A number of publications in September warned about the emergence of “Groove,” a new ransomware group that called on competing extortion gangs to unite in attacking U.S. government interests online. It now appears that Groove was all a big hoax designed to toy with security firms and journalists.

“An appeal to business brothers!” reads the Oct. 22 post from Groove calling for attacks on the United States government sector.

Groove was first announced Aug. 22 on RAMP, a new and fairly exclusive Russian-language darknet cybercrime forum.

“GROOVE is first and foremost an aggressive financially motivated criminal organization dealing in industrial espionage for about two years,” wrote RAMP’s administrator “Orange” in a post asking forum members to compete in a contest for designing a website for the new group. “Let’s make it clear that we don’t do anything without a reason, so at the end of the day, it’s us who will benefit most from this contest.”

According to a report published by McAfee, Orange launched RAMP to appeal to ransomware-related threat actors who were were ousted from major cybercrime forums for being too toxic, or to cybercriminals who complained of being short-changed or stiffed altogether by different ransomware affiliate programs.

The report said RAMP was the product of a dispute between members of the Babuk ransomware gang, and that its members likely had connections to another ransomware group called BlackMatter.

“[McAfee] believes, with high confidence, that the Groove gang is a former affiliate or subgroup of the Babuk gang, who are willing to collaborate with other parties, as long as there is financial gain for them,” the report said. “Thus, an affiliation with the BlackMatter gang is likely.”

In the first week of September, Groove posted on its darknet blog nearly 500,000 login credentials for customers of Fortinet VPN products, usernames and passwords that could be used to remotely connect to vulnerable systems. Fortinet said the credentials were collected from systems that hadn’t yet implemented a patch issued in May 2019.

Some security experts said the post of the Fortinet VPN usernames and passwords was aimed at drawing new affiliates to Groove. But it seems more likely the credentials were posted to garner the attention of security researchers and journalists.

Sometime in the last week, Groove’s darknet blog disappeared. In a post on the Russian cybercrime forum XSS, an established cybercrook using the handle “Boriselcin” explained that Groove was little more than a pet project to screw with the media and security industry.

“For those who don’t understand what’s going on: I set up a fake Groove Gang and named myself a gang,” Boriselcin wrote. The rest of the post reads:

“They ate it up, I dumped 500k old Fortinet [access credentials] that no one needed and they ate it up. I say that I am going to target the U.S. government sector and they eat it up. Few journalists realized that this was all a show, a fake, and a scam! And my respect goes out to those who figured it out. I don’t even know what to do now with this blog with a ton of traffic. Maybe sell it? Now I just need to start writing [the article], but I can’t start writing it without checking everything.”

A review of Boriselcin’s recent postings on XSS indicate he has been planning this scheme for several months. On Sept. 13, Boriselcin posted that “several topics are ripening,” and that he intended to publish an article about duping the media and security firms.

“Manipulation of large information security companies and the media through a ransom blog,” he wrote. “It’s so funny to read Twitter and the news these days But the result is great so far. Triggering the directors of information security companies. We fuck the supply chain of the information security office.”

Image: @nokae8

Throughout its short existence, Groove listed only a handful of victims on its darknet victim shaming blog, leading some to conclude the group wasn’t much of a threat.

“I wouldn’t take this call too seriously,” tweeted The Record’s Catalin Cimpanu in response to tweets about Groove’s rallying cry to attack U.S. government interests. “Groove are low-tier actors with few skills.”

Normally, when a cybercriminal forum or enterprise turns out to be fake or a scam, we learn the whole thing was a sting operation by federal investigators from the United States and/or other countries. Perhaps the main reason we don’t see more scams like Boricelcin’s is because there’s not really any money in it.

But that’s not to say his cynical ploy fails to serve a larger purpose. Over the past few years, we’ve seen multiple ransomware gangs reinvent themselves and rebrand to evade prosecution or economic sanctions. From that vantage point, anything which sows confusion and diverts the media and security industry’s time and attention away from real threats is a net plus for the cybercriminal community.

Tom Hoffman, senior vice president of intelligence at Flashpoint, said mocking Western media outlets and reporters is a constant fixture of the conversation on top-tier cybercrime forums. ”

“It is clear the criminal actors read all the press releases and Twitter claims about them,” Hoffman said. “We know some of them just want to inflict pain on the West, so this type of trolling is likely to continue. With the high level of attention this one got, I would assume we will see some other copycats pretty soon.”

Cyber intelligence firm Intel471 said while it’s possible that a single actor concocted Groove as a way to troll security researchers and the media, they believe it’s more likely that the actor’s attempt to create their own ransomware group didn’t work out as they had planned.

“It’s also important to remember that the true identity and nature of any Ransomware-as-a-Service gang is not always clear and the membership makeup or affiliates of these gangs can be fluid,” Intel 471 wrote. “Despite that and based on our research from multiple sources, which includes but isn’t limited to observations of shared infrastructure and victimology, we believe “boriselcin” operated the Groove blog and the RAMP forum. This individual is a well-known member of the Russian-language cybercrime community with ties to a number of ransomware gangs and in August offered $1000 for someone to design a ransomware victim shaming blog for Groove. We are skeptical of the claims raised by the actor that Groove was an elaborate hoax from the beginning although we wouldn’t be surprised to see further claims by the actor claiming this in future.”

Update, 5:56 p.m. ET: Included perspective from Intel 471.

In December 2018, bling vendor Signet Jewelers fixed a weakness in their Kay Jewelers and Jared websites that exposed the order information for all of their online customers. This week, Signet subsidiary Zales.com updated its website to remediate a nearly identical customer data exposure.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who was browsing Zales.com and suddenly found they were looking at someone else’s order information on the website, including their name, billing address, shipping address, phone number, email address, items and total amount purchased, delivery date, tracking link, and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number.

The reader noticed that the link for the order information she’d stumbled on included a lengthy numeric combination that — when altered — would produce yet another customer’s order information.

When the reader failed to get an immediate response from Signet, KrebsOnSecurity contacted the company. In a written response, Signet said, “A concern was brought to our attention by an IT professional. We addressed it swiftly, and upon review we found no misuse or negative impact to any systems or customer data.”

Their statement continues:

“As a business principle we make consumer information protection the highest priority, and proactively initiate independent and industry-leading security testing. As a result, we exceed industry benchmarks on data protection maturity. We always appreciate it when consumers reach out to us with feedback, and have committed to further our efforts on data protection maturity.”

When Signet fixed similar weaknesses with its Jared and Kay websites back in 2018, the reader who found and reported that data exposure said his mind quickly turned to the various ways crooks might exploit access to customer order information.

“My first thought was they could track a package of jewelry to someone’s door and swipe it off their doorstep,” said Brandon Sheehy, a Dallas-based Web developer. “My second thought was that someone could call Jared’s customers and pretend to be Jared, reading the last four digits of the customer’s card and saying there’d been a problem with the order, and if they could get a different card for the customer they could run it right away and get the order out quickly. That would be a pretty convincing scam. Or just targeted phishing attacks.”

In the grand scheme of many other, far more horrible things going on in information security right now, this Zales customer data exposure is small potatoes. And this type of data exposure is unbelievably common today: KrebsOnSecurity could probably run one story each day for several months just based on examples I’ve seen at dozens of other places online.

But I do think one key reason we continue to see companies make these easily avoidable mistakes with their customer data is that there are hardly ever any real consequences for organizations that fail to take more care. Meanwhile, their customers’ data is free to be hoovered up by anyone or anything that cares to look for it.

“Being a Web developer, the only thing I can chalk this up to is complete incompetence, and being very lazy and indifferent to your customers’ data,” Sheehy said. “This isn’t novel stuff, it’s basic Web site security.”

The Conti ransomware affiliate program appears to have altered its business plan recently. Organizations infected with Conti’s malware who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment are added to Conti’s victim shaming blog, where confidential files stolen from victims may be published or sold. But sometime over the past 48 hours, the cybercriminal syndicate updated its victim shaming blog to indicate that it is now selling access to many of the organizations it has hacked.

A redacted screenshot of the Conti News victim shaming blog.

“We are looking for a buyer to access the network of this organization and sell data from their network,” reads the confusingly worded message inserted into multiple recent victim listings on Conti’s shaming blog.

It’s unclear what prompted the changes, or what Conti hopes to gain from the move. It’s also not obvious why they would advertise having hacked into companies if they plan on selling that access to extract sensitive data going forward. Conti did not respond to requests for comment.

“I wonder if they are about to close down their operation and want to sell data or access from an in-progress breach before they do,” said Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer at computer security firm Emsisoft. “But it’s somewhat stupid to do it that way as you will alert the companies that they have a breach going on.”

The unexplained shift comes as policymakers in the United States and Europe are moving forward on efforts to disrupt some of the top ransomware gangs. Reuters recently reported that the U.S. government was behind an ongoing hacking operation that penetrated the computer systems of REvil, a ransomware affiliate group that experts say is about as aggressive and ruthless as Conti in dealing with victims. What’s more, REvil was among the first ransomware groups to start selling its victims’ data.

REvil’s darknet victim shaming site remains offline. In response, a representative for the Conti gang posted a long screed on Oct. 22 to a Russian language hacking forum denouncing the attack on REvil as the “unilateral, extraterritorial, and bandit-mugging behavior of the United States in world affairs.”

“Is there a law, even an American one, even a local one in any county of any of the 50 states, that legitimize such indiscriminate offensive action?” reads the Conti diatribe. “Is server hacking suddenly legal in the United States or in any of the US jurisdictions? Suppose there is such an outrageous law that allows you to hack servers in a foreign country. How legal is this from the point of view of the country whose servers were attacked? Infrastructure is not flying there in space or floating in neutral waters. It is a part of someone’s sovereignty.”

Conti’s apparent new direction may be little more than another ploy to bring victim companies to the negotiating table, as in “pay up or someone will pay for your data or long-term misery if you don’t.”

Or maybe something just got lost in the translation from Russian (Conti’s blog is published in English). But by shifting from the deployment of ransomware malware toward the sale of stolen data and network access, Conti could be aligning its operations with many competing ransomware affiliate programs that have recently focused on extorting companies in exchange for a promise not to publish or sell stolen data.

However, as Digital Shadows points out in a recent ransomware roundup, many ransomware groups are finding it difficult to manage data-leak sites, or hosting stolen data on the dark web for download.

After all, when it takes weeks to download one victim’s data via Tor — if indeed the download succeeds at all — the threat of leaking sensitive data as a negotiation tactic loses some of its menace. It’s also a crappy user experience. This has resulted in some ransomware groups exposing data using public file-sharing websites, which are faster and more reliable but can be taken down through legal means quite quickly.

Data leak sites also can offer investigators a potential way to infiltrate ransomware gangs, as evidenced by the recent reported compromise of the REvil gang by U.S. authorities.

“On 17 Oct 2021, a representative of the REvil ransomware gang took it to a Russian-speaking criminal forum to reveal that their data-leak sites had been ‘hijacked’,” Digital Shadows’ Ivan Righi wrote. “The REvil member explained that an unknown individual accessed the hidden services of REvil’s website’s landing page and blog using the same key owned by the developers. The user believed that the ransomware gang’s servers had been compromised and the individual responsible for the compromise was ‘looking for’ him.”

A recent report by Mandiant revealed that FIN12 — the group believed to be responsible for both Conti and the Ryuk ransomware operation — has managed to conduct ransomware attacks in less than 3 days, compared to more than 12 days for attacks involving data exfiltration.

Seen through those figures, perhaps Conti is merely seeking to outsource more of the data exfiltration side of the business (for a fee, of course) so that it can focus on the less time-intensive but equally profitable racket of deploying ransomware.

“As Q4 comes near, it will be interesting to see if issues relating to managing data leak sites will discourage new ransomware groups [from pursuing] the path of data-leak sites, or what creative solutions they will create to work around these issues,” Righi concluded. “The Ryuk ransomware group has proven itself to remain effective and a top player in the ransomware threat landscape without the need for a data-leak site. In fact, Ryuk has thrived by not needing a data leak site and data exfiltration.”

A recent phishing campaign targeting Coinbase users shows thieves are getting smarter about phishing one-time passwords (OTPs) needed to complete the login process. It also shows that phishers are attempting to sign up for new Coinbase accounts by the millions as part of an effort to identify email addresses that are already associated with active accounts.

A Google-translated version of the now-defunct Coinbase phishing site, coinbase.com.password-reset[.]com

Coinbase is the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, with roughly 68 million users from over 100 countries. The now-defunct phishing domain at issue — coinbase.com.password-reset[.]com — was targeting Italian Coinbase users (the site’s default language was Italian). And it was fairly successful, according to Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm Hold Security.

Holden’s team managed to peer inside some poorly hidden file directories associated with that phishing site, including its administration page. That panel, pictured in the redacted screenshot below, indicated the phishing attacks netted at least 870 sets of credentials before the site was taken offline.

The Coinbase phishing panel.

Holden said each time a new victim submitted credentials at the Coinbase phishing site, the administrative panel would make a loud “ding” — presumably to alert whoever was at the keyboard on the other end of this phishing scam that they had a live one on the hook.

In each case, the phishers manually would push a button that caused the phishing site to ask visitors for more information, such as the one-time password from their mobile app.

“These guys have real-time capabilities of soliciting any input from the victim they need to get into their Coinbase account,” Holden said.

Pressing the “Send Info” button prompted visitors to supply additional personal information, including their name, date of birth, and street address. Armed with the target’s mobile number, they could also click “Send verification SMS” with a text message prompting them to text back a one-time code.

SIFTING COINBASE FOR ACTIVE USERS

Holden said the phishing group appears to have identified Italian Coinbase users by attempting to sign up new accounts under the email addresses of more than 2.5 million Italians. His team also managed to recover the username and password data that victims submitted to the site, and virtually all of the submitted email addresses ended in “.it”.

But the phishers in this case likely weren’t interested in registering any accounts. Rather, the bad guys understood that any attempts to sign up using an email address tied to an existing Coinbase account would fail. After doing that several million times, the phishers would then take the email addresses that failed new account signups and target them with Coinbase-themed phishing emails.

Holden’s data shows this phishing gang conducted hundreds of thousands of halfhearted account signup attempts daily. For example, on Oct. 10 the scammers checked more than 216,000 email addresses against Coinbase’s systems. The following day, they attempted to register 174,000 new Coinbase accounts.

In an emailed statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Coinbase said it takes “extensive security measures to ensure our platform and customer accounts remain as safe as possible.” Here’s the rest of their statement:

“Like all major online platforms, Coinbase sees attempted automated attacks performed on a regular basis. Coinbase is able to automatically neutralize the overwhelming majority of these attacks, using a mixture of in-house machine learning models and partnerships with industry-leading bot detection and abuse prevention vendors. We continuously tune these models to block new techniques as we discover them. Coinbase’s Threat Intelligence and Trust & Safety teams also work to monitor new automated abuse techniques, develop and apply mitigations, and aggressively pursue takedowns against malicious infrastructure. We recognize that attackers (and attack techniques) will continue to evolve, which is why we take a multi-layered approach to combating automated abuse.”

Last month, Coinbase disclosed that malicious hackers stole cryptocurrency from 6,000 customers after using a vulnerability to bypass the company’s SMS multi-factor authentication security feature.

“To conduct the attack, Coinbase says the attackers needed to know the customer’s email address, password, and phone number associated with their Coinbase account and have access to the victim’s email account,” Bleeping Computer’s Lawrence Abrams wrote. “While it is unknown how the threat actors gained access to this information, Coinbase believes it was through phishing campaigns targeting Coinbase customers to steal account credentials, which have become common.”

This phishing scheme is another example of how crooks are coming up with increasingly ingenious methods for circumventing popular multi-factor authentication options, such as one-time passwords. Last month, KrebsOnSecurity highlighted research into several new services based on Telegram-based bots that make it relatively easy for crooks to phish OTPs from targets using automated phone calls and text messages.These OTP phishing services all assume the customer already has the target’s login credentials through some means — such as through a phishing site like the one examined in this story.

Savvy readers here no doubt already know this, but to find the true domain referenced in a link, look to the right of “http(s)://” until you encounter the first slash (/). The domain directly to the left of that first slash is the true destination; anything that precedes the second dot to the left of that first slash is a subdomain and should be ignored for the purposes of determining the true domain name.

In the phishing domain at issue here — coinbase.com.password-reset[.]com — password-reset[.]com is the destination domain, and the “coinbase.com” is just an arbitrary subdomain of password-reset[.]com. However, when viewed in a mobile device, many visitors to such a domain may only see the subdomain portion of the URL in their mobile browser’s address bar.

The best advice to sidestep phishing scams is to avoid clicking on links that arrive unbidden in emails, text messages or other media. Most phishing scams invoke a temporal element that warns of dire consequences should you fail to respond or act quickly. If you’re unsure whether the message is legitimate, take a deep breath and visit the site or service in question manually — ideally, using a browser bookmark so as to avoid potential typosquatting sites.

Also, never provide any information in response to an unsolicited phone call. It doesn’t matter who claims to be calling: If you didn’t initiate the contact, hang up. Don’t put them on hold while you call your bank; the scammers can get around that, too. Just hang up. Then you can call your bank or wherever else you need.

By the way, when was the last time you reviewed your multi-factor settings and options at the various websites entrusted with your most precious personal and financial information? It might be worth paying a visit to 2fa.directory (formerly twofactorauth[.]org) for a checkup.

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

Kentik’s view of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage.

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

The outages come just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

We don’t know how or why the outages persist at Facebook and its other properties, but the changes had to have come from inside the company, as Facebook manages those records internally. Whether the changes were made maliciously or by accident is anyone’s guess at this point.

Madory said it could be that someone at Facebook just screwed up.

“In the past year or so, we’ve seen a lot of these big outages where they had some sort of update to their global network configuration that went awry,” Madory said. “We obviously can’t rule out someone hacking them, but they also could have done this to themselves.”

Update, 4:37 p.m. ET: Sheera Frenkel with The New York Times tweeted that Facebook employees told her they were having trouble accessing Facebook buildings because their employee badges no longer worked. That could be one reason this outage has persisted so long: Facebook engineers may be having trouble physically accessing the computer servers needed to upload new BGP records to the global Internet.

Update, 6:16 p.m. ET: A trusted source who spoke with a person on the recovery effort at Facebook was told the outage was caused by a routine BGP update gone wrong. The source explained that the errant update blocked Facebook employees — the majority of whom are working remotely — from reverting the changes. Meanwhile, those with physical access to Facebook’s buildings couldn’t access Facebook’s internal tools because those were all tied to the company’s stranded domains.

In the meantime, several different domain registration companies listed the domain Facebook.com as up for sale. This happened thanks to automated systems that look for registered domains which appear to be expired, abandoned or recently vacated. There’s no reason to believe Facebook.com will actually be sold as a result, but it’s fun to consider how many billions of dollars it could fetch on the open market.

This is a developing story and will likely be updated throughout the day.