A Ukrainian security researcher this week leaked several years of internal chat logs and other sensitive data tied to Conti, an aggressive and ruthless Russian cybercrime group that focuses on deploying its ransomware to companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The chat logs offer a fascinating glimpse into the challenges of running a sprawling criminal enterprise with more than 100 salaried employees. The records also provide insight into how Conti has dealt with its own internal breaches and attacks from private security firms and foreign governments.

Conti’s threatening message this week regarding international interference in Ukraine.

Conti makes international news headlines each week when it publishes to its dark web blog new information stolen from ransomware victims who refuse to pay an extortion demand. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Conti published a statement announcing its “full support.”

“If anybody will decide to organize a cyberattack or any war activities against Russia, we are going to use all our possible resources to strike back at the critical infrastructures of an enemy,” the Conti blog post read.

On Sunday, Feb. 27, a new Twitter account “Contileaks” posted links to an archive of chat messages taken from Conti’s private communications infrastructure, dating from January 29, 2021 to the present day. Shouting “Glory for Ukraine,” the Contileaks account has since published additional Conti employee conversations from June 22, 2020 to Nov. 16, 2020.

The Contileaks account did not respond to requests for comment. But Alex Holden, the Ukrainian-born founder of the Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, said the person who leaked the information is not a former Conti affiliate — as many on Twitter have assumed. Rather, he said, the leaker is a Ukrainian security researcher who has chosen to stay in his country and fight.

“The person releasing this is a Ukrainian and a patriot,” Holden said. “He’s seeing that Conti is supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and this is his way to stop them in his mind at least.”

GAP #1

The temporal gaps in these chat records roughly correspond to times when Conti’s IT infrastructure was dismantled and/or infiltrated by security researchers, private companies, law enforcement, and national intelligence agencies. The holes in the chat logs also match up with periods of relative quiescence from the group, as it sought to re-establish its network of infected systems and dismiss its low-level staff as a security precaution.

On Sept. 22, 2020, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) began a weeks-long operation in which it seized control over the Trickbot botnet, a malware crime machine that has infected millions of computers and is often used to spread ransomware. Conti is one of several cybercrime groups that has regularly used Trickbot to deploy malware.

Once in control over Trickbot, the NSA’s hackers sent all infected systems a command telling them to disconnect themselves from the Internet servers the Trickbot overlords used to control compromised Microsoft Windows computers. On top of that, the NSA stuffed millions of bogus records about new victims into the Trickbot database.

News of the Trickbot compromise was first published here on Oct. 2, 2020, but the leaked Conti chats show that the group’s core leadership detected something was seriously wrong with their crime machine just a few hours after the initial compromise of Trickbot’s infrastructure on Sept. 22.

“The one who made this garbage did it very well,” wrote “Hof,” the handle chosen by a top Conti leader, commenting on the Trickbot malware implant that was supplied by the NSA and quickly spread to the rest of the botnet. “He knew how the bot works, i.e. he probably saw the source code, or reversed it. Plus, he somehow encrypted the config, i.e. he had an encoder and a private key, plus uploaded it all to the admin panel. It’s just some kind of sabotage.”

“Moreover, the bots have been flooded with such a config that they will simply work idle,” Hof explained to his team on Sept. 23, 2020. Hof noted that the intruder even kneecapped Trickbot’s built-in failsafe recovery mechanism. Trickbot was configured so that if none of the botnet’s control servers were reachable, the bots could still be recaptured and controlled by registering a pre-computed domain name on EmerDNS, a decentralized domain name system based on the Emercoin virtual currency.

“After a while they will download a new config via emercoin, but they will not be able to apply this config, because this saboteur has uploaded the config with the maximum number, and the bot is checking that the new config should be larger than the old one,” Hof wrote. “Sorry, but this is fucked up. I don’t know how to get them back.”

It would take the Conti gang several weeks to rebuild its malware infrastructure, and infect tens of thousands of new Microsoft Windows systems. By late October 2020, Conti’s network of infected systems had grown to include 428 medical facilities throughout the United States. The gang’s leaders saw an opportunity to create widespread panic — if not also chaos — by deploying their ransomware simultaneously to hundreds of American healthcare organizations already struggling amid a worldwide pandemic.

“Fuck the clinics in the USA this week,” wrote Conti manager “Target” on Oct. 26, 2020. “There will be panic. 428 hospitals.”

On October 28, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hastily assembled a conference call with healthcare industry executives warning about an “imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.”

Follow-up reporting confirmed that at least a dozen healthcare organizations were hit with ransomware that week, but the carnage apparently was not much worse than a typical week in the healthcare sector. One information security leader in the healthcare industry told KrebsOnSecurity at the time that it wasn’t uncommon for the industry to see at least one hospital or health care facility hit with ransomware each day.

GAP #2

The more recent gap in the Conti chat logs corresponds to a Jan. 26, 2021 international law enforcement operation to seize control of Emotet, a prolific malware strain and cybercrime-as-a-service platform that was used heavily by Conti. Following the Emotet takedown, the Conti group once again reorganized, with everyone forced to pick new nicknames and passwords.

The logs show Conti made a special effort to help one of its older members — Alla Witte — a 55-year-old Latvian woman arrested last year on suspicion of working as a programmer for the Trickbot group. The chat records indicate Witte became something of a maternal figure for many of Conti’s younger personnel, and after her arrest Conti’s leadership began scheming a way to pay for her legal defense.

Alla Witte’s personal website — allawitte[.]nl — circa October 2018.

“They gave me a lawyer, they said the best one, plus excellent connections, he knows the investigator, he knows the judge, he is a federal lawyer there, licensed, etc., etc.,” wrote “Mango” — a mid-level manager within Conti — to “Stern,” a much higher-up Conti taskmaster who frequently asked various units of the gang for updates on their daily assignments.

Stern agreed that this was the best course of action, but it’s unclear if it was successfully carried out. Also, the entire scheme may not have been as altruistic as it seemed: Mango suggested that paying Witte’s attorney fees might also give the group inside access to information about the government’s ongoing investigation of Trickbot.

“Let’s try to find a way to her lawyer right now and offer him to directly sell the data bypassing her,” Mango suggests to Stern on June 23, 2021.

The FBI has been investigating Trickbot for years, and it is clear that at some point the U.S. government shared information with the Russians about the hackers they suspected were behind Trickbot. It is also clear from reading these logs that the Russians did little with this information until October 2021, when Conti’s top generals began receiving tips from their Russian law enforcement sources that the investigation was being rekindled.

“Our old case was resumed,” wrote the Conti member “Kagas” in a message to Stern on Oct. 6, 2021. “The investigator said why it was resumed: The Americans officially requested information about Russian hackers, not only about us, but in general who was caught around the country. Actually, they are interested in the Trickbot, and some other viruses. Next Tuesday, the investigator called us for a conversation, but for now, it’s like [we’re being called on as] witnesses. That way if the case is suspended, they can’t interrogate us in any way, and, in fact, because of this, they resumed it. We have already contacted our lawyers.”

Incredibly, another Conti member pipes into the discussion and says the group has been assured that the investigation will go nowhere from the Russian side, and that the entire inquiry from local investigators would be closed by mid-November 2021.

It appears Russian investigators were more interested in going after a top Conti competitor — REvil, an equally ruthless Russian ransomware group that likewise mainly targeted large organizations that could pay large ransom demands.

On Jan. 14, 2022, the Russian government announced the arrest of 14 people accused of working for REvil. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said the actions were taken in response to a request from U.S. officials, but many experts believe the crackdown was part of a cynical ploy to assuage (or distract) public concerns over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bellicose actions in the weeks before his invasion of Ukraine.

The leaked Conti messages show that TrickBot was effectively shut down earlier this month. As Catalin Cimpanu at The Record points out, the messages also contain copious ransom negotiations and payments from companies that had not disclosed a breach or ransomware incident (and indeed had paid Conti to ensure their silence). In addition, there are hundreds of bitcoin addresses in these chats that will no doubt prove useful to law enforcement organizations seeking to track the group’s profits.

This is the first of several stories about the inner workings of Conti, based on the leaked chat records. Part II will be told through the private messages exchanged by Conti employees working in different operational units, and it explores some of the more unique and persistent challenges facing large-scale cybercriminal organizations today.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson made headlines last year when he vowed to criminally prosecute a journalist for reporting a security flaw in a state website that exposed personal information of more than 100,000 teachers. But Missouri prosecutors now say they will not pursue charges following revelations that the data had been exposed since 2011 — two years after responsibility for securing the state’s IT systems was centralized within Parson’s own Office of Administration.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R), vowing to prosecute the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for reporting a security vulnerability that exposed teacher SSNs.

In October 2021, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud alerted Missouri education department officials that their website was exposing the Social Security numbers of more than 100,000 primary and secondary teachers in the state. Renaud found teachers’ SSNs were accessible in the HTML source code of some Missouri education department webpages.

After confirming that state IT officials had secured the exposed teacher data, the Post-Dispatch ran a story about their findings. Gov. Parson responded by holding a press conference in which he vowed his administration would seek to prosecute and investigate “the hackers” and anyone who aided the publication in its “attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

“The state is committed to bringing to justice anyone who hacked our systems or anyone who aided them to do so,” Parson said in October. “A hacker is someone who gains unauthorized access to information or content. This individual did not have permission to do what they did. They had no authorization to convert or decode, so this was clearly a hack.”

Parson tasked the Missouri Highway Patrol to produce a report on their investigation into “the hackers.”  On Monday, Feb. 21, The Post-Dispatch published the 158-page report (PDF), which concluded after 175 hours of investigation that Renaud did nothing wrong and only accessed information that was publicly available.

Emails later obtained by the Post-Dispatch showed that the FBI told state cybersecurity officials that there was “not an actual network intrusion” and the state database was “misconfigured.” The emails also revealed the proposed message when education department leaders initially prepared to respond in October:

“We are grateful to the member of the media who brought this to the state’s attention,” was the proposed quote attributed to the state’s education commissioner before Parson began shooting the messenger.

The Missouri Highway Patrol report includes an interview with Mallory McGowin, the chief communications officer for the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). McGowin told police the website weakness actually exposed 576,000 teacher Social Security numbers, and the data would have been publicly exposed for a decade.

McGowin also said the DESE’s website was developed and maintained by the Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division (ITSD) — which the governor’s office controls directly.

“I asked Mrs. McGowin if I was correct in saying the website was for DESE but it was maintained by ITSD, and she indicated that was correct,” the Highway Patrol investigator wrote. “I asked her if the ITSD was within the Office of Administration, or if DESE had their on-information technology section, and she indicated it was within the Office of Administration. She stated in 2009, policy was changed to move all information technology services to the Office of Administration.”

The report was a vindication for Renaud and for University of Missouri-St. Louis professor Shaji Khan, who helped the Post-Dispatch verify that the security flaw existed. Khan was also a target of Parson’s vow to prosecute “the hackers.” Khan’s attorney Elad Gross told the publication his client was not being charged, and that “state officials committed all of the wrongdoing here.”

“They failed to follow basic security procedures for years, failed to protect teachers’ Social Security numbers, and failed to take responsibility, instead choosing to instigate a baseless investigation into two Missourians who did the right thing and reported the problem,” Gross told The Post-Dispatch. “We thank the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Cole County Prosecutor’s Office for their diligent work on a case that never should have been sent to them.”

A network intrusion at the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in January led to the theft of personal information on more than 500,000 people receiving assistance from the group. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the email address used by a cybercriminal actor who offered to sell the stolen ICRC data also was used to register multiple domain names the FBI says are tied to a sprawling media influence operation originating from Iran.

On Jan. 19, the ICRC disclosed the compromise of servers hosting the personal information of more than 500,000 people receiving services from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The ICRC said the hacked servers contained data relating to the organization’s Restoring Family Links services, which works to reconnect people separated by war, violence, migration and other causes.

The same day the ICRC went public with its breach, someone using the nickname “Sheriff” on the English-language cybercrime forum RaidForums advertised the sale of data from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Sheriff’s sales thread suggests the ICRC was asked to pay a ransom to guarantee the data wouldn’t be leaked or sold online.

“Mr. Mardini, your words have been heard,” Sheriff wrote, posting a link to the Twitter profile of ICRC General Director Robert Mardini and urging forum members to tell him to check his email. “Check your email and send a figure you can pay.”

RaidForums member “unindicted” aka Sheriff selling access to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement data. Image: Ke-la.com

In their online statement about the hack (updated on Feb. 7) the ICRC said it had not had any contact with the hackers, and no ransom demand had been made.

“In line with our standing practice to engage with any actor who can facilitate or impede our humanitarian work, we are willing to communicate directly and confidentially with whoever may be responsible for this operation to impress upon them the need to respect our humanitarian action,” the ICRC statement reads.

Asked to comment on Sheriff’s claims, the ICRC issued the following statement:

“Right now, we do not have any conclusive evidence that this information from the data breach has been published or is being traded. Our cybersecurity team has looked into any reported allegation of data being available on the dark web.”

Update, 2:00 p.m., ET: The ICRC just published an update to its FAQ on the breach. The ICRC now says the hackers broke in on Nov. 9, 2021, using an unpatched critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-40539). “This vulnerability allows malicious cyber actors to place web shells and conduct post-exploitation activities such as compromising administrator credentials, conducting lateral movement, and exfiltrating registry hives and Active Directory files. Once inside our network, the hackers were able to deploy offensive security tools which allowed them to disguise themselves as legitimate users or administrators. This in turn allowed them to access the data, despite this data being encrypted.”

Original story:

The email address that Sheriff used to register at RaidForums — kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com — appears in an affidavit for a search warrant filed by the FBI roughly a year ago. That FBI warrant came on the heels of an investigation published by security firm FireEye, which examined an Iranian-based network of inauthentic news sites and social media accounts aimed at the United States., U.K. and other western audiences.

“This operation is leveraging a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in line with Iranian interests,” FireEye researchers wrote. “These narratives include anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Iran.”

The FBI says the domains registered by the email address tied to Sheriff’s RaidForums account were used in service of the Liberty Front Press, a network of phony news sites thought to originate from Iran.

According to the FBI affidavit, the address kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com was used to register at least three different domains for phony news sites, including awdnews[.]com, sachtimes[.]com, and whatsupic[.]com. A reverse WHOIS search on that email address at DomainTools.com (an advertiser on this site) shows it was used to register 17 domains between 2012 and 2021, including moslimyouthmedia[.]com, moslempress[.]com, and realneinovosti[.]net.

A review of Sheriff’s postings to RaidForum reveals he has used two other nicknames since registering on the forum in December 2021: “Unindicted,” and “threat_actor.” In several posts, Sheriff taunts one FireEye employee by name.

In a Jan. 3, 2022 post, Sheriff says their “team” is seeking licenses for the Cobalt Strike penetration testing tool, and that they’re prepared to pay $3,000 – $4,000 per license. Cobalt Strike is a legitimate security product that is sold only to vetted partners, but compromised or ill-gotten Cobalt Strike licenses frequently are used in the run-up to ransomware attacks.

“We will buy constantly, make contact,” Sheriff advised. “Do not ask if we still need)) the team is interested in licenses indefinitely.”

On Jan. 4, 2022, Sheriff tells RaidForums that their team is in need of access to a specific data broker platform, and offers to pay as much as $35,000 for that access. Sheriff says they will only accept offers that are guaranteed through the forum’s escrow account.

The demand for escrow in a sales thread is almost universally a sign that someone means business and they are ready to transact on whatever was advertised or requested. That’s because escrow transactions necessarily force the buyer to make a deposit with the forum’s administrators before proceeding on any transaction.

Sheriff appears to have been part of a group on RaidForums that offered to buy access to organizations that could be extorted with ransomware or threatened with the publication of stolen data (PDF screenshot from threat intelligence firm KELA). In a “scam report” filed against Sheriff by another RaidForums member on Dec. 31, 2021, the claimant says Sheriff bought access from them and agreed to pay 70 percent of any ransom paid by the victim organization.

Instead, the claimant maintains, Sheriff only paid them roughly 25 percent. “The company pay $1.35 million ransom and only payment was made of $350k to me, so i ask for $600k to fix this dispute,” the affiliate wrote.

In another post on RaidForums, a user aptly named “FBI Agent” advised other denizens to steer clear of Sheriff’s ransomware affiliate program, noting that transacting with this person could run afoul of sanctions from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that restrict commerce with people residing in Iran.

“To make it clear, we don’t work with individuals under the OFAC sanctions list, which @Sheriff is under,” the ransomware affiliate program administrator wrote in reply.

RaidForums says Sheriff was referred to the forum by Pompompurin, the same hacker who used a security hole in the FBI’s website last year to blast a phony alert about a cybercrime investigation to state and local authorities. Pompompurin has been quite active on RaidForums for the past few years, frequently posting databases from newly-hacked organizations, and selling access to stolen information.

Reach via Twitter, Pompompurin said they had no idea who might have offered money and information on Sheriff, and that they would never “snitch” on Sheriff.

“I know who he is but I’m not saying anything,” Pompompurin replied.

The information about Sheriff was brought to my attention by an anonymous person who initially contacted KrebsOnSecurity saying they wanted to make a donation to the publication. When the person offering the gift asked if it was okay that the money came from a ransomware transaction, I naturally declined the offer.

That person then proceeded to share the information about the connection between Sheriff’s email address and the FBI search warrant, as well as the account’s credentials.

The same identity approached several other security researchers and journalists, one of whom was able to validate that the kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com address actually belonged to Sheriff’s account. Those researchers were likewise offered tainted donations, except the individual offering the donation seemed to use a different story with each person about who they were or why they were offering money. Others contacted by the same anonymous user said they also received unsolicited details about Sheriff.

It seems clear that whoever offered that money and information has their own agenda, which may also involve attempts to make members of the news media appear untrustworthy for agreeing to accept stolen funds. However, the information they shared checks out, and since there is precious little public reporting on the source of the ICRC intrusion, the potential connection to hacker groups based in Iran seems worth noting.

Russian authorities have arrested six men accused of operating some of the most active online bazaars for selling stolen payment card data. The crackdown — the second closure of major card fraud shops by Russian authorities in as many weeks — comes closely behind Russia’s arrest of 14 alleged affiliates of the REvil ransomware gang, and has many in the cybercrime underground asking who might be next.

Dept. K’s message for Trump’s Dumps users.

On Feb. 7 and 8, the domains for the carding shops Trump’s Dumps, Ferum Shop, Sky-Fraud and UAS were seized by Department K, a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation that focuses on computer crimes. The websites for the carding stores were retrofitted with a message from Dept. K asking, “Which one of you is next?”

According to cyber intelligence analysts at Flashpoint, that same message was included in the website for UniCC, another major and venerated carding shop that was seized by Dept. K in January.

Around the same time Trump’s Dumps and the other three shops began displaying the Dept. K message, the Russian state-owned news outlet TASS moved a story naming six Russian men who were being charged with “the illegal circulation of means of payment.”

TASS reports the six detained include Denis Pachevsky, general director of Saratovfilm Film Company LLC; Alexander Kovalev, an individual entrepreneur; Artem Bystrykh, an employee of Transtekhkom LLC; Artem Zaitsev; an employee of Get-net LLC; and two unemployed workers, Vladislav Gilev and Yaroslav Solovyov.

None of the stories about the arrests tie the men to the four carding sites. But Flashpoint found that all of the domains seized by Dept. K. were registered and hosted through Zaitsev’s company — Get-net LLC.

“All four sites frequently advertised one another, which is generally atypical for two card marketplaces competing in the same space,” Flashpoint analysts wrote.

Stas Alforov is director of research for Gemini Advisory, a New York firm that monitors underground cybercrime markets. Alforov said it is most unusual for the Russians to go after carding sites that aren’t selling data stolen from Russian citizens.

“It’s not in their business to be taking down Russian card shops,” Alforov said. “Unless those shops were somehow selling data on Russian cardholders, which they weren’t.”

A carding shop that sold stolen credit cards and invoked 45’s likeness and name was among those taken down this week by Russian authorities.

Debuting in 2011, Ferum Shop is one of the oldest observed dark web marketplaces selling “card not present” data (customer payment records stolen from hacked online merchants), according to Gemini.

“Every year for the last 5 years, the marketplace has been a top 5 source of card not present records in terms of records posted for sale,” Gemini found. “In this time period, roughly 66% of Ferum Shop’s records have been from United States financial institutions. The remaining 34% have come from over 200 countries.”

In contrast, Trump’s Dumps focuses on selling card data stolen from hacked point-of-sale devices, and it benefited greatly from the January 2021 retirement of Joker’s Stash, which for years dwarfed most other carding shops by volume. Gemini found Trump’s Dumps gained roughly 40 percent market share after Joker’s closure, and that more than 87 percent of the payment card records it sells are from U.S. financial institutions.

“In the past 5 years, Ferum Shop and Trump’s Dumps have cumulatively added over 64 million compromised payment cards,” Alforov wrote. “Based on average demand for CP and CNP records and the median price of $10, the total revenue from these sales is estimated to be over $430 million. Due to the 20 to 30% commission that shops generally receive, the administrators of Ferum Shop and Trump’s Dumps likely generated between $86 and $129 million in profits from these card sales.”

The arrests of the six men comes less than two weeks after Russian law enforcement officials detained four suspected carders — including Andrey Sergeevich Novak, the reputed owner of the extremely popular and long-running UniCC carding shop.

In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department charged Novak and three dozen other defendants thought to be key members of “Infraud,” a huge cybercrime community online that prosecutors say cost merchants and consumers more than half a billion dollars.

Unicc shop, which sold stolen credit card data as well as Social Security numbers and other consumer information that can be used for identity theft. It was seized by Dept. K in January 2020.

Flashpoint said the recent arrests represent the first major actions against Russia-based cybercriminals since March 2020, when the FSB detained more than thirty members of an illicit carding operation, charging twenty-five of them with “illegal circulation of means of payment.”

Dumps, or card data stolen from compromised point-of-sale devices, have been declining in popularity among fraudsters for years as more financial institutions have issued more secure chip-based cards. In contrast, card-not-present data stolen from online stores continues to be in high demand, because it helps facilitate fraud at online retailers. Gemini says the supply of card-not-present data rose by 50 percent in 2021 versus 2020, fed largely by the success of Magecart e-skimmers that target vulnerabilities in e-commerce sites.

Alforov says while the carding shop closures are curiously timed, he doubts the supply of stolen card data is going to somehow shrink as a result. Rather, he said, some of the lower-tier card shops that were previously just resellers working with Trump’s Dumps and others are now suddenly ramping up inventory with their own new suppliers — very likely thanks to the same crooks who were selling cards to the six men arrested this week in Russia.

“What we’re seeing now is a lot of those reseller shops are coming to the market and saying, ‘We don’t have that order data we were getting from Ferum Shop but now have our own vendors,’” Alforov said. “Some of the lesser tier shops are starting to move up the food chain.”

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said today it will be transitioning away from requiring biometric data from taxpayers who wish to access their records at the agency’s website. The reversal comes as privacy experts and lawmakers have been pushing the IRS and other federal agencies to find less intrusive methods for validating one’s identity with the U.S. government online.

Late last year, the login page for the IRS was updated with text advising that by the summer of 2022, the only way for taxpayers to access their records at irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that collects biometric data — such as live facial scans using a mobile device or webcam.

The IRS first announced its partnership with ID.me in November, but the press release received virtually no attention. On Jan. 19, KrebsOnSecurity published the story IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access, detailing a rocky experience signing up for IRS access via ID.me. That story immediately went viral, bringing this site an almost unprecedented amount of traffic. A tweet about it quickly garnered more than two million impressions.

It was clear most readers had no idea these new and more invasive requirements were being put in place at the IRS and other federal agencies (the Social Security Administration also is steering new signups to ID.me).

ID.me says it has approximately 64 million users, with 145,000 new users signing up each day. Still, the bulk of those users are people who have been forced to sign up with ID.me as a condition of receiving state or federal financial assistance, such as unemployment insurance, child tax credit payments, and pandemic assistance funds.

In the face of COVID, dozens of states collectively lost tens of billions of dollars at the hands of identity thieves impersonating out-of-work Americans seeking unemployment insurance. Some 30 states and 10 federal agencies now use ID.me to screen for ID thieves applying for benefits in someone else’s name.

But ID.me has been problematic for many legitimate applicants who saw benefits denied or delayed because they couldn’t complete ID.me’s verification process.  Critics charged the IRS’s plan would unfairly disadvantage people with disabilities or limited access to technology or Internet, and that facial recognition systems tend to be less accurate for people with darker skin.

Many readers were aghast that the IRS would ask people to hand over their biometric and personal data to a private company that begin in 2010 as a way to help veterans, teachers and other public servants qualify for retail discounts. These readers had reasonable questions: Who has (or will have) access to this data? Why should it be stored indefinitely (post-verification)? What happens if ID.me gets breached?

The Washington Post reported today that in a meeting with lawmakers, IRS officials said they were considering another identity verification option that wouldn’t use facial recognition. At the same time, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) challenged the Treasury Department and IRS to reconsider the biometric requirements.

In a statement published today, the IRS said it was transitioning away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts.

“The transition will occur over the coming weeks in order to prevent larger disruptions to taxpayers during filing season,” the IRS said. “During the transition, the IRS will quickly develop and bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition. The IRS will also continue to work with its cross-government partners to develop authentication methods that protect taxpayer data and ensure broad access to online tools.”

“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig wrote. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The statement further stressed that the transition announced today does not interfere with the taxpayer’s ability to file their return or pay taxes owed. “During this period, the IRS will continue to accept tax filings, and it has no other impact on the current tax season,” the IRS said. “People should continue to file their taxes as they normally would.”

It remains unclear what other service or method the IRS will use going forward to validate the identities of new account signups. Wyden and others have urged the IRS to use Login.gov, a single sign-on service that Congress required federal agencies to use in 2015.

“Login.gov is already used to access 200 websites run by 28 Federal agencies and over 40 million Americans have accounts,” Wyden wrote in a letter to the IRS today. “Unfortunately, login.gov has not yet reached its full potential, in part because many agencies have flouted the Congressional mandate that they use it, and because successive Administrations have failed to prioritize digital identity. The cost of this inaction has been billions of dollars in fraud, which has in turn fueled a black market for stolen personal data, and enabled companies like ID.me to commercialize what should be a core government service.”

Login.gov is run by the U.S. General Services Administration, which told The Post that it was “committed to not deploying facial recognition…or any other emerging technology for use with government benefits and services until a rigorous review has given us confidence that we can do so equitably and without causing harm to vulnerable populations.”