Blog

Victoria Kivilevich, Director of Threat Research

Bottom Line Up Front

• Following recent hacks of Uber and Rockstar Games, KELA decided to take a look at attacks that started with compromised corporate credentials being leaked or traded in the cybercrime ecosystem.
• Nowadays, this ecosystem enables threat actors to easily acquire such credentials that were accessed by information-stealing malware and offered for sale on automated botnet marketplaces, such as Genesis, Russian Market and TwoEasy. 
• While some threat actors are looking for banking and e-commerce credentials that they can use to cash out easily by stealing money from a compromised account, smarter attackers target organizations and their corporate credentials. These attackers are exchanging tips for finding such credentials, and they use the cybercrime ecosystem to buy them for a few dollars. 
• Luckily, defenders can access the same cybercrime ecosystem and can have the same visibility as a threat actor that is planning an attack. Threat intelligence solutions can be used effectively to monitor exposed assets and reduce attack surface by remediating exposures or taking down compromised data. 
• It’s crucial to consider not only direct assets of the company, but also workspaces hosted by third parties, with Slack being a perfect example: based on KELA’s research, thousands of unique workspaces were compromised and could be used for attacks similar to the Electronic Arts incident.
• The evolution of cybercrime — focusing on servitization (paying for a service instead of buying the equipment) and sales automation, as well as increased visibility of goods — will drive more threat actors to use this ecosystem.

Yael Kishon, Threat Intelligence Analyst

On March 14, 2022, a new English-language cybercrime forum called Breached (also known as BreachForums) launched, as a response to the closure and seizure of the popular RaidForums. Breached was launched with the same design by the threat actor “pompompurin” as “an alternative to RaidForums,” offering large-scale database leaks, login credentials, adult content, and hacking tools. 

In late January 2022, three prominent actors from RaidForums were arrested after the domain was seized – the administrator and creator of the forum “Omnipotent” and two other administrators, “Jaw” and “moot.” According to the US Department of Justice, the owner of RaidForums was Portuguese national Diogo Santos Coelho (aka Omnipotent), who was charged with conspiracy, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Coelho and his partners are alleged to have designed the forum’s software and computer infrastructure and managed the forum, promoting database exchange. 

After the closure of RaidForums, it was only a few weeks until the launch of Breached. And in  the first six months of its existence, Breached has become the new platform for database exchange, attracting more than 82,000 registered users. KELA explored whether Breached has actually replaced RaidForums as the most popular database exchange site and analyzed the top actors’ activities and trends associated with the new forum. 

Irina Nesterovsky, Chief Research Officer

At KELA, we meet and work with companies from various geographies and languages, yet everyone keeps asking the same question: “Do you cover Spanish/French/Arabic/Younameit cybercrime sources?”. First, the answer is “yes” (isn’t that always the case?), but we also have a more in-depth one – such in which we say that a threat against any company, no matter the vertical, no matter the size, is not confined to a language or geography.

What’s interesting about cybercrime, especially one targeted at enterprises and their clients – is that the criminals perpetrating it don’t have to be your countrymen or even speak your language to pose a threat to your organization.

As an example, let’s look into some of the most high-profile cybercrime communities discussing various schemes and trading in network accesses, databases, and others just for monetary gain. Those – taking as an example the Exploit and XSS forums – happen to be run by Russian-speaking threat actors, who will also use English to correspond with their fellow foreign cybercriminals. The targets and victims discussed by those cybercriminals vary and can include any company worldwide – regardless of their residence. And while, as seen in KELA’s review of Initial Access Brokers trends, the leading country with companies compromised through network access is still the US, it is also followed by the UK, Brazil, Canada, and India.

KELA Cyber Intelligence Center

In recent years, information-stealing Trojans have become a very popular attack vector. This type of malware is used for harvesting saved information on machines including usernames and passwords (“logs”) which are further sold on automated botnet marketplaces such as RussianMarket, TwoEasy, and Genesis, or privately. If purchased by threat actors, these credentials pose a significant risk to an organization, as they allow actors to access various resources which may result in data exfiltration, lateral movement, and malware deployment, such as ransomware.

Some of the most popular info-stealers advertised on cybercrime forums and identified on these marketplaces are RedLine, Raccoon, and Vidar. While some of these commodity stealers remain relevant, KELA observed that the threat landscape started to change under various conditions. The Russia-Ukraine war, the info-stealer operators’ need to improve malware capabilities, and their financial motivation, resulted in new stealers and services becoming available.

This report focuses on the currently active information stealers, highlighting the evolution of the old stealers, as well as the debut of new ones.

Elena Koldobsky, Threat Intelligence Analyst

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine, following years of tension between the two countries. The notion of war led multiple countries to speculate that Russia may use cyber attacks against Ukraine and supporting it western organizations and companies, with the US sending “top security officials” to help NATO prepare for Russian cyberattacks. Surprisingly, expectations for severe cyber-attacks on Ukraine and Europe turned out to be overestimated, as Russia refrained from large-scale attacks, and instead used distributed denial-of-service and wiper attacks on Ukrainian governmental institutions, infrastructure and telecommunications companies, and more. To defend itself, Ukraine raised a volunteer “IT Army”, which, together with hacktivists organizations from across the world, is targeting Russian companies and organizations to this day.

The winds of change have not passed over the cybercrime underground. From new illicit services that have never been available before, through war-related discussions appearing on apolitical cybercrime forums, to a hacktivist group using a famous Russian ransomware gang’s source code to target Russian companies – the cybercrime landscape has altered beyond recognition.

This report reviews the various changes that occurred in the cybercrime underground following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It provides a unique window into the delicate geopolitics of cybercrime, demonstrating how real-life emergencies influence services and opportunities and generate new trends.