KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of company projects. T-Mobile says no customer or government information was stolen in the intrusion.

LAPSUS$ is known for stealing data and then demanding a ransom not to publish or sell it. But the leaked chats indicate this mercenary activity was of little interest to the tyrannical teenage leader of LAPSUS$, whose obsession with stealing and leaking proprietary computer source code from the world’s largest tech companies ultimately led to the group’s undoing.

From its inception in December 2021 until its implosion late last month, LAPSUS$ operated openly on its Telegram chat channel, which quickly grew to more than 40,000 followers after the group started using it to leak huge volumes of sensitive data stolen from victim corporations.

But LAPSUS$ also used private Telegram channels that were restricted to the core seven members of the group. KrebsOnSecurity recently received a week’s worth of these private conversations between LAPSUS$ members as they plotted their final attacks late last month.

The candid conversations show LAPSUS$ frequently obtained the initial access to targeted organizations by purchasing it from sites like Russian Market, which sell access to remotely compromised systems, as well as any credentials stored on those systems.

The logs indicate LAPSUS$ had exactly zero problems buying, stealing or sweet-talking their way into employee accounts at companies they wanted to hack. The bigger challenge for LAPSUS$ was the subject mentioned by “Lapsus Jobs” in the screenshot above: Device enrollment. In most cases, this involved social engineering employees at the targeted firm into adding one of their computers or mobiles to the list of devices allowed to authenticate with the company’s virtual private network (VPN).

The messages show LAPSUS$ members continuously targeted T-Mobile employees, whose access to internal company tools could give them everything they needed to conduct hassle-free “SIM swaps” — reassigning a target’s mobile phone number to a device they controlled. These unauthorized sim swaps allow an attacker to intercept a target’s text messages and phone calls, including any links sent via SMS for password resets, or one-time codes sent for multi-factor authentication.

In one chat, the LAPSUS$ leader — 17-year-old from the U.K. who goes by the nicknames “White,” “WhiteDoxbin” and “Oklaqq” — is sharing his screen with another LAPSUS$ member who used the handles “Amtrak” and “Asyntax.”

The two were exploring T-Mobile’s internal systems, and Amtrak asked White to obscure the T-Mobile logo on his screen. In these chats, the user “Lapsus Jobs” is White. Amtrak explains this odd request by saying his parents are aware he was previously involved in SIM swapping, and he doesn’t want to give them any cause for alarm if they happen to look over his shoulder while he’s hacking away at home.

“Parents know I simswap,” Amtrak said. “So, if they see [that] they think I’m hacking.”

The messages reveal that each time LAPSUS$ was cut off from a T-Mobile employee’s account — either because the employee tried to log in or change their password — they would just find or buy another set of T-Mobile VPN credentials. T-Mobile currently has approximately 75,000 employees worldwide.

On March 19, 2022, the logs and accompanying screenshots show LAPSUS$ had gained access to Atlas, a powerful internal T-Mobile tool for managing customer accounts.

After gaining access to Atlas, White proceeded to look up T-Mobile accounts associated with the FBI and Department of Defense (see image above). Fortunately, those accounts were listed as requiring additional verification procedures before any changes could be processed.

Faced with increasingly vocal pleadings from other LAPSUS$ members not to burn their access to Atlas and other tools by trying to SIM swap government accounts, White unilaterally decided to terminate the VPN connection permitting access to T-Mobile’s network.

The other LAPSUS$ members desperately wanted to SIM swap some wealthy targets for money. Amtrak throws a fit, saying “I worked really hard for this!” White calls the Atlas access trash and then kills the VPN connection anyway, saying he wanted to focus on using their illicit T-Mobile access to steal source code.

Perhaps to mollify his furious teammates, White changed the subject and told them he’d gained access to T-Mobile’s Slack and Bitbucket accounts. He said he’d figured out how to upload files to the virtual machine he had access to at T-Mobile.

Roughly 12 hours later, White posts a screenshot in their private chat showing his automated script had downloaded more than 30,000 source code repositories from T-Mobile over a 12-hour period:

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, T-Mobile issued the following statement:

“Several weeks ago, our monitoring tools detected a bad actor using stolen credentials to access internal systems that house operational tools software. The systems accessed contained no customer or government information or other similarly sensitive information, and we have no evidence that the intruder was able to obtain anything of value. Our systems and processes worked as designed, the intrusion was rapidly shut down and closed off, and the compromised credentials used were rendered obsolete.”

CONSIDER THE SOURCE

It is not clear why LAPSUS$ was so fixated on stealing source code. Perhaps LAPSUS$ thought they could find in the source clues about security weaknesses that could be used to further hack these companies and their customers. Maybe the group already had buyers lined up for specific source code that they were then hired to procure. Or maybe it was all one big Capture the Flag competition, with source code being the flag. The leaked chats don’t exactly explain this fixation.

But it seems likely that the group routinely tried to steal and then delete any source code it could find on victim systems. That way, it could turn around and demand a payment to restore the deleted data.

In one conversation in late March, a LAPSUS$ member posts screenshots and other data indicating they’d gained remote administrative access to a multi-billion dollar company. But White is seemingly unimpressed, dismissing the illicit access as not worth the group’s time because there was no source code to be had.

LAPSUS$ first surfaced in December 2021, when it hacked into Brazil’s Ministry of Health and deleted more than 50 terabytes of data stored on the ministry’s hacked servers. The deleted data included information related to the ministry’s efforts to track and fight the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, which has suffered a disproportionate 13 percent of the world’s COVID-19 fatalities. LAPSUS$’s next 15 victims were based either in Latin America or Portugal, according to cyber threat intelligence firm Flashpoint.

By February 2022, LAPSUS$ had pivoted to targeting high-tech firms based in the United States. On Feb. 26, LAPSUS$ broke into graphics and computing chip maker NVIDIA. The group said it stole more than a terabyte of NVIDIA data, including source code and employee credentials.

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica wrote about LAPSUS$’s unusual extortion demand against NVIDIA: The group pledged to publish the stolen code unless NVIDIA agreed to make the drivers for its video cards open-source. According to these chats, NVIDIA responded by connecting to the computer the attackers were using in their attack, and then encrypting the stolen data.

Like many high-tech firms whose value is closely tied to their intellectual property, NVIDIA relies on a number of technologies designed to prevent data leaks or theft. According to LAPSUS$, among those is a requirement that only devices which have been approved or issued by the company can be used to access its virtual private network (VPN).

These so-called Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems retrieve information about the underlying hardware and software powering the system requesting access, and then relay that information along with any login credentials.

In a typical MDM setup, a company will issue employees a laptop or smartphone that has been pre-programmed with a data profile, VPN and other software that allows the employer to track, monitor, troubleshoot or even wipe device data in the event of theft, loss, or a detected breach.

MDM tools also can be used to encrypt or retrieve data from connected systems, and this was purportedly the functionality NVIDIA used to claw back the information stolen by LAPSUS$.

“Access to NVIDIA employee VPN requires the PC to be enrolled in MDM,” LAPSUS$ wrote in a post on their public Telegram channel. “With this they were able to connect to a [virtual machine] that we use. Yes, they successfully encrypted the data. However, we have a backup and it’s safe from scum!!!”

NVIDIA declined to comment for this story.

On March 7, consumer electronics giant Samsung confirmed what LAPSUS$ had bragged on its Telegram channel: That the group had stolen and leaked nearly 200 GB of source code and other internal company data.

The chats reveal that LAPSUS$ stole a great deal more source code than they bragged about online. One of White’s curious fascinations was SASCAR, Brazil’s leading fleet management and freight security company. White had bought and talked his way into SASCAR’s systems, and had stolen many gigabytes worth of source code for the company’s fleet tracking software.

It was bad enough that LAPSUS$ had just relieved this company of valuable intellectual property: The chats show that for several days White taunted SASCAR employees who were responding to the then-unfolding breach, at first by defacing the company’s website with porn.

The messages show White maintained access to the company’s internal systems for at least 24 hours after that, even sitting in on the company’s incident response communications where the security team discussed how to evict their tormentors.

SASCAR is owned by tire industry giant Michelin, which did not respond to requests for comment.

ENROLLMENT

The leaked LAPSUS$ internal chats show the group spent a great deal of time trying to bypass multi-factor authentication for the credentials they’d stolen. By the time these leaked chat logs were recorded, LAPSUS$ had spent days relentlessly picking on another target that relied on MDM to restrict employee logins: Iqor, a customer support outsourcing company based in St. Petersburg, Fla.

LAPSUS$ apparently had no trouble using Russian Market to purchase access to Iqor employee systems. “I will buy login when on sale, Russians stock it every 3-4 days,” Amtrak wrote regarding Iqor credentials for sale in the bot shops.

The real trouble for LAPSUS$ came when the group tried to evade Iqor’s MDM systems by social engineering Iqor employees into removing multi-factor authentication on Iqor accounts they’d purchased previously. The chats show that time and again Iqor’s employees simply refused requests to modify multi-factor authentication settings on the targeted accounts, or make any changes unless the requests were coming from authorized devices.

After many days of trying, LAPSUS$ ultimately gave up on Iqor. On Mar. 22, LAPSUS$ announced it hacked Microsoft, and began leaking 37 gigabytes worth of Microsoft source code.

Like NVIDIA, Microsoft was able to stanch some of the bleeding, cutting off LAPSUS$’s illicit access while the group was in the process of downloading all of the available source code repositories alphabetically (the group publicized their access to Microsoft at the same time they were downloading the software giant’s source code). As a result, LAPSUS$ was only able to leak the source for Microsoft products at the beginning of the code repository, including Azure, Bing and Cortana.

BETRAYAL

LAPSUS$ leader White drew attention to himself prior to the creation of LAPSUS$ last year when he purchased a website called Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic online community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people.

Based on the feedback posted by Doxbin members, White was not a particularly attentive administrator. Longtime members soon took to harassing him about various components of the site falling into disrepair. That pestering eventually prompted White to sell Doxbin back to its previous owner at a considerable loss. But before doing so, White leaked the Doxbin user database.

White’s leak triggered a swift counterpunch from Doxbin’s staff, which naturally responded by posting on White perhaps the most thorough dox the forum had ever produced — including videos filmed just outside his home where he lives with his parents in the United Kingdom.

The past and current owner of the Doxbin — an established cybercriminal who goes by the handle “KT” — is the same person who leaked these private LAPSUS$ Telegram chat logs to KrebsOnSecurity.

In early April, multiple news outlets reported that U.K. police had arrested seven people aged 15-21 in connection with the LAPSUS$ investigation. But it seems clear from reading these leaked Telegram chats that individual members of LAPSUS$ were detained and questioned at different times over the course of several months.

In his chats with other LAPSUS$ members during the last week in March, White maintained that he was arrested 1-2 months prior in connection with an intrusion against a victim referred to only by the initials “BT.” White also appeared unconcerned when Amtrak admits that the City of London police found LAPSUS$ Telegram chat conversations on his mobile phone.

Perhaps to demonstrate his indifference (or maybe just to screw with Amtrak), White responds by leaking Amtrak’s real name and phone number to the group’s public Telegram channel. In an ALL CAPS invective of disbelief at the sudden betrayal, Amtrak relates how various people started calling his home and threatening his parents as a result, and how White effectively outed him to law enforcement and the rest of the world as a LAPSUS$ member.

The vast majority of noteworthy activity documented in these private chats takes place between White and Amtrak, but it doesn’t seem that White counted Amtrak or any of his fellow LAPSUS$ members as friends or confidants. On the contrary, White generally behaved horribly toward everyone in the group, and he particularly seemed to enjoy abusing Amtrak (who somehow always came back for more).

“Mox,” one of the LAPSUS$ members who shows up throughout these leaked chats, helped the group in their unsuccessful attempts to enroll their mobile devices with an airline in the Middle East to which they had purchased access. Audio recordings leaked from the group’s private Telegram channel include a call wherein Mox can be heard speaking fluently in Arabic and impersonating an airline employee.

At one point, Mox’s first name briefly shows up in a video he made and shared with the group, and Mox mentions that he lives in the United States. White then begins trying to find and leak Mox’s real-life identity.

When Mox declares he’s so scared he wants to delete his iCloud account, White suggests he can get Mox’s real name, precise location and other information by making a fraudulent “emergency data request” (EDR) to Apple, in which they use a hacked police department email account to request emergency access to subscriber information under the claim that the request can’t wait for a warrant because someone’s life is on the line.

White was no stranger to fake EDRs. White was a founding member of a cybercriminal group called “Recursion Team,” which existed between 2020 and 2021. This group mostly specialized in SIM swapping targets of interest and participating in “swatting” attacks, wherein fake bomb threats, hostage situations and other violent scenarios are phoned in to police as part of a scheme to trick them into visiting potentially deadly force on a target’s address.

The Recursion Team was founded by a then 14-year-old from the United Kingdom who used the handle “Everlynn.” On April 5, 2021, Everlynn posted a new sales thread to the cybercrime forum cracked[.]to titled, “Warrant/subpoena service (get law enforcement data from any service).” The price: $100 to $250 per request.

As part of the Recursion Team, White used the alias “Peter.” Several LAPSUS$ members quizzed White and Amtrak about whether authorities asked about Recursion Team during questioning. In several discussion threads, White’s “Lapsus Jobs” alias on Telegram answers “yes?” or “I’m here” when another member addresses him by Peter.

White dismissed his public doxing of both Amtrak and Mox as their fault for being sloppy with operational security, or by claiming that everyone already knew their real identities. Incredibly, just a few minutes after doxing Amtrak, White nonchalantly asks him for help in stealing source code from yet another victim firm — as if nothing had just happened between them. Amtrak seems soothed by this invitation, and agrees to help.

On Mar. 30, software consultancy giant Globant was forced to acknowledge a hack after LAPSUS$ published 70 gigabytes of data stolen from the company, including customers’ source code. While the Globant hack has been widely reported for weeks, the cause of the breach remained hidden in these stolen logs: A stolen five-year-old access token for Globant’s network that still worked.

Globant lists a number of high-profile customers on its website, including the U.K. Metropolitan Police, software house Autodesk and gaming giant Electronic Arts. In March, KrebsOnSecurity showed how White was connected to the theft of 780 GB worth of source code from Electronic Arts last summer.

In that attack, the intruders reportedly gained access to EA’s data after purchasing authentication cookies for an EA Slack channel from the dark web marketplace “Genesis,” which offers more or less the same wares as the Russian Market.

One remarkable aspect of LAPSUS$ was that its members apparently decided not to personally download or store any data they stole from companies they hacked. They were all so paranoid of police raiding their homes that they assiduously kept everything “in the cloud.” That way, when investigators searched their devices, they would find no traces of the stolen information.

But this strategy ultimately backfired: Shortly before the private LAPSUS$ chat was terminated, the group learned it had just lost access to the Amazon AWS server it was using to store months of source code booty and other stolen data.

“RIP FBI seized my server,” Amtrak wrote. “So much illegal shit. It’s filled with illegal shit.”

White shrugs it off with the dismissive comment, “U can’t do anything about ur server seized.” Then Amtrak replies that he never made a backup of the server.

“FFS, THAT AWS HAD TMO SRC [T-Mobile source] code!” White yelled back.

The two then make a mad scramble to hack back into T-Mobile and re-download the stolen source code. But that effort ultimately failed after T-Mobile’s systems revoked the access token they were using to raid the company’s source code stash.

“How they noticed?” Amtrak asked White.

“Gitlab auto-revoked, likely,” White replied. “Cloning 30k repos four times in 24 hours isn’t very normal.”

Ah, the irony of a criminal hacking group that specializes in stealing and deleting data having their stolen data deleted.

It’s remarkable how often LAPSUS$ was able to pay a few dollars to buy access to some hacked machine at a company they wanted to break into, and then successfully parlay that into the theft of source code and other sensitive information.

What’s even more remarkable is that anyone can access dark web bot shops like Russian Market and Genesis, which means larger companies probably should be paying someone to regularly scrape these criminal bot services, even buying back their own employee credentials to take those vulnerable systems off the market. Because that’s probably the simplest and cheapest incident response money can buy.

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly 120 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Two of the flaws have been publicly detailed prior to this week, and one is already seeing active exploitation, according to a report from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Of particular concern this month is CVE-2022-24521, which is a “privilege escalation” vulnerability in the Windows common log file system driver. In its advisory, Microsoft said it received a report from the NSA that the flaw is under active attack.

“It’s not stated how widely the exploit is being used in the wild, but it’s likely still targeted at this point and not broadly available,” assessed Dustin Childs with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Go patch your systems before that situation changes.”

Nine of the updates pushed this week address problems Microsoft considers “critical,” meaning the flaws they fix could be abused by malware or malcontents to seize total, remote access to a Windows system without any help from the user.

Among the scariest critical bugs is CVE-2022-26809, a potentially “wormable” weakness in a core Windows component (RPC) that earned a CVSS score of 9.8 (10 being the worst). Microsoft said it believes exploitation of this flaw is more likely than not.

Other potentially wormable threats this month include CVE-2022-24491 and CVE-2022-24497, Windows Network File System (NFS) vulnerabilities that also clock in at 9.8 CVSS scores and are listed as “exploitation more likely by Microsoft.”

“These could be the kind of vulnerabilities which appeal to ransomware operators as they provide the potential to expose critical data,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “It is also important for security teams to note that NFS Role is not a default configuration for Windows devices.”

Speaking of wormable flaws, CVE-2022-24500 is a critical bug in the Windows Server Message Block (SMB).

“This is especially poignant as we approach the anniversary of WannaCry, which famously used the EternalBlue SMB vulnerability to propagate at great pace,” Breen added. “Microsoft advises blocking TCP port 445 at the perimeter firewall, which is strong advice regardless of this specific vulnerability. While this won’t stop exploitation from attackers inside the local network, it will prevent new attacks originating from the Internet.”

In addition, this month’s patch batch from Redmond brings updates for Exchange Server, Office, SharePoint Server, Windows Hyper-V, DNS Server, Skype for Business, .NET and Visual Studio, Windows App Store, and Windows Print Spooler components.

As it generally does on the second Tuesday of each month, Adobe released four patches addressing 70 vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop, After Effects, and Adobe Commerce. More information on those updates is available here.

For a complete rundown of all patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.

As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these patches, please drop a note about it here in the comments.

Online scams that try to separate the unwary from their cryptocurrency are a dime a dozen, but a great many seemingly disparate crypto scam websites tend to rely on the same dodgy infrastructure providers to remain online in the face of massive fraud and abuse complaints from their erstwhile customers. Here’s a closer look at hundreds of phony crypto investment schemes that are all connected through a hosting provider which caters to people running crypto scams.

A security researcher recently shared with KrebsOnSecurity an email he received from someone who said they foolishly invested an entire bitcoin (currently worth ~USD $43,000) at a website called ark-x2[.]org, which promised to double any cryptocurrency investment made with the site.

The ark-x2[.]org site pretended to be a crypto giveaway website run by Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARKinvest, an established Florida company that manages several exchange-traded investment funds. This is hardly the first time scammers have impersonated Wood or ARKinvest; a tweet from Wood in 2020 warned that the company would never use YouTube, Twitter, Instagram or any social media to solicit money.

At the crux of these scams are well-orchestrated video productions published on YouTube and Facebook that claim to be a “live event” featuring famous billionaires. In reality, these videos just rehash older footage while peppering viewers with prompts to sign up at a scam investment site — one they claim has been endorsed by the celebrities.

“I was watching a live video at YouTube where Elon Musk, Cathy Wood, and Jack Dorsey were talking about Crypto,” the victim told my security researcher friend. “An overlay on the video pointed to subscribing to the event at their website. I’ve been following Cathy Wood in her analysis on financial markets, so I was in a comfortable and trusted environment. The three of them are bitcoin maximalists in a sense, so it made perfect sense they were organizing a giveaway.”

“Without any doubt (other than whether the transfer would go through), I sent them 1 BTC (~$42,800), and they were supposed to return 2 BTC back,” the victim continued. “In hindsight, this was an obvious scam. But the live video and the ARK Invest website is what produced the trusted environment to me. I realized a few minutes later, when the live video looped. It wasn’t actually live, but a replay of a video from 6 months ago.”

Ark-x2[.]org is no longer online. But a look at the Internet address historically tied to this domain (186.2.171.79) shows the same address is used to host or park hundreds of other newly-minted crypto scam domains, including coinbase-x2[.]net (pictured below).

Typical of crypto scam sites, Coinbase-x2 promises a chance to win 50,000 ETH (Ethereum virtual currency), plus a “welcome bonus” wherein they promise to double any crypto investment made with the platform. But everyone who falls for this greed trap soon discovers they won’t be getting anything in return, and that their “investment” is gone forever.

There isn’t a lot of information about who bought these crypto scam domains, as most of them were registered in the past month at registrars that automatically redact the site’s WHOIS ownership records.

However, several dozen of the domains are in the .us domain space, which is technically supposed to be reserved for entities physically based in the United States. Those Dot-us domains all contain the registrant name Sergei Orlovets from Moscow, the email address ulaninkirill52@gmail.com, and the phone number +7.9914500893. Unfortunately, each of these clues lead to a dead end, meaning they were likely picked and used solely for these scam sites.

A dig into the Domain Name Server (DNS) records for Coinbase-x2[.]net shows it is hosted at a service called Cryptohost[.]to. Cryptohost also controls several other address ranges, including 194.31.98.X, which is currently home to even more crypto scam websites, many targeting lesser-known cryptocurrencies like Polkadot.

An ad posted to the Russian-language hacking forum BHF last month touted Cryptohost as a “bulletproof hosting provider for all your projects,” i.e., it can be relied upon to ignore abuse complaints about its customers.

“Why choose us? We don’t keep your logs!,” someone claiming to represent Cryptohost wrote to denizens of BHF.

Cryptohost says its service is backstopped by DDoS-Guard, a Russian company that has featured here recently for providing services to the sanctioned terrorist group Hamas and to the conspiracy theory groups QAnon/8chan.

Cryptohost did not respond to requests for comment.

Signing up as a customer at Cryptohost presents a control panel that includes the IP address 188.127.235.21, which belongs to a hosting provider in Moscow called SmartApe. SmartApe says its main advantage is unlimited disk space, “which allows you to host an unlimited number of sites for little money.”

According to FinTelegram, a blog that bills itself as a crowdsourced financial intelligence service that covers investment scams, SmartApe is a “Russian-Israeli hosting company for cybercriminals.”

SmartApe CEO Mark Tepterev declined to comment on the allegations from FinTelegram, but said the company has thousands of clients, some of whom have their own clients.

“Also we host other hostings that have their own thousands of customers,” Tepterev said. “Of course, there are clients who use our services in their dubious interests. We immediately block such clients upon receipt of justified complaints.”

Much of the text used in these scam sites has been invoked verbatim in similar schemes dating back at least two years, and it’s likely that scam website templates are re-used so long as they continue to reel in new investors. Searching online for the phrase “During this unique event we will give you a chance to win” reveals many current and former sites tied to this scam.

While it may seem incredible that people will fall for stuff like this, such scams reliably generate decent profits. When Twitter got hacked in July 2020 and some of the most-followed celebrity accounts on Twitter started tweeting double-your-crypto offers, 383 people sent more than $100,000 in a few hours.

In Sept. 2021, the Bitcoin Foundation (bitcoin.org) was hacked, with the intruders placing a pop-up message on the site asking visitors to send money. The message said any sent funds would be doubled and returned, claiming that the Bitcoin Foundation had set up the program as a way of “giving back to the community.” The brief scam netted more than $17,000.

According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, nearly 7,000 people lost more than $80 million in crypto scams from October 2020 through March 2021 based on consumer fraud reports. That’s a significant jump from the year prior, when the FTC tracked just 570 cryptocurrency investment scam complaints totaling $7.5 million.

A recent report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis found that scammers stole approximately $14 billion worth of cryptocurrency in 2021 — nearly twice the $7.8 billion stolen by scammers in 2020, the report found.

In March, Australia’s competition watchdog filed a lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms, alleging the social media giant failed to prevent scammers using its platform to promote fake ads featuring well-known people. The complaint alleges the advertisements, which endorsed investment in cryptocurrency or money-making schemes, could have misled Facebook users into believing they were promoted by famous Australians.

In many ways, the crypto giveaway scam is a natural extension of perhaps the oldest cyber fraud in the book: Advanced-fee fraud. Most commonly associated with Nigerian Letter or “419” fraud and lottery/sweepstakes schemes, advanced fee scams promise a financial windfall if only the intended recipient will step up and claim what is rightfully theirs — and oh by the way just pay this small administrative fee and we’ll send the money.

What makes these double-your-crypto sites successful is not just ignorance and avarice, but the idea held by many novice investors that cryptocurrencies are somehow magical money-minting machines, or perhaps virtual slot machines that will eventually pay off if one simply deposits enough coinage.

Many organizations are already struggling to combat cybersecurity threats from ransomware purveyors and state-sponsored hacking groups, both of which tend to take days or weeks to pivot from an opportunistic malware infection to a full blown data breach. But few organizations have a playbook for responding to the kinds of virtual “smash and grab” attacks we’ve seen recently from LAPSUS$, a juvenile data extortion group whose short-lived, low-tech and remarkably effective tactics have put some of the world’s biggest corporations on edge.

Since surfacing in late 2021, LAPSUS$ has gained access to the networks or contractors for some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta and Samsung. LAPSUS$ typically threatens to release sensitive data unless paid a ransom, but with most victims the hackers ended up publishing any information they stole (mainly computer source code).

Microsoft blogged about its attack at the hands of LAPSUS$, and about the group targeting its customers. It found LAPSUS$ used a variety of old-fashioned techniques that seldom show up in any corporate breach post-mortems, such as:

-targeting employees at their personal email addresses and phone numbers;
-offering to pay $20,000 a week to employees who give up remote access credentials;
-social engineering help desk and customer support employees at targeted companies;
-bribing/tricking employees at mobile phone stores to hijack a target’s phone number;
-intruding on their victims’ crisis communications calls post-breach.

If these tactics sound like something you might sooner expect from spooky, state-sponsored “Advanced Persistent Threat” or APT groups, consider that the core LAPSUS$ members are thought to range in age from 15 to 21. Also, LAPSUS$ operates on a shoestring budget and is anything but stealthy: According to Microsoft, LAPSUS$ doesn’t seem to cover its tracks or hide its activity. In fact, the group often announces its hacks on social media.

ADVANCED PERSISTENT TEENAGERS

This unusual combination makes LAPSUS$ something of an aberration that is probably more aptly referred to as “Advanced Persistent Teenagers,” said one CXO at a large organization that recently had a run-in with LAPSUS$.

“There is a lot of speculation about how good they are, tactics et cetera, but I think it’s more than that,” said the CXO, who spoke about the incident on condition of anonymity. “They put together an approach that industry thought suboptimal and unlikely. So it’s their golden hour.”

LAPSUS$ seems to have conjured some worst-case scenarios in the minds of many security experts, who worry what will happen when more organized cybercriminal groups start adopting these techniques.

“LAPSUS$ has shown that with only $25,000, a group of teenagers could get into organizations with mature cybersecurity practices,” said Amit Yoran, CEO of security firm Tenable and a former federal cybersecurity czar, testifying last week before the House Homeland Security Committee. “With much deeper pockets, focus, and mission, targeting critical infrastructure. That should be a sobering, if not terrifying, call to action.”

My CXO source said LAPSUS$ succeeds because they simply refuse to give up, and just keep trying until someone lets them in.

“They would just keep jamming a few individuals to get [remote] access, read some onboarding documents, enroll a new 2FA [two-factor authentication method] and exfiltrate code or secrets, like a smash-and-grab,” the CXO said. “These guys were not leet, just damn persistent.”

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The smash-and-grab attacks by LAPSUS$ obscure some of the group’s less public activities, which according to Microsoft include targeting individual user accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges to drain crypto holdings.

In some ways, the attacks from LAPSUS$ recall the July 2020 intrusion at Twitter, wherein the accounts for Apple, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Uber and others were made to tweet messages inviting the world to participate in a cryptocurrency scam that promised to double any amount sent to specific wallets. The flash scam netted the perpetrators more than $100,000 in the ensuing hours.

The group of teenagers who hacked Twitter hailed from a community that traded in hacked social media accounts. This community places a special premium on accounts with short “OG” usernames, and some of its most successful and notorious members were known to use all of the methods Microsoft attributed to LAPSUS$ in the service of hijacking prized OG accounts.

The Twitter hackers largely pulled it off by brute force, writes Wired on the July 15, 2020 hack.

“Someone was trying to phish employee credentials, and they were good at it,” Wired reported. “They were calling up consumer service and tech support personnel, instructing them to reset their passwords. Many employees passed the messages onto the security team and went back to business. But a few gullible ones—maybe four, maybe six, maybe eight—were more accommodating. They went to a dummy site controlled by the hackers and entered their credentials in a way that served up their usernames and passwords as well as multifactor authentication codes.”

Twitter revealed that a key tactic of the group was “phone spear phishing” (a.k.a. “voice phishing” a.k.a. “vishing”). This involved calling up Twitter staffers using false identities, and tricking them into giving up credentials for an internal company tool that let the hackers reset passwords and multi-factor authentication setups for targeted users.

In August 2020, KrebsOnSecurity warned that crooks were using voice phishing to target new hires at major companies, impersonating IT employees and asking them to update their VPN client or log in at a phishing website that mimicked their employer’s VPN login page.

Two days after that story ran, the FBI and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued their own warning on vishing, saying the attackers typically compiled dossiers on employees at specific companies by mass-scraping public profiles on social media platforms, recruiter and marketing tools, publicly available background check services, and open-source research. The joint FBI/CISA alert continued:

“Actors first began using unattributed Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) numbers to call targeted employees on their personal cellphones, and later began incorporating spoofed numbers of other offices and employees in the victim company. The actors used social engineering techniques and, in some cases, posed as members of the victim company’s IT help desk, using their knowledge of the employee’s personally identifiable information—including name, position, duration at company, and home address—to gain the trust of the targeted employee.”

“The actors then convinced the targeted employee that a new VPN link would be sent and required their login, including any 2FA [2-factor authentication] or OTP [one-time passwords]. The actor logged the information provided by the employee and used it in real-time to gain access to corporate tools using the employee’s account.”

Like LAPSUS$, these vishers just kept up their social engineering attacks until they succeeded. As KrebsOnSecurity wrote about the vishers back in 2020:

“It matters little to the attackers if the first few social engineering attempts fail. Most targeted employees are working from home or can be reached on a mobile device. If at first the attackers don’t succeed, they simply try again with a different employee.”

“And with each passing attempt, the phishers can glean important details from employees about the target’s operations, such as company-specific lingo used to describe its various online assets, or its corporate hierarchy.”

“Thus, each unsuccessful attempt actually teaches the fraudsters how to refine their social engineering approach with the next mark within the targeted organization.”

SMASH & GRAB

The primary danger with smash-and-grab groups like LAPSUS$ is not just their persistence but their ability to extract the maximum amount of sensitive information from their victims using compromised user accounts that typically have a short lifespan. After all, in many attacks, the stolen credentials are useful only so long as the impersonated employee isn’t also trying to use them.

This dynamic puts tremendous pressure on cyber incident response teams, which suddenly are faced with insiders who are trying frantically to steal everything of perceived value within a short window of time. On top of that, LAPSUS$ has a habit of posting screenshots on social media touting its access to internal corporate tools. These images and claims quickly go viral and create a public relations nightmare for the victim organization.

Single sign-on provider Okta experienced this firsthand last month, when LAPSUS$ posted screenshots that appeared to show Okta’s Slack channels and another with a Cloudflare interface. Cloudflare responded by resetting its employees’ Okta credentials.

Okta quickly came under fire for posting only a brief statement that said the screenshots LAPSUS$ shared were connected to a January 2022 incident involving the compromise of “a third-party customer support engineer working for one of our subprocessors,” and that “the matter was investigated and contained by the subprocessor.”

This assurance apparently did not sit well with many Okta customers, especially after LAPSUS$ began posting statements that disputed some of Okta’s claims. On March 25, Okta issued an apology for its handling of the January breach at a third-party support provider, which ultimately affected hundreds of its customers.

My CXO source said the lesson from LAPSUS$ is that even short-lived intrusions can have a long-term negative impact on victim organizations — especially when victims are not immediately forthcoming about the details of a security incident that affects customers.

“It does force us to think about insider access differently,” the CXO told KrebsOnSecurity. “Nation states have typically wanted longer, more strategic access; ransomware groups want large lateral movement. LAPSUS$ doesn’t care, it’s more about, ‘What can these 2-3 accounts get me in the next 6 hours?’ We haven’t optimized to defend that.”

Any organizations wondering what they can do to harden their systems against attacks from groups like LAPSUS$ should consult Microsoft’s recent blog post on the group’s activities, tactics and tools. Microsoft’s guidance includes recommendations that can help prevent account takeovers or at least mitigate the impact from stolen employee credentials.

There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

In the United States, when federal, state or local law enforcement agencies wish to obtain information about who owns an account at a social media firm, or what Internet addresses a specific cell phone account has used in the past, they must submit an official court-ordered warrant or subpoena.

Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as long as the proper documents are provided and the request appears to come from an email address connected to an actual police department domain name.

But in certain circumstances — such as a case involving imminent harm or death — an investigating authority may make what’s known as an Emergency Data Request (EDR), which largely bypasses any official review and does not require the requestor to supply any court-approved documents.

It is now clear that some hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. Using their illicit access to police email systems, the hackers will send a fake EDR along with an attestation that innocent people will likely suffer greatly or die unless the requested data is provided immediately.

In this scenario, the receiving company finds itself caught between two unsavory outcomes: Failing to immediately comply with an EDR — and potentially having someone’s blood on their hands — or possibly leaking a customer record to the wrong person.

“We have a legal process to compel production of documents, and we have a streamlined legal process for police to get information from ISPs and other providers,” said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“And then we have this emergency process, almost like you see on [the television series] Law & Order, where they say they need certain information immediately,” Rasch continued. “Providers have a streamlined process where they publish the fax or contact information for police to get emergency access to data. But there’s no real mechanism defined by most Internet service providers or tech companies to test the validity of a search warrant or subpoena. And so as long as it looks right, they’ll comply.”

To make matters more complicated, there are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world — including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone — and all it takes for hackers to succeed is illicit access to a single police email account.

THE LAPSUS$ CONNECTION

The reality that teenagers are now impersonating law enforcement agencies to subpoena privileged data on their targets at whim is evident in the dramatic backstory behind LAPSUS$, the data extortion group that recently hacked into some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, including Microsoft, Okta, NVIDIA and Vodafone.

In a blog post about their recent hack, Microsoft said LAPSUS$ succeeded against its targets through a combination of low-tech attacks, mostly involving old-fashioned social engineering — such as bribing employees at or contractors for the target organization.

“Other tactics include phone-based social engineering; SIM-swapping to facilitate account takeover; accessing personal email accounts of employees at target organizations; paying employees, suppliers, or business partners of target organizations for access to credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) approval; and intruding in the ongoing crisis-communication calls of their targets,” Microsoft wrote of LAPSUS$.

Researchers from security firms Unit 221B and Palo Alto Networks say that prior to launching LAPSUS$, the group’s leader “White” (a.k.a. “WhiteDoxbin,” “Oklaqq”) was a founding member of a cybercriminal group calling itself the “Recursion Team.” This group specialized in SIM swapping targets of interest and participating in “swatting” attacks, wherein fake bomb threats, hostage situations and other violent scenarios are phoned in to police as part of a scheme to trick them into visiting potentially deadly force on a target’s address.

The founder of the Recursion Team was a then 14-year-old from the United Kingdom who used the handle “Everlynn.” On April 5, 2021, Everlynn posted a new sales thread to the cybercrime forum cracked[.]to titled, “Warrant/subpoena service (get law enforcement data from any service).” The price: $100 to $250 per request.

“Services [include] Apple, Snapchat, Google (more expensive), not doing Discord, basically any site mostly,” read Everlynn’s ad, which was posted by the user account “InfinityRecursion.”

A month prior on Cracked, Everlynn posted a sales thread, “1x Government Email Account || BECOME A FED!,” which advertised the ability to send email from a federal agency within the government of Argentina.

“I would like to sell a government email that can be used for subpoena for many companies such as Apple, Uber, Instagram, etc.,” Everlynn’s sales thread explained, setting the price at $150. “You can breach users and get private images from people on SnapChat like nudes, go hack your girlfriend or something haha. You won’t get the login for the account, but you’ll basically obtain everything in the account if you play your cards right. I am not legally responsible if you mishandle this. This is very illegal and you will get raided if you don’t use a vpn. You can also breach into the government systems for this, and find LOTS of more private data and sell it for way, way more.”

Last week, the BBC reported that authorities in the United Kingdom had detained seven individuals aged 16 to 21 in connection with LAPSUS$.

TAKING ON THE DOXBIN

It remains unclear whether White or Everlynn were among those detained; U.K. police declined to name the suspects. But White’s real-life identity became public recently after he crossed the wrong people.

The de-anonymization of the LAPSUS$ leader began late last year after he purchased a website called Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic online community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people.

Based on the feedback posted by Doxbin members, White was not a particularly attentive administrator. Longtime members soon took to harassing him about various components of the site falling into disrepair. That pestering eventually prompted White to sell Doxbin back to its previous owner at a considerable loss. But before doing so, White leaked the Doxbin user database.

White’s leak triggered a swift counterpunch from Doxbin’s staff, which naturally responded by posting on White perhaps the most thorough dox the forum had ever produced.

KrebsOnSecurity recently interviewed the past and current owner of the Doxbin — an established hacker who goes by the handle “KT.” According to KT, it is becoming more common for hackers to use EDRs for stalking, hacking, harassing and publicly humiliating others.

KT shared several recent examples of fraudulent EDRs obtained by hackers who bragged about their success with the method.

“Terroristic threats with a valid reason to believe somebody’s life is in danger is usually the go-to,” KT said, referring to the most common attestation that accompanies a fake EDR.

One of the phony EDRs shared by KT targeted an 18-year-old from Indiana, and was sent to the social media platform Discord earlier this year. The document requested the Internet address history of Discord accounts tied to a specific phone number used by the target. Discord complied with the request.

“Discord replies to EDRs in 30 minutes to one hour with the provided information,” KT claimed.

Asked about the validity of the unauthorized EDR shared by KT, Discord said the request came from a legitimate law enforcement account that was later determined to have been compromised.

“We can confirm that Discord received requests from a legitimate law enforcement domain and complied with the requests in accordance with our policies,” Discord said in a written statement. “We verify these requests by checking that they come from a genuine source, and did so in this instance. While our verification process confirmed that the law enforcement account itself was legitimate, we later learned that it had been compromised by a malicious actor. We have since conducted an investigation into this illegal activity and notified law enforcement about the compromised email account.”

KT said fake EDRs don’t have to come from police departments based in the United States, and that some people in the community of those sending fake EDRs are hacking into police department emails by first compromising the agency’s website. From there, they can drop a backdoor “shell” on the server to secure permanent access, and then create new email accounts within the hacked organization.

In other cases, KT said, hackers will try to guess the passwords of police department email systems. In these attacks, the hackers will identify email addresses associated with law enforcement personnel, and then attempt to authenticate using passwords those individuals have used at other websites that have been breached previously.

“A lot of governments overseas are using WordPress, and I know a kid on Telegram who has multiple shells on gov sites,” KT said. “It’s near impossible to get U.S. dot-govs nowadays, although I’ve seen a few people with it. Most govs use [Microsoft] Outlook, so it’s more difficult because theres usually some sort of multi-factor authentication. But not all have it.”

According to KT, Everlynn and White recently had a falling out, with White paying KT to publish a dox on Everlynn and to keep it pinned to the site’s home page. That dox states that Everlynn is a 15-year-old from the United Kingdom who has used a variety of monikers over the past year alone, including “Miku” and “Anitsu.”

KT said Everlynn’s dox is accurate, and that the youth has been arrested multiple times for issuing fake EDRs. But KT said each time Everlynn gets released from police custody, they go right back to committing the same cybercrimes.

“Anitsu (Miku, Everlynn), an old staff member of Doxbin, was arrested probably 4-5 months ago for jacking government emails used for EDR’ing,” KT said. “White and him are not friends anymore though. White paid me a few weeks ago to pin his dox on Doxbin. Also, White had planned to use EDRs against me, due to a bet we had planned; dox for dox, winner gets 1 coin.”

A FUNDAMENTALLY UNFIXABLE PROBLEM?

Nicholas Weaver, a security specialist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, said one big challenge to combating fraudulent EDRs is that there is fundamentally no notion of global online identity.

“The only way to clean it up would be to have the FBI act as the sole identity provider for all state and local law enforcement,” Weaver said. “But even that won’t necessarily work because how does the FBI vet in real time that some request is really from some podunk police department?”

It’s not clear that the FBI would be willing or able to take on such a task. In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that hackers sent a fake email alert to thousands of state and local law enforcement entities through the FBI’s Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP). In that attack, the intruders abused a fairly basic and dangerous coding error on the website, and the fake emails all came from a real fbi.gov address.

KrebsOnSecurity asked the FBI whether it had any indication that its own systems were used for unauthorized EDRs. The FBI declined to answer that question, but confirmed it was aware of different schemes involving phony EDRs targeting both the public and the agency’s private sector partners.

“We take these reports seriously and vigorously pursue them,” reads a written statement shared by the FBI. “Visit this page for tips and resources to verify the information you are receiving. If you believe you are a victim of an emergency data request scheme, please report to www.ic3.gov or contact your local FBI field office.”

Rasch said while service providers need more rigorous vetting mechanisms for all types of legal requests, getting better at spotting unauthorized EDRs would require these companies to somehow know and validate the names of every police officer in the United States.

“One of the problems you have is there’s no validated master list of people who are authorized to make that demand,” Rasch said. “And that list is going to change all the time. But even then, the entire system is only as secure as the least secure individual police officer email account.”

The idea of impersonating law enforcement officers to obtain information typically only available via search warrant or subpoena is hardly new. A fictionalized example appeared in the second season of the hit television show Mr. Robot, wherein the main character Elliot pretends to be a police officer to obtain location data in real time from a cellular phone company.

Weaver said what probably keeps fraudulent EDRs from being more common is that most people in the criminal hacking community perceive it as too risky. This is supported by the responses in discussion threads across multiple hacking forums where members sought out someone to perform an EDR on their behalf.

“It’s highly risky if you get caught,” Weaver said. “But doing this is not a matter of skill. It’s one of will. It’s a fundamentally unfixable problem without completely redoing how we think about identity on the Internet on a national scale.”

The current situation with fraudulent EDRs illustrates the dangers of relying solely on email to process legal requests for highly sensitive subscriber data. In July 2021, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced new legislation to combat the growing use of counterfeit court orders by scammers and criminals. The bill calls for funding for state and tribal courts to adopt widely available digital signature technology that meets standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Forged court orders, usually involving copy-and-pasted signatures of judges, have been used to authorize illegal wiretaps and fraudulently take down legitimate reviews and websites by those seeking to conceal negative information and past crimes,” the lawmakers said in a statement introducing their bill.

The Digital Authenticity for Court Orders Act would require federal, state and tribal courts to use a digital signature for orders authorizing surveillance, domain seizures and removal of online content.