Alexander Vinnik, a Russian operator of virtual currency exchange BTC-e pleaded guilty to participating in a money laundering scheme.

Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering for his involvement in operating the cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e from 2011 to 2017. BTC-e processed over $9 billion in transactions and served over one million users globally, including many in the United States. In July 2017 law enforcement shut down the virtual currency exchange.

Greek Police arrested the Russian national in 2017, and they accused the man of running the BTC-e Bitcoin exchange to launder billions worth of cryptocurrency.

The virtual currency exchange received criminal proceeds from various illegal activities, including computer intrusions, ransomware attacks, identity theft, corruption, and drug distribution.

Vinnik promoted unlawful activities carried out through BTC-e and was responsible for at least $121 million in losses.

“BTC-e had no anti-money laundering (AML) and/or “know-your-customer” (KYC) processes and policies in place, as federal law also requires. BTC-e collected virtually no customer data at all, which made the exchange attractive to those who desired to conceal criminal proceeds from law enforcement.” reads the press release published by DoJ. “BTC-e relied on shell companies and affiliate entities that were similarly unregistered with FinCEN and lacked basic anti-money laundering and KYC policies to electronically transfer fiat currency in and out of BTC-e. Vinnik set up numerous such shell companies and financial accounts across the globe to allow BTC-e to conduct its business.” 

In July 2018, a Greek lower court agreed to extradite Vinnik to France to face charges of hacking, money laundering, extortion, and involvement in organized crime.

French authorities accused Vinnik of defrauding more than 100 people in six French cities between 2016 and 2018.

French prosecutors revealed that among the 188 victims of the Vinnik’s attacks, there were local authorities, businesses, and individuals across the world.

In June, New Zealand police had frozen NZ$140 million (US$90 million) in assets linked to a Russian cyber criminal. New Zealand police had worked closely with the US Internal Revenue Service on the case and the investigation is still ongoing.

Vinnik denied charges of extortion and money laundering and did not answer magistrates’ questions, his lawyer also announced that is evaluating whether to appeal.

French prosecutors believe Vinnik was one of the authors of the Locky ransomware that was also employed in attacks on French businesses and organizations between 2016 and 2018.

At his trial, Vinnik explained that he was not the kingpin of the organization, he claimed t have served only as a technical operator executing the instructions of BTC-e directors.

Vinnik was convicted of money laundering but prosecutors didn’t find enough evidence to convict him of extortion.

“The court convicted Vinnik of money laundering but didn’t find enough evidence to convict him of extortion, and stopped short of the 10-year jail term and 750,000 euros in fines that prosecutors had requested.” reported the Associated Press.

“One of his French lawyers, Ariane Zimra, said his conviction for money laundering “doesn’t make sense,” arguing that cryptocurrency is not legally considered “money.”

Subsequently, Vinnik returned to Greece before being extradited to the U.S..

“Today’s result shows how the Justice Department, working with international partners, reaches across the globe to combat cryptocrime,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “This guilty plea reflects the Department’s ongoing commitment to use all tools to fight money laundering, police crypto markets, and recover restitution for victims.”

In February, the U.S. charged Aliaksandr Klimenka, a Belarusian and Cypriot national linked with the cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e. The man is facing charges of money laundering conspiracy and operation of an unlicensed money services business.

According to the indictment, Klimenka allegedly controlled the platform BTC-e with Alexander Vinnik and others. Klimenka also allegedly controlled a technology services company named Soft-FX, and the financial company FX Open. 

The servers that were hosting the BTC-e were maintained in the United States, and according to the DoJ, they were allegedly leased to and maintained by Klimenka and Soft-FX.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Alexander Vinnik)

MITRE published more details on the recent security breach, including a timeline of the attack and attribution evidence.

MITRE has shared more details on the recent hack, including the new malware involved in the attack and a timeline of the attacker’s activities.

In April 2024, MITRE disclosed a security breach in one of its research and prototyping networks. The security team at the organization promptly launched an investigation, logged out the threat actor, and engaged third-party forensics Incident Response teams to conduct independent analysis in collaboration with internal experts.

According to the MITRE Corporation, a nation-state actor breached its systems in January 2024 by chaining two Ivanti Connect Secure zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887).

MITRE spotted a foreign nation-state threat actor probing its Networked Experimentation, Research, and Virtualization Environment (NERVE), used for research and prototyping. The organization immediately started mitigation actions which included taking NERVE offline. The investigation is still ongoing to determine the extent of information involved.

The organization notified authorities and affected parties and is working to restore operational alternatives for collaboration. 

Despite MITRE diligently following industry best practices, implementing vendor recommendations, and complying with government guidance to strengthen, update, and fortify its Ivanti system, they overlooked the lateral movement into their VMware infrastructure.

The organization said that the core enterprise network or partners’ systems were not affected by this incident.

Mitre researchers reported that the indicators of compromise that were observed during the security breach overlap with those Mandiant associated with UNC5221, which is a China-linked APT group.

The state-sponsored hackers first gaining initial access to NERVE on December 31, then they deployed the ROOTROT web shell on

The adversary deployed the ROOTROT web shell on Internet-facing Ivanti appliances.

On January 4, 2024, the threat actors conducted a reconnaissance on NERVE environment. They accessed vCenter through a compromised Ivanti appliance and communicated with multiple ESXi hosts. The attackers used hijacked credentials to log into several accounts via RDP and accessed user bookmarks and file shares to probe the network.

Then the nation-state actors manipulated VMs to compromise the overall infrastructure.

“The adversary manipulated VMs and established control over the infrastructure. The adversary used compromised administrative credentials, authenticated from an internal NERVE IP address, indicating lateral movement within the NERVE.” reads the update published by Mitre. “They attempted to enable SSH and attempted to destroy one of their own VMs as well as POSTed to /ui/list/export and downloaded a file demonstrating a sophisticated attempt to conceal their presence and maintain persistence within the network.”

On January 7, 3034, the adversary accessed VMs and deployed malicious payloads, including the BRICKSTORM backdoor and a web shell tracked as BEEFLUSH, enabling persistent access and arbitrary command execution.

The hackers relied on SSH manipulation and script execution to maintain control over the compromised systems. Mitre noted attackers exploiting a default VMware account to list drives and generate new VMs, one of which was removed on the same day. BRICKSTORM was discovered in directories with local persistence setups, communicating with designated C2 domains. BEEFLUSH interacted with internal IP addresses, executing dubious scripts and commands from the vCenter server’s /tmp directory

In the following days, the threat actors deployed additional payloads on the target infrastrcuture, including the WIREFIRE (aka GIFTEDVISITOR) web shell, and the BUSHWALK webshell for data exfiltration.

Between mid-February and mid-March, before MITRE discovered the security breach in April, threat actors maintained persistence in the NERVE environment and attempted lateral movement. The organization pointed out that the nation-state actors failed to compromise other resources. 

“Despite unsuccessful attempts to pivot to other resources, the adversary persisted in accessing other virtual environments within Center.” concludes the update that includes malware analysis and Indicators of Compromise for the involved payloads. “The adversary executed a ping command for one of MITRE’s corporate domain controllers and attempted to move laterally into MITRE systems but was unsuccessful.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, China)

The FBI, UK National Crime Agency, and Europol revealed the identity of the admin of the LockBit operation and sanctioned him.

The FBI, UK National Crime Agency, and Europol have unmasked the identity of the admin of the LockBit ransomware operation, aka ‘LockBitSupp’ and ‘putinkrab’ , and issued sanctions against him. It was the first time that the admin of the notorious group was identified by law enforcement.

The man is a Russian national named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev (31) of Voronezh, Russia.

“The sanctions against Russian national Dmitry Khoroshev (pictured), the administrator and developer of the LockBit ransomware group, are being announced today by the FCDO alongside the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.” reads the press release published by NCA.

The NCA states that Khoroshev will now be subject to a series of asset freezes and travel bans.

“Khoroshev, AKA LockBitSupp, who thrived on anonymity and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who could reveal his identity, will now be subject to a series of asset freezes and travel bans.” continues the NCA.

According to the UK agency, data retrieved from the systems belonging to the ransomware gang revealed that from June 2022 to February 2024, the criminals gave orchestrated over 7,000 attacks. The most targeted countries included the US, UK, France, Germany, and China.

LockBit operation targeted over 100 hospitals and healthcare companies, resulting in at least 2,110 victims. The NCA states that despite the group attempted to rebuild its operation, the international law enforcement operation carried out in February severely impacted the gang’s activities.

LockBit created a new leak site to inflate their apparent activity. Since the NCA’s intervention in February, LockBit attacks in the UK have decreased by 73%, with similar reductions reported in other countries. The investigation also provided insight into the group’s operations and network.

The NCA added that of the 194 affiliates identified as using LockBit’s services up until February 2024:

• 148 built attacks.
• 119 engaged in negotiations with victims, meaning they definitely deployed attacks.
• Of the 119 who began negotiations, there are 39 who appear not to have ever received a ransom payment.
• 75 did not engage in any negotiation, so also appear not to have received any ransom payments.

The US government also charged in the past other five LockBit members, Artur Sungatov, Ivan Kondratyev (Bassterlord), Ruslan Magomedovich Astamirov, Mikhail Matveev (Wazawaka), and Mikhail Vasiliev.

“These sanctions are hugely significant and show that there is no hiding place for cyber criminals like Dmitry Khoroshev, who wreak havoc across the globe. He was certain he could remain anonymous, but he was wrong.” NCA Director General Graeme Biggar said.

“We know our work to disrupt LockBit thus far has been extremely successful in degrading their capability and credibility among the criminal community. The group’s attempt at rebuilding has resulted in a much less sophisticated enterprise with significantly reduced impact.”

“Today’s announcement puts another huge nail in the LockBit coffin and our investigation into them continues. We are also now targeting affiliates who have used LockBit services to inflict devastating ransomware attacks on schools, hospitals and major companies around the world.”

According to Europol, law enforcement agencies have obtained over 2,500 decryption keys and are contacting the LockBit victims to offer assistance. With Europol’s support, agencies like the Japanese Police, the National Crime Agency, and the FBI have developed decryption tools to recover files encrypted by LockBit ransomware. These tools are now accessible for free on the No More Ransom portal in 37 languages.

“Europol has been exploiting the vast amount of data gathered during the investigation and the first phase of action to identify these victims, who are located all over the world. Its European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) has disseminated some 3 500 intelligence packages containing information about Lockbit victims to 33 countries.” reads the announcement published by Europol.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, cybercrime)

The UK Ministry of Defense disclosed a data breach at a third-party payroll system that exposed data of armed forces personnel and veterans.

The UK Ministry of Defense disclosed a data breach impacting a third-party payroll system that exposed data of approximately 272,000 armed forces personnel and veterans.

The Ministry of Defence revealed that a malign actor gained access to part of the Armed Forces payment network, which is an external system completely separate to MOD’s core network.

Defence Secretary Grant Shapps told House of Commons that the impacted system is not connected to the main military HR system.

The UK Ministry of Defense is reviewing the operations of the impacted contractor and announced that appropriate measures will be taken.

The compromised information includes the personal data of regular and reserve personnel and some recently retired veterans. The malicious actor gained access to names and bank details, and, in a smaller number of cases, addresses of the impacted personnel.

The UK government did not publicly attribute the attack, however, the BBC reported that UK ministers suspected China was responsible

“Grant Shapps told MPs the government had reason to believe the hack “was the suspected work of a malign actor” – and the BBC understands that ministers suspect China was responsible.” states the BBC.

Mr. Shapps publicly criticized the contractor, stating there was “evidence of failings” in the management of the breached system.

“For reasons of national security, we can’t release further details of the suspected cyber activity behind this incident,” Mr. Shapps added.

China denied any involvement in the attack and labeled the accusation as a “fabricated and malicious slander”.

“We urge the relevant parties in the UK to stop spreading false information, stop fabricating so-called China threat narratives, and stop their anti-China political farce,” a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in the UK said.

Labour’s shadow defence secretary John Healey speculated that the external contractor operating the breached system was Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL).

SSCL is a joint venture between the British government and a private tech firm, it provides services to the Home Office, Cabinet Office and Ministry of Justice.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, UK Ministry of Defense)

A critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability in the Tinyproxy service potentially impacted 50,000 Internet-Exposing hosts.

Researchers from Cisco Talos reported a use-after-free vulnerability in the HTTP Connection Headers parsing of Tinyproxy 1.11.1 and Tinyproxy 1.10.0. The issue is tracked as CVE-2023-49606 and received a CVSS score of 9.8. The exploitation of the issue can potentially lead to remote code execution.

“A specially crafted HTTP header can trigger reuse of previously freed memory, which leads to memory corruption and could lead to remote code execution. An attacker needs to make an unauthenticated HTTP request to trigger this vulnerability.” reads the advisory.

Tinyproxy is an open-source HTTP proxy daemon designed for simplicity and efficiency.

The vulnerability impacts over 90,000 hosts that expose a Tinyproxy service on the internet. Talos researchers published a proof-of-concept exploit code for this vulnerability.

“As of May 3, 2024, Censys observed over 90,000 hosts exposing a Tinyproxy service, ~57% of which are potentially vulnerable to this exploit.” reads the report. 

Most of the exposed hosts are in the United States, followed by South Korea and China.

Maintainers of the project temporarily addressed the issue with the release of version 1.11.1. tinyproxy 1.11.2 release will definitively fix the issue.

• “the issue is fixed in master with commit 12a8484

the code may appear naive, but it allows to circumvent the allocation of more memory which could fail again. the straight-forward fix would be to strdup the value retrieved from the key/value store, and then work on that and free it later.

• the code is only triggered after access list checks and authentication have succeeded.
  so if you use basic auth with a reasonably secure password or allow only specific trusted hosts you won’t have to worry. same if your proxy is only available on a trusted private network, like inside a corporate environment (you gotta trust your employees anyway).

so it seems most tinyproxy users won’t have to worry – because who runs an entirely open proxy on the open internet these days ?”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, RCE)

Threat actors are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress to take over web sites.

WPScan researchers reported that threat actors are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress.

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features. The plugin has over 5 million active installations.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-40000 CVSS score: 8.3, is an Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation (‘Cross-site Scripting’) issue in LiteSpeed Technologies LiteSpeed Cache that allows Stored XSS.

Attackers exploited the issue to create a rogue admin account, named wpsupp‑user and wp‑configuser, on vulnerable websites.

Upon creating admin accounts, threat actors can gain full control over the website.

Patchstack discovered the stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in February 2024.

An unauthenticated user can trigger the issue to elevate privileges by using specially crafted HTTP requests.

WPScan reported that threat actors may inject a malicious script into vulnerable versions of the LiteSpeed plugin. The researchers observed a surge in access to a malicious URL on April 2nd and on April 27.

“The most common IP addresses that were probably scanning for vulnerable sites were 94.102.51.144, with 1,232,810 requests, and 31.43.191.220 with 70,472 requests.” reads WPScan. “The most common IP addresses that were probably scanning for vulnerable sites were 94.102.51.144, with 1,232,810 requests, and 31.43.191.220 with 70,472 requests.”

The vulnerability was fixed in October 2023 with the release of version 5.7.0.1.

Researchers provided indicators of compromise for these attacks, including malicious URLs involved in the campaign: https[:]//dns[.]startservicefounds.com/service/f[.]php, https[:]//api[.]startservicefounds[.]com, and https[:]//cache[.]cloudswiftcdn[.]com. The researchers also recommends to Watch out for IPs associated with the malware, such as 45.150.67.235.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, UK Ministry of Defense)

TunnelVision is a new VPN bypass technique that enables threat actors to spy on users’ traffic bypassing the VPN encapsulation.

Leviathan Security researchers recently identified a novel attack technique, dubbed TunnelVision, to bypass VPN encapsulation. A threat actor can use this technique to force a target user’s traffic off their VPN tunnel using built-in features of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol).

The technique causes the VPN to fail to encrypt certain packets, leaving the traffic vulnerable to snooping. The researchers referred to this result as “decloaking.” The experts pointed out that the VPN control channel remains active during the attack and users still appear connected to the VPN in all observed instances.

The technique manipulates routing tables that used to send network traffic through the VPN tunnel.

TunnelVision exploits the vulnerability CVE-2024-3661, which is a DHCP design flaw where messages such as the classless static route (option 121) are not authenticated and for this reason can be manipulated by the attackers.

Option 121 enables administrators to incorporate static routes into a client’s routing table using classless ranges. There is no restriction, aside from packet size, on the number of different routes that can be simultaneously installed.

A threat actor that can send DHCP messages can tamper with routes to reroute VPN traffic, enabling him to intercept, disrupt, or potentially manipulate network traffic.

A local network attacker can exploit the technique to redirect traffic to the local network instead of the VPN tunnel.

The attackers can decloak VPN traffic only if the targeted host accepts a DHCP lease from the attacker-controlled server and the targeted host’s DHCP client implements DHCP option 121.

“We want to stress that there are ways an attacker who is on the same network as a targeted user might be able to become their DHCP server:

• A rogue DHCP server using a DHCP starvation attack against the true DHCP, then responding to new clients. We have achieved this in lab environments and are working on a follow-up blog post.
• A rogue DHCP server racing to respond to DHCPDISCOVER broadcasts to abuse DHCP clients’ common behavior where they implement first-offer lease selection. 
• ARP spoofing to intercept traffic between the true DHCP server and client, then waiting for a client to renew their lease.” reads the report from Leviathan Security.

“Our technique is to run a DHCP server on the same network as a targeted VPN user and to also set our DHCP configuration to use itself as a gateway. When the traffic hits our gateway, we use traffic forwarding rules on the DHCP server to pass traffic through to a legitimate gateway while we snoop on it.”

The researchers explained that during the attack, the victim cannot notice any disconnection to the VPN, they also remarked that the flaw isn’t tied to a specific VPN provider or implementation.

The TunnelVision technique is effective against most IP routing-based VPN systems.

The researchers speculate that the vulnerability existed in DHCP since 2002, when option 121 was implemented. They believe the technique could have already been discovered and potentially used in the wild by threat actors.

To mitigate the issue VPN providers could implement network namespaces on supporting operating systems to isolate interfaces and routing tables from the local network’s control.

The experts provided other mitigations, including using Firewall Rules, Ignoring Option 121, using a Hot Spot or VM, and avoiding use untrusted networks.

Below is a video PoC of the attack published by the researchers:

“We have a limitation as a research team of two– there are simply too many VPNs on the market to test each one individually. The first approach we took was to notify companies via bug bounties or security disclosure email, but that quickly became unscalable. We’ve also engaged the EFF and CISA to help disclose as broadly as possible prior to publicly releasing this research. We thank them tremendously for their help.” concludes the report.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, TunnelVision)

The LockBit ransomware group has added the City of Wichita to its Tor leak site and threatened to publish stolen data.

Last week, the City of Wichita, Kansas, was the victim of a ransomware attack and shut down its network to contain the threat.

Wichita is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Sedgwick County. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 397,532.

The security breach took place on May 5th, 2024, and the City immediately started its incident response procedure to prevent the threat from spreading.

The City is investigating and containing the incident with the help of third-party security experts and federal and local law enforcement authorities.

“We regret to report that certain online City services may be unavailable as we thoroughly review and assess an incident that affected some of our computer systems. As part of this assessment, we turned off our computer network.” reads the security breach notification. “This decision was not made lightly but was necessary to ensure that systems are securely vetted before returning to service.”

The City warned that some services may be temporarily unavailable while systems are offline.

The City hasn’t disclosed the family of ransomware that infected its systems and the name of the extortion gang behind the attack.

“We are working with specialists to thoroughly review and assess systems before putting them back online. Systems will be restored on a staggered basis to minimize disruptions. We do not have a definitive timeline for returning all systems to production.” the city noted.

“This [the name of the group that is claiming responsibility for the attack] is not being shared for operational security purposes.” states the report.

However, the LockBit ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the cyberattack on the City of Wichita.

The deadline for the ransom payment is May 15, 2024.

The City is still facing disruptions caused by the attack.

“The information technology department and its security partners continue to work around the clock to address the cyber security incident. Many City systems are down as security experts determine the source and extent of the incident. There is no timetable for when systems could be coming back online. We appreciate your patience as we work through this incident as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.” reads an update published by the City.

The extortion group claimed responsibility for the attack after law enforcement agencies unmasked and sanctioned the leader of the LockBit group, Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, aka LockBitSupp.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, City of Wichita)