DNS scan for irc.voidptr.cz at Farsight Security shows that at one time the IRC channel was hosted at the Internet address 52.86.95.180 — where it shared space with just one other domain: irc.malwaretech.com.

All of the connections explained in this blog post — and some that weren’t — can be seen in the following mind map that I created with the excellent MindNode Pro for Mac.

Following Hutchins’ arrest, multiple Hackforums members posted what they suspected about his various presences on the forum. In one post from October 2011, Hackforums founder and administrator Jesse “Omniscient” LaBrocca said Iarkey had hundreds of accounts on Hackforums.

In one of the longest threads on Hackforums about Hutchins’ arrest there are several postings from a user named “Previously Known As” who self-identifies in that post and multiple related threads as BV1. In one such post, dated Aug. 7, 2017, BV1 observes that Hutchins failed to successfully separate his online selves from his real life identity.

“He definitely thought he separated TouchMe/MWT from iarkey/Element,” said BV1. “People warned him, myself included, that people can still connect MWT to iarkey, but he never seemed to care too much. He has so many accounts on HF at this point, I doubt someone will be able to connect all the dots. It sucks that some of the worst accounts have been traced back to him already. He ran a hosting company and a Minecraft server with Orgy and I.”

In a brief interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Brendan “BV1” Johnston said Hutchins was a good friend. Johnston said Hutchins had — like many others who later segued into jobs in the information security industry — initially dabbled in the dark side. But Johnston said his old friend sincerely tried to turn things around in late 2012 — when Gone With the Wind sold most of his coding projects to other Hackforums members and began focusing on blogging about poorly-written malware.

“I feel like I know Marcus better than most people do online, and when I heard about the accusations I was completely shocked,” Johnston said. “He tried for such a long time to steer me down a straight and narrow path that seeing this tied to him didn’t make sense to me at all.”

Let me be clear: I have no information to support the claim that Hutchins authored or sold the Kronos banking trojan. According to the government, Hutchins did so in 2014 on the Dark Web marketplace AlphaBay — which was taken down in July 2017 as part of a coordinated, global law enforcement raid on AlphaBay sellers and buyers alike.

However, the findings in this report suggest that for several years Hutchins enjoyed a fairly successful stint coding malicious software for others, said Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and a lecturer at UC Berkeley.

“It appears like Mr. Hutchins had a significant and prosperous blackhat career that he at least mostly gave up in 2013,” Weaver said. “Which might have been forgotten if it wasn’t for the involuntary British press coverage on WannaCry raising his profile and making him out as a ‘hero’.”

Weaver continued:

“I can easily imagine the Feds taking the opportunity to use a penny-ante charge against a known ‘bad guy’ when they can’t charge for more significant crimes,” he said. “But the Feds would have done far less collateral damage if they actually provided a criminal complaint with these sorts of detail rather than a perfunctory indictment.”

Hutchins did not try to hide the fact that he has written and published unique malware strains, which in the United States at least is a form of protected speech.

In December 2014, for example, Hutchins posted to his Github page the source code to TinyXPB, malware he claims to have written that is designed to seize control of a computer so that the malware loads before the operating system can even boot up.

While the publicly available documents related to his case are light on details, it seems clear that prosecutors can make a case against those who attempt to sell malware to cybercriminals — such as on hacker forums like AlphaBay — if they can demonstrate the accused had knowledge and intent that the malware would be used to commit a crime.

The Justice Department’s indictment against Hutchins suggests that the prosecution is relying heavily on the word of an unnamed co-conspirator who became a confidential informant for the government. Update, 9:08 a.m.: Several readers on Twitter disagreed with the previous statement, noting that U.S. prosecutors have said the other unnamed suspect in the Hutchins indictment is still at large.

Original story:

According to a story at BankInfoSecurity, the evidence submitted by prosecutors for the government includes:

• Statements made by Hutchins after he was arrested.
• A CD containing two audio recordings from a county jail in Nevada where he was detained by the FBI.
• 150 pages of Jabber chats between the defendant and an individual.
• Business records from Apple, Google and Yahoo.
• Statements (350 pages) by the defendant from another internet forum, which were seized by the government in another district.
• Three to four samples of malware.
• A search warrant executed on a third party, which may contain some privileged information.

Hutchins declined to comment for this story, citing his ongoing prosecution. He has pleaded not guilty to all four counts against him, including conspiracy to distribute malicious software with the intent to cause damage to 10 or more affected computers without authorization, and conspiracy to distribute malware designed to intercept protected electronic communications. FBI officials have not yet responded to requests for comment.

I awoke this morning to find my account on Twitter (@briankrebs) had attracted almost 12,000 new followers overnight. Then I noticed I’d gained almost as many followers as the number of re-tweets (RTs) earned for a tweet I published on Tuesday. The tweet stated how every time I tweet something related to Russian President Vladimir Putin I get a predictable stream of replies that are in support of President Trump — even in cases when neither Trump nor the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign were mentioned.

Upon further examination, it appears that almost all of my new followers were compliments of a social media botnet that is being used to amplify fake news and to intimidate journalists, activists and researchers. The botnet or botnets appear to be targeting people who are exposing the extent to which sock puppet and bot accounts on social media platforms can be used to influence public opinion.

After tweeting about my new bounty of suspicious-looking Twitter friends I learned from my legitimate followers on Twitter that @briankrebs wasn’t alone and that several journalists and nonprofit groups that have written recently about bot-like activity on Twitter experienced something similar over the past few days.

These tweet and follow storms seem capable of tripping some kind of mechanism at Twitter that seeks to detect when accounts are suspected of artificially beefing up their follower counts by purchasing followers (for more on that dodgy industry, check out this post).

Earlier today, Daily Beast cybersecurity reporter Joseph Cox had his Twitter account suspended temporarily after the account was the beneficiary of hundreds of bot followers over a brief period on Tuesday. This likely was the goal in the campaign against my site as well.

“Right after my Daily Beast story about suspicious activity by pro-Kremlin bots went live, my own account came under attack,” Cox wrote.

Let that sink in for a moment: A huge collection of botted accounts — the vast majority of which should be easily detectable as such — may be able to abuse Twitter’s anti-abuse tools to temporarily shutter the accounts of real people suspected of being bots!

Overnight between Aug. 28 and 29, a large Twitter botnet took aim at the account for the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a project run by the Atlantic Council, a political think-tank based in Washington, D.C. In a post about the incident, DFRLab said the attack used fake accounts to impersonate and attack its members.

Those personal attacks — which included tweets and images lamenting the supposed death of DFR senior fellow Ben Nimmo — were then amplified and re-tweeted by tens of thousands of apparently automated accounts, according to a blost post published today by DFRLab.

Suspecting that DFRLab was now being followed by many more botted accounts that might retweet or otherwise react to any further tweets mentioning bot attacks, Nimmo cleverly composed another tweet about the bot attack — only this time CC’ing the @Twitter and @Twittersupport accounts. Sure enough, that sly tweet was retweeted by bots more than 73,000 times before the tweet storm died down.

“We considered that the bots had probably been programmed to react to a relatively simple set of triggers, most likely the words ‘bot attack’ and the @DFRLab handle,” Nimmo wrote. “To test the hypothesis, we posted a tweet mentioning the same words, and were retweeted over 500 times in nine minutes — something which, admittedly, does not occur regularly with our human followers.” Read more about the DFRLab episode here.

This week’s Twitter bot drama follows similar attacks on public interest groups earlier this month. On Aug. 19, the award-winning investigative journalism site ProPublica.org published the story, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate.

On the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 22, several ProPublica reporters began receiving email bombs — email list subscription attacks that can inundate a targeted inbox with dozens or even hundreds of email list subscription confirmation requests per minute. These attacks are designed to deluge the victim’s inbox with so many subscription confirmation requests that it becomes extremely time-consuming to fish out the legitimate messages amid the dross.

On Wednesday ProPublica author Jeff Larson saw a tweet he sent about the email attacks get re-tweeted 1,200 times. Later that evening, senior reporting fellow Lauren Kirchner noticed a similar sized response to her tweet about how the subscription attack was affecting her ability to respond to messages.

On top of that, several ProPublica staffers suddenly gained about 500 new followers. On Thursday, ProPublica’s managing editor Eric Umansky noticed that a tweet accusing ProPublica of being an “alt-left #HateGroup and #FakeNews site funded by Soros” had received more than 23,000 re-tweets.

Today, the 500 or so bot accounts that had followed the ProPublica employees unfollowed them. Interestingly, a little more than 24 hours after the tweet that got my account 12,000+ new followers, all of those followers are no longer following @briankrebs.

I thought at first perhaps Twitter had suspended the accounts, but a random check of the 11,500+ accounts that I was able to catalog today as new followers shows that most of them remain active.

Asked to respond to criticism that it isn’t doing enough to find and ban bot accounts on its network, Twitter declined to comment, directing me instead to this post in June from Twitter Vice President of Public Policy Colin Crowell, which stated in part:

While bots can be a positive and vital tool, from customer support to public safety, we strictly prohibit the use of bots and other networks of manipulation to undermine the core functionality of our service. We’ve been doubling down on our efforts here, expanding our team and resources, and building new tools and processes. We’ll continue to iterate, learn, and make improvements on a rolling basis to ensure our tech is effective in the face of new challenges.

We’re working hard to detect spammy behaviors at source, such as the mass distribution of Tweets or attempts to manipulate trending topics. We also reduce the visibility of potentially spammy Tweets or accounts while we investigate whether a policy violation has occurred. When we do detect duplicative, or suspicious activity, we suspend accounts. We also frequently take action against applications that abuse the public API to automate activity on Twitter, stopping potentially manipulative bots at the source.

It’s worth noting that in order to respond to this challenge efficiently and to ensure people cannot circumvent these safeguards, we’re unable to share the details of these internal signals in our public API. While this means research conducted by third parties about the impact of bots on Twitter is often inaccurate and methodologically flawed, we must protect the future effectiveness of our work.

It is possible that someone or some organization is simply purchasing botted accounts from shadowy sellers who peddle these sorts of things. If that’s the case, however, whoever built the botnet that retweeted my tweet 12,000 times certainly selected a diverse range of accounts.

Ed Summers, a software developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, graciously offered to grab some basic information about the more than 11,500 suspected new bot followers that were still following my account earlier this morning. An analysis of that data indicates that more than 75 percent of the accounts (8,836) were created before 2013 — with the largest group of accounts (3,366) created six years ago.

Summers has published the entire list of suspected bot accounts at his Github page. He’s also published a list of the 20,000 or so suspected bot accounts that re-tweeted Nimmo’s fake death, and found an overlap of at least 1,865 accounts with the 11,500+ suspected bot accounts that targeted my account this week.

I mentioned earlier that most of these bot accounts should have been easy to detect as such: The vast majority of bot accounts that hit my account this week had very few followers: More than 2,700 have zero followers, and more than half of the accounts have fewer than five followers.

Finally, I’ve noticed that most of them appear to be artificially boosting the popularity of a broad variety of businesses and entertainers around the globe, often using tweets from multiple languages. When these bots are not intimidating or otherwise harassing reporters and researchers, they appear to be part of a business that can be hired to do promotional tweets.

Further reading:

Twitter Bots Drown Out Anti-Kremlin Tweets

Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam

SecuringDemocracy.org: Tracking Russian Influence Operations on Twitter

Update: 9:52 a.m. ET: Corrected spelling of name for managing editor of ProPublica.