Free Russia Foundation to investigate data breach after internal documents published online — Novaya Gazeta Europe
One of Russia’s most prominent pro-democracy organisations, the Free Russia Foundation, announced that it was investigating a potential cyberattack on Friday, following a leak of thousands of emails and documents related to its work.
First and foremost, our thanks go to the threat research team at Silent Push and the security team at Stark Industries Solutions (referred to as “Stark” from this point forwards) for their enthusiastic cooperation in the ‘behind the scenes’ efforts of this blog post.IntroductionIn our opening statement, we also introduce the subject of this post: the cross-team and cross-organization collaborative efforts of Silent Push, Stark, and Team Cymru in taking action against a common and well-known adve
stardom dreams, stalking devices and the secret conglomerate selling both
people frequently reach out to me with companies to look into. usually it takes me about 10 minutes before i move on for one reason or another—it's not interesting for a story or has good security, for example. i didnt expect anything different when an acquaintance told me about Tracki, a self-proclaimed "world leader in GPS tracking" that they suspected could be used nefariously. at first glance, Tracki appeared to be a serious company, maybe even one that cared about security. we could never have guessed what was about to unfold before us. half a year into our investigation, we'd found it all: a hidden conglomerate posing as five independent companies, masked from governments and customers alike through the use of dozens of false identities, US letterbox companies, and an undeclared owner. a 90s phone sex scheme that, through targeting by one of hollywood's most notorious fixers, spiraled into a collection of almost a hundred domains advertising everything from online dating to sore throat remedies. a slew of device-assisted murder cases, on top of potential data breaches affecting almost 12 million users, ranging from federal government officials to literal infants. and most importantly, a little-known Snoop Dogg song. how in the world did we get here? starting our descent
In early December of 2023, we discovered an open directory filled with batch scripts, primarily designed for defense evasion and executing command and control payloads. These scripts execute various actions, including disabling antivirus processes and stopping services related to SQL, Hyper-V, security tools, and Exchange servers. This report also highlights scripts responsible for erasing backups, wiping event logs, and managing the installation or removal of remote monitoring tools like Atera. Our investigation uncovered the use of additional tools, including Ngrok for proxy services, SystemBC, and two well-known command and control frameworks: Sliver and PoshC2. The observed servers show long term usage by the threat actors, appearing in The DFIR Report Threat Feeds as far back as September 2023. They have been active intermittently since then, with the most recent activity detected in August 2024. Ten new sigma rules were created from this report and added to our private sigma ruleset
Hacking Millions of Modems (and Investigating Who Hacked My Modem)
Two years ago, something very strange happened to me while working from my home network. I was exploiting a blind XXE vulnerability that required an external HTTP server to smuggle out files, so I spun up an AWS box and ran a simple Python webserver to receive the traffic from the vulnerable server:
