Final week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the information that one of many largest cybercrime companies for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked lately, exposing its inner operations, funds and organizational construction. In immediately’s Half II, we’ll look at clues concerning the real-life id of “Fearlless,” the nickname chosen by the proprietor of the SWAT USA Drops service.
Primarily based in Russia, SWAT USA recruits individuals in america to reship packages containing expensive electronics which can be bought with stolen bank cards. As detailed in this Nov. 2 story, SWAT at the moment employs greater than 1,200 U.S. residents, all of whom might be lower unfastened and not using a promised payday on the finish of their first month reshipping stolen items.
The present co-owner of SWAT, a cybercriminal who makes use of the nickname “Fearlless,” operates totally on the cybercrime discussion board Verified. This Russian-language discussion board has tens of hundreds of members, and it has suffered a number of hacks that uncovered greater than a decade’s value of person information and direct messages.
January 2021 posts on Verified present that Fearlless and his accomplice Universalo bought the SWAT reshipping enterprise from a Verified member named SWAT, who’d been working the service for years. SWAT agreed to switch the enterprise in trade for 30 % of the web revenue over the following six months.
Cyber intelligence agency Intel 471 says Fearlless first registered on Verified in February 2013. The e-mail deal with Fearlless used on Verified leads nowhere, however a overview of Fearlless’ direct messages on Verified signifies this person initially registered on Verified a 12 months earlier as a reshipping vendor, below the alias “Apathyp.”
There are two clues supporting the conclusion that Apathyp and Fearlless are the identical particular person. First, the Verified directors warned Apathyp he had violated the discussion board’s guidelines barring the usage of a number of accounts by the identical particular person, and that Verified’s automated techniques had detected that Apathyp and Fearlless have been logging in from the identical gadget. Second, in his earliest personal messages on Verified, Fearlless advised others to contact him on an on the spot messenger deal with that Apathyp had claimed as his.
Intel 471 says Apathyp registered on Verified utilizing the e-mail deal with [email protected]. A search on that e-mail deal with on the breach intelligence service Constella Intelligence discovered {that a} password generally related to it was “niceone.” However the [email protected] account isn’t related to a lot else that’s fascinating besides a now-deleted account at Vkontakte, the Russian reply to Fb.
Nevertheless, in Sept. 2020, Apathyp despatched a non-public message on Verified to the proprietor of a stolen bank card store, saying his credentials not labored. Apathyp advised the proprietor that his chosen password on the service was “12Apathy.”
A search on that password at Constella reveals it was utilized by simply 4 totally different e-mail addresses, two of that are notably fascinating: [email protected] and [email protected]. Constella found that each of those addresses have been beforehand related to the identical password as [email protected] — “niceone,” or some variation thereof.
Constella discovered that years in the past [email protected] was used to create a Vkontakte account below the identify Ivan Sherban (former password: “12niceone“) from Magnitogorsk, an industrial metropolis within the southern area of Russia. That very same e-mail deal with is now tied to a Vkontakte account for an Ivan Sherban who lists his residence as Saint Petersburg, Russia. Sherban’s profile picture shows a closely tattooed, muscular and recently married particular person along with his stunning new bride on the brink of drive off in a convertible sports activities automobile.
A pivotal clue for validating the analysis into Apathyp/Fearlless got here from the id intelligence agency myNetWatchman, which discovered that [email protected] at one time used the passwords “геззи1991” (gezze1991) and “gezze18081991.”
Care to position a wager on when Vkontakte says is Mr. Sherban’s birthday? Ten factors for those who answered August 18 (18081991).
Mr. Sherban didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark.
