attribution – Key Findings

Never be too careless with what you post on social media. It might come back to haunt you one day and in the case of our investigations it sure led to some key findings on the scam network!

Chapter 1 – It all starts with a bad sock puppet

Chapter 2 – The Art of OSINT

Chapter 3 – What’s the big deal? And who’s to blame?

Chapter 4 – The more, the better

Chapter 5 – Mistakes on social media

The ultimate goal of our investigation was to find the people behind the scam. So far, we had found fake personas and most of the WHOIS data was misleading as well. Of all the people we came across, there was still a reasonable amount of doubt that they were actually involved in the scam, or we couldn’t reveal their true identities for sure. In our hunt for the truth we also turned to social media, hoping to find someone connected to our case.

As previously mentioned, most names used to register websites were clearly fake. Nancy Wilson and Steve Dalton were among the favorites. However, we did notice that the majority of sites had Indian addresses in the WHOIS data. In particular, two addresses reoccurred often: one in Noida and one in Gurgaon (also known as Gurugram). We decided to find Facebook profiles that had visited both cities and that were also linked to East Peoria, the city in Illinois that the scammers posted on their websites. Maybe someone was careless enough and had checked into all three places. Of course, this was done a while back when the Facebook graph search was still working.

Jackpot! While we hadn’t expected to find anything on this wild query, one Facebook profile matched our search. This person, named Baljeet, was a very active social media user and constantly checked into places on Facebook. Among these check-ins were Noida, Gurgaon and East Peoria.

Intelligence collection always feeds on mistakes your adversaries or intelligence targets make, and Baljeet committed a major blunder here. Soon after, we found ourselves digging into Baljeet’s profile. It turns out, that he had frequently visited locations (marked in blue) in the vicinity of the office building (marked in red) which was found in the WHOIS data of the scam sites and in which we suspected the team of developers behind these sites to be located.

At the same time, we discovered that Baljeet registered a website with his full name and actual email address, which we had found in his Twitter timeline. This website was providing web design services to customers in the US. And guess what? The site was using the same address in East Peoria and also the same phone number as the scam sites! I decided to have a little chat with Baljeet on Facebook to confront him with this information.

The conversation went on for a while and Baljeet kept coming up with excuses and dodgy information on why his website was using the same address and phone number as the scam sites. After our talks, he actually took down both for a while, but the address is back on the website today. To us it is clear: Baljeet is definitely involved in this scam. You don’t just sit in India and coincidently use the same address (in the middle of nowhere) and phone number as multiple scam sites on your own site. You don’t just coincidently happen to work in vicinity of addresses we have attributed to the scam sites.

While looking into other social media profiles used by Baljeet, we came across other indicators that fit the overall picture. A couple days ago, he proudly posted the following on Twitter: A certificate of an advanced Google Analytics course (my browser was set to German when I opened the link).

As you can see, the information we won from social media research led to us a prime suspect in our case. Not only did we have a real name now, we also had a unique username, a pattern of life and enough information to verify his involvement in our scam.

Our social media research also led to many more key findings. One of the phone numbers we found in the scam sites’ WHOIS data was also posting job advertisements on Facebook.

A call center agent providing support to activate Norton? That’s exactly how our hunt started. Looks like it is all coming together! The information we gathered throughout our social media research was invaluable and had us dig even deeper into WHOIS data and source code from the scam websites, leading to unravelling the whole network behind it. But that is something for the coming chapters.

Sector035/MW-OSINT – 15.08.2019

My blog has been hacked! Someone defaced the page and looking into the technical details didn’t provide any leads to the culprit. Maybe OSINT can help in this case.

Today’s article will look into cyber attribution and how OSINT can help identify the perpetrator of a cyberattack or other hacking exploits. Keep in mind, as long as the perpetrator does not make any mistakes it will be hard to track him down. Even if the actual person behind an attack cannot be found, hints on the hacker’s background may help narrow things down to a specific target group or origin. Let us have a closer look at the defacement shown above.

As stated, looking into technical details (IP-address, code, etc.) did not reveal anything useful. So we have to take a closer look at the tag and handle that was placed on our site. A reverse image search was conducted and did not show any results. The hacker goes by the name “drag0nw1ng١٩٨١”, this exact search-term also came up inconclusive. The Arabic numbers in the handle may be an indicator for the hacker’s cultural background. Next up, we will search for the handle in different variations, including a “standardized” one:

Not many results to look at here, so we can easily go through each and every page. Next to a Russian PlayStation profile named Dragonwing1981, we stumble upon some interesting results that might be related to our case.

Several data-breaches and leaks show an email address using the exact name. Dragonwing1981@yahoo.com was registered to a member of an internet forum called Kataib Hezbollah. This forum in Arabic language no longer exists and was used to disseminate terrorist propaganda. Since our hacker used Arabic numbers in his handle and the handle seems quite unique (based on the low amount of Google results), the email address might be linked to our guy.

The oldest mentioning of “dragonwing1981” came from another internet forum. In August 2004, the forum was hacked by someone with the email address we found before:

Research done by the forum members linked the perpetrator to Iraq:

Looks like things are coming together. There is one more approach we can try, in order to back our claims further. When using the password reset function in Yahoo, it gives you parts of the phone number (without the country code). Let us see what happens, when we try to reset Dragonwing’s password:

07 is the operator code used by Iraqi mobile networks and the length of the number also fits Iraqi mobile phone numbers. Luckily, Yahoo (unlike Google) displays the exact amount of digits of a phone number.

Let us review the evidence we have collected so far:

Use of Arabic numbers in the handle
Unique handle, not found often on the internet
Username and a related email address found in an Arabic internet forum
Email address used in a hack in 2004, identified as possibly originating from Iraq
Phone number linked to the email address possibly an Iraqi mobile phone number

Can we be sure that all these pieces of evidence are really linked to each other? Not really, but that is why we use words of estimative probability in intelligence analysis. Cyber attribution is not always about tradecraft, infrastructure or the malware/attack itself. Digging into individual actors may help shed light upon the origins of cyber-attacks and the OSINT process shown above should always be incorporated into any research effort as soon as “personal data” (e.g. tags, names, handles) is involved.

Of course, we could just send Dragonwing1981 an email and congratulate him on his defacement. However, unlike other stories on my blog, this one is completely made up and is based on a CTF-task I created for the OSINT courses I instruct. As far as I am concerned, Dragonwing1981 is innocent…

MW-OSINT / 02.05.2019

Tag: attribution

Tracking a Hacker with OSINT