krebsonsecurity

Deleting the data after verification is a good practice. But if you're actively compromised, it probably doesn't matter how long you keep the data because it's already been immediately "backed up" by the intruders the second it is collected.

Much like Target and Home Depot with their big credit card breaches a decade ago. Everyone was up in arms about these companies "storing" full credit card records, when in reality the attackers had card-sniffing malware installed on every single cash register at every single store across the country.

Sometimes just a little bit DNS research can yield a lot of useful results.

Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address [email protected] email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.

A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".

I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.

Thanks. I did update the story to reflect the apparent fix. I'm still trying to verify if this behavior remains in some form.

This is the way. You don't have to protect what you don't collect. Mullvad is an excellent example of this. They don't even want you to pick a password, and they're fine if you just mail them cash as payment.

The identity of the defendant has been doing this for many years and is one of the original members of the Com. The people in that scene sim-swapping artists for their music are those that have already made their stolen millions, and have long ago graduated from stealing usernames and gamertag handles.

Some of the exposure in these cases is due to the fact that you have cybercriminals who've been doing the same things for more than a decade. That is a very long time in which to make just a few key opsec mistakes, and also most RU cybercriminals back then did not take as much care to cover their tracks as they do today.

I thought about that also, and then one of the victims I talked to brought up a good point. An 8 character password with symbols and numbers doesn't sound like a great password today, but many of the accounts getting drained were tied to people who were very early LastPass users, and mostly longtime investors. Back then, affordable GPUs that can do 4 million hash cracking attempts per second weren't really a thing.

What I found was a lot of people made security assumptions and never revisited those assumptions. Or never fully did.