Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

Hacktivists use proxy services from Russia, China for 'billions of designed-for-abuse connection attempts' Cybercrime has skyrocketed since the start of the Iran war, according to Akamai, which reports a 245 percent increase in everything from credential harvesting attempts to automated reconnaissance traffic aimed at banks and other critical businesses.…

The cybersecurity community on Reddit responded in disbelief this month when a self-described Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance began questioning the arrangement they'd made with company called DSLRoot, which was paying $250 a month to plug a pair of laptops into the Redditor's high-speed Internet connection in the United States. This post examines the history and provenance of DSLRoot, one of the oldest "residential proxy" networks with origins in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of proxy and anonymity services nested at some of America's largest Internet service providers (ISPs).

Russian, Kazakh Hackers Charged in $46M Proxy Botnet SchemeFederal prosecutors charged four hackers for running a proxy botnet that exploited infected routers, using domains like Anyproxy.net to resell U.S. network access globally - and generating over $46M before a coordinated international takedown, according to a Friday indictment.

A joint law enforcement operation undertaken by Dutch and U.S. authorities has dismantled a criminal proxy network that's powered by thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) and end-of-life (EoL) devices, enlisting them into a botnet for providing anonymity to malicious actors

The Russian hacking group tracked as APT29 (aka "Midnight Blizzard") is using a network of 193 remote desktop protocol proxy servers to perform man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks to steal data and credentials and to install malicious payloads. [...]

Water Barghest Group Lists Infected Devices Within 10 Minutes of Initial CompromiseA threat actor with suspected ties to Russian nation-state hackers has listed thousands of IoT devices as proxy networks within minutes of their initial compromise. A campaign that began in 2020 has so far infected 20,000 IoT devices, according to a new report by Trend Micro.

Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

The routers were hijacked to steal credentials, proxy traffic, and host phishing pages and custom tools

The FBI took down a botnet of small office/home office (SOHO) routers used by Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) to proxy malicious traffic and to target the United States and its allies in spearphishing and credential theft attacks. [...]

On December 7, 2021, Google announced it had sued two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy -- a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals -- suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy's founder is one of the men being sued by Google.

Authorities in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. last week said they dismantled the "RSOCKS" botnet, a collection of millions of hacked devices that were sold as "proxies" to cybercriminals looking for ways to route their malicious traffic through someone else's computer. While the coordinated action did not name the Russian hackers allegedly behind RSOCKS, KrebsOnSecurity has identified its owner as a Russian man living abroad who also runs the world's top Russian spamming forum.

RSOCKS commandeered millions of devices in order to offer proxy services used to mask malicious traffic.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the disruption of the Russian RSocks malware botnet used to hijack millions of computers, Android smartphones, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices worldwide for use as proxy servers. [...]