On July 22, 2025, the European police company Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted within the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime discussion board with greater than 50,000 members. The motion has triggered an ongoing frenzy of hypothesis and panic amongst XSS denizens in regards to the identification of the unnamed suspect, however the consensus is that he’s a pivotal determine within the crime discussion board scene who goes by the hacker deal with “Toha.” Right here’s a deep dive on what’s knowable about Toha, and a brief stab at who received nabbed.
An unnamed 38-year-old man was arrested in Kiev final month on suspicion of administering the cybercrime discussion board XSS. Picture: ssu.gov.ua.
Europol didn’t identify the accused, however printed partially obscured photographs of him from the raid on his residence in Kiev. The police company mentioned the suspect acted as a trusted third celebration — arbitrating disputes between criminals — and guaranteeing the safety of transactions on XSS. A statement from Ukraine’s SBU safety service mentioned XSS counted amongst its members many cybercriminals from numerous ransomware teams, together with REvil, LockBit, Conti, and Qiliin.
Because the Europol announcement, the XSS discussion board resurfaced at a brand new deal with on the deep internet (reachable solely by way of the anonymity community Tor). However from reviewing the current posts, there seems to be little consensus amongst longtime members in regards to the identification of the now-detained XSS administrator.
Essentially the most frequent remark relating to the arrest was a message of solidarity and assist for Toha, the deal with chosen by the longtime administrator of XSS and several other different main Russian boards. Toha’s accounts on different boards have been silent because the raid.
Europol mentioned the suspect has loved an almost 20-year profession in cybercrime, which roughly traces up with Toha’s historical past. In 2005, Toha was a founding member of the Russian-speaking discussion board Hack-All. That’s, till it received massively hacked a number of months after its debut. In 2006, Toha rebranded the discussion board to exploit[.]in, which might go on to attract tens of hundreds of members, together with an eventual Who’s-Who of wished cybercriminals.
Toha introduced in 2018 that he was promoting the Exploit discussion board, prompting rampant hypothesis on the boards that the client was secretly a Russian or Ukrainian authorities entity or entrance individual. Nonetheless, these suspicions have been unsupported by proof, and Toha vehemently denied the discussion board had been given over to authorities.
One of many oldest Russian-language cybercrime boards was DaMaGeLaB, which operated from 2004 to 2017, when its administrator “Ar3s” was arrested. In 2018, a partial backup of the DaMaGeLaB discussion board was reincarnated as xss[.]is, with Toha as its said administrator.
CROSS-SITE GRIFTING
Clues about Toha’s early presence on the Web — from ~2004 to 2010 — can be found within the archives of Intel 471, a cyber intelligence agency that tracks discussion board exercise. Intel 471 exhibits Toha used the identical e-mail deal with throughout a number of discussion board accounts, together with at Exploit, Antichat, Carder[.]su and inattack[.]ru.
DomainTools.com finds Toha’s e-mail deal with — [email protected] — was used to register at the least a dozen domains — most of them from the mid- to late 2000s. Aside from exploit[.]in and a website referred to as ixyq[.]com, the opposite domains registered to that e-mail deal with finish in .ua, the top-level area for Ukraine (e.g. deleted.org[.]ua, lj.com[.]ua, and blogspot.org[.]ua).
A 2008 snapshot of a website registered to [email protected] and to Anton Medvedovsky in Kiev. Notice the message on the backside left, “Protected by Exploit,in.” Picture: archive.org.
Almost the entire domains registered to [email protected] comprise the identify Anton Medvedovskiy within the registration information, apart from the aforementioned ixyq[.]com, which is registered to the identify Yuriy Avdeev in Moscow.
This Avdeev surname got here up in a prolonged dialog with Lockbitsupp, the chief of the rapacious and damaging ransomware affiliate group Lockbit. The dialog befell in February 2024, when Lockbitsupp requested for assist figuring out Toha’s real-life identification.
In early 2024, the chief of the Lockbit ransomware group — Lockbitsupp — requested for assist investigating the identification of the XSS administrator Toha, which he claimed was a Russian man named Anton Avdeev.
Lockbitsupp didn’t share why he wished Toha’s particulars, however he maintained that Toha’s actual identify was Anton Avdeev. I declined to assist Lockbitsupp in no matter revenge he was planning on Toha, however his query made me curious to look deeper.
It seems Lockbitsupp’s question was primarily based on a now-deleted Twitter submit from 2022, when a consumer by the identify “3xp0rt” asserted that Toha was a Russian man named Anton Viktorovich Avdeev, born October 27, 1983.
Looking the net for Toha’s e-mail deal with [email protected] reveals a 2010 sales thread on the discussion board bmwclub.ru the place a consumer named Honeypo was promoting a 2007 BMW X5. The advert listed the contact individual as Anton Avdeev and gave the contact telephone quantity 9588693.
A search on the telephone quantity 9588693 within the breach monitoring service Constella Intelligence finds loads of official Russian authorities information with this quantity, date of start and the identify Anton Viktorovich Avdeev. For instance, hacked Russian authorities information present this individual has a Russian tax ID and SIN (Social Safety quantity), and that they have been flagged for site visitors violations on a number of events by Moscow police; in 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2014.
Astute readers might have seen by now that the ages of Mr. Avdeev (41) and the XSS admin arrested this month (38) are a bit off. This would appear to recommend that the individual arrested is somebody aside from Mr. Avdeev, who didn’t reply to requests for remark.
A FLY ON THE WALL
For additional perception on this query, KrebsOnSecurity sought feedback from Sergeii Vovnenko, a former cybercriminal from Ukraine who now works on the safety startup paranoidlab.com. I reached out to Vovnenko as a result of for a number of years starting round 2010 he was the proprietor and operator of thesecure[.]biz, an encrypted “Jabber” instantaneous messaging server that Europol mentioned was operated by the suspect arrested in Kiev. Thesecure[.]biz grew fairly in style amongst lots of the prime Russian-speaking cybercriminals as a result of it scrupulously saved few information of its customers’ exercise, and its administrator was at all times a trusted member of the group.
The explanation I do know this historic tidbit is that in 2013, Vovnenko — utilizing the hacker nicknames “Fly,” and “Flycracker” — hatched a plan to have a gram of heroin bought off of the Silk Street darknet market and shipped to our house in Northern Virginia. The scheme was to spoof a name from one in every of our neighbors to the native police, saying this man Krebs down the road was a druggie who was having narcotics delivered to his house.
I occurred to be lurking on Flycracker’s non-public cybercrime discussion board when his heroin-framing plan was carried out, and referred to as the police myself earlier than the smack finally arrived within the U.S. Mail. Vovnenko was later arrested for unrelated cybercrime actions, extradited to america, convicted, and deported after a 16-month keep within the U.S. jail system [on several occasions, he has expressed heartfelt apologies for the incident, and we have since buried the hatchet].
Vovnenko mentioned he bought a tool for cloning bank cards from Toha in 2009, and that Toha shipped the merchandise from Russia. Vovnenko defined that he (Flycracker) was the proprietor and operator of thesecure[.]biz from 2010 till his arrest in 2014.
Vovnenko believes thesecure[.]biz was stolen whereas he was in jail, both by Toha and/or an XSS administrator who glided by the nicknames N0klos and Sonic.
“Once I was in jail, [the] admin of xss.is stole that area, or in all probability N0klos purchased XSS from Toha or vice versa,” Vovnenko mentioned of the Jabber area. “No person from [the forums] spoke with me after my jailtime, so I can solely guess what actually occurred.”
N0klos was the proprietor and administrator of an early Russian-language cybercrime discussion board often known as Darklife[.]ws. Nonetheless, N0kl0s additionally seems to be a lifelong Russian resident, and in any case appears to have vanished from Russian cybercrime boards a number of years in the past.
Requested whether or not he believes Toha was the XSS administrator who was arrested this month in Ukraine, Vovnenko maintained that Toha is Russian, and that “the French cops took the flawed man.”
WHO IS TOHA?
So who did the Ukrainian police arrest in response to the investigation by the French authorities? It appears believable that the BMW advert invoking Toha’s e-mail deal with and the identify and telephone variety of a Russian citizen was merely misdirection on Toha’s half — supposed to confuse and throw off investigators. Maybe this even explains the Avdeev surname surfacing within the registration information from one in every of Toha’s domains.
However typically the best reply is the proper one. “Toha” is a standard Slavic nickname for somebody with the primary identify “Anton,” and that matches the identify within the registration information for greater than a dozen domains tied to Toha’s [email protected] e-mail deal with: Anton Medvedovskiy.
Constella Intelligence finds there may be an Anton Gannadievich Medvedovskiy residing in Kiev who will probably be 38 years outdated in December. This particular person owns the e-mail deal with [email protected], as effectively an an Airbnb account that includes a profile photograph of a person with roughly the identical hairline because the suspect within the blurred photographs launched by the Ukrainian police. Mr. Medvedovskiy didn’t reply to a request for remark.
My tackle the takedown is that the Ukrainian authorities probably arrested Medvedovskiy. Toha shared on DaMaGeLab in 2005 that he had just lately completed the eleventh grade and was finding out at a college — a time when Mevedovskiy would have been round 18 years outdated. On Dec. 11, 2006, fellow Exploit members wished Toha a cheerful birthday. Information uncovered in a 2022 hack on the Ukrainian public providers portal diia.gov.ua present that Mr. Medvedovskiy’s birthday is Dec. 11, 1987.
The legislation enforcement motion and ensuing confusion in regards to the identification of the detained has thrown the Russian cybercrime discussion board scene into disarray in current weeks, with prolonged and heated arguments about XSS’s future spooling out throughout the boards.
XSS relaunched on a brand new Tor deal with shortly after the authorities plastered their seizure discover on the discussion board’s homepage, however the entire trusted moderators from the outdated discussion board have been dismissed with out clarification. Current members noticed their discussion board account balances drop to zero, and have been requested to plunk down a deposit to register on the new discussion board. The brand new XSS “admin” mentioned they have been involved with the earlier homeowners and that the modifications have been to assist rebuild safety and belief throughout the group.
Nonetheless, the brand new admin’s assurances seem to have accomplished little to assuage the worst fears of the discussion board’s erstwhile members, most of whom appear to be protecting their distance from the relaunched web site for now.
Certainly, if there may be one widespread understanding amid all of those discussions in regards to the seizure of XSS, it’s that Ukrainian and French authorities now have a number of years price of personal messages between XSS discussion board customers, in addition to contact rosters and different consumer information linked to the seized Jabber server.
“The parable of the ‘trusted individual’ is shattered,” the consumer “GordonBellford” cautioned on Aug. 3 in an Exploit discussion board thread in regards to the XSS admin arrest. “The discussion board is run by strangers. They received all the things. Two years of Jabber server logs. Full backup and discussion board database.”
GordonBellford continued:
And the scariest factor is: this information array is not only an archive. It’s materials for evaluation that has ALREADY BEEN DONE . With the assistance of contemporary instruments, they see all the things:
Graphs of your contacts and exercise.
Relationships between nicknames, emails, password hashes and Jabber ID.
Timestamps, IP addresses and digital fingerprints.
Your distinctive writing type, phrasing, punctuation, consistency of grammatical errors, and even typical typos that can hyperlink your accounts on totally different platforms.They don’t seem to be searching for a needle in a haystack. They merely sifted the haystack by the AI sieve and received ready-made dossiers.
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