For years, gray market services known as “bulletproof” hosts have been a key tool for cybercriminals looking to anonymously maintain web infrastructure with no questions asked. But as global law enforcement scrambles to crack down on digital threats, they have developed strategies for getting customer information from these hosts and have increasingly targeted the people behind the services with indictments. At the cybercrime-focused conference Sleuthcon in in Arlington, Virginia on Friday, researcher Thibault Seret outlined how this shift has pushed both bulletproof hosting companies and criminal customers toward an alternative approach.
Rather than relying on web hosts to find ways of operating outside law enforcement's reach, some service providers have turned to offering purpose-built VPNs and other proxy services as a way of rotating and masking customer IP addresses and offering infrastructure that either intentionally doesn't log traffic or mixes traffic from many sources together. And while the technology isn't new, Seret and other researchers emphasized to WIRED that the transition to using proxies among cybercrminals over the last couple of years is significant.
“The issue is, you cannot technically distinguish which traffic in a node is bad and which traffic is good,” Seret, a researcher at the threat intelligence firm Team Cymru, told WIRED ahead of his talk. “That's the magic of a proxy service—you cannot tell who’s who. It's good in terms of internet freedom, but it's super, super tough to analyze what’s happening and identify bad activity.”
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A consortium of global law enforcement agencies and tech companies announced on Wednesday that they have disrupted the infostealer malware known as Lumma. One of the most popular infostealers worldwide, Lumma has been used by hundreds of what Microsoft calls “cyber threat actors” to steal passwords, credit card and banking information, and cryptocurrency wallet details. The tool, which officials say is developed in Russia, has provided cybercriminals with the information and credentials they needed to drain bank accounts, disrupt services, and carry out data extortion attacks against schools, among other things.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) obtained an order from a United States district court last week to seize and take down about 2,300 domains underpinning Lumma’s infrastructure. At the same time, the US Department of Justice seized Lumma’s command and control infrastructure and disrupted cybercriminal marketplaces that sold the Lumma malware. All of this was coordinated, too, with the disruption of regional Lumma infrastructure by Europol’s European Cybercrime Center and Japan’s Cybercrime Control Center.
Microsoft lawyers wrote on Wednesday that Lumma, which is also known as LummaC2, has spread so broadly because it is “easy to distribute, difficult to detect, and can be programmed to bypass certain security defenses.” Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft’s DCU, says in a blog post that Lumma is a “go-to tool,” including for the notorious Scattered Spider cybercriminal gang. Attackers distribute the malware using targeted phishing attacks that typically impersonate established companies and services, like Microsoft itself, to trick victims.
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