Cyber Crime Dark Web Carding Forum Users Are Getting Worried After A String Of Shutdowns – The shadowy underground world of the dark web provides cyber criminals with an avenue to trade stolen information, tools, or malware, hold Internet attack victims to ransom, and discuss their goals and strategies. But dark web forums that host illegal marketplaces and discussions are starting to lose their appeal. Find out why the Telegram messaging app is emerging as the new dark web frontier and now serves as a popular alternative to dark web forums.
Curious about other illegal sources to include in your monitoring process? See our top illegal resources to follow in 2023.
Cyber Crime Dark Web Carding Forum Users Are Getting Worried After A String Of Shutdowns
Telegram is a messaging app with enhanced privacy and encryption features. The app works across popular mobile and desktop platforms and syncs messages across all registered devices of a user. Besides private one-to-one conversations, Telegram users can subscribe to channels in which the owners post content or they can become members of groups in which all participants discuss topics.
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A study from 2021 found a 100% rise in the use of Telegram by cyber criminals. The natural question then is what factors explain this meteoric rise?
Countless numbers of fake Telegram channels are used by threat actors to sell leaked credentials and more.
Cybercriminals underestimate the amount of anonymity they get when using dark web forums that administrators can easily monitor. While IP addresses and domains are automatically hidden by such a special route, there is a fear of being monitored by administrators and having identities exposed. Telegram doesn’t have traditional admins overseeing your groups and one-to-one conversations, which is great for anonymity. Risky players can also hide their phone numbers on the service.
Encryption is an interesting topic when it comes to illegal cybercriminal activity. Telegram offers end-to-end encryption for messages by default, which helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks that can snoop on messages in transit. Dark web forums and marketplaces also have an encryption option but threat actors need to use something like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) to ensure encryption, which isn’t easy.
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Another important thing is how Telegram offers hacking groups and lone wolf players a way to harden their jobs. Having to register a domain to provide services and tools for sale makes threat actors’ operations vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) that can take them offline. Telegram channels bypass this requirement for a community and ensure that cyber criminals can stay online as long as the Telegram service is online.
With an understanding of why threat actors are opting for Telegram, it’s worth looking at some real-world cases that demonstrate the danger of this new dark web frontier.
Online privacy lawyer vpnMentor’s investigation discovered a data leak containing personal information on over 100,000 US citizens from sports betting tips website PlayBook Sports. The data disclosure includes email addresses, home addresses, and full names of the individuals involved.
A public Telegram channel named Combolist attracted over 45,000 subscribers all interested in buying and downloading data dumps containing compromised username and password credentials. A Financial Report led to the removal of the channel from Telegram after separate posts offered 300,000 emails and passwords for video game platforms and 600,000 logins for popular web services such as Yahoo and Yandex.
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Posts about remote access tools and information theft are widespread on various Telegram channels and groups. Especially popular are SpyMax and Mobihok, which provide remote access to Android devices. Hackers like RedLine and Oski Stealer that steal information privately from user devices are also widely available for a fee.
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Also widely seen on Telegram channels and groups are exploits for various cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The most commonly found exploits include a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and a remote code execution bug known as Spring4Shell in the popular Java Spring framework.
We see many of the same threats on illegal Telegram channels that we see on dark web markets and forums. In many cases threat actors have moved directly away from more traditional TOR websites, and onto Telegrams offering similar goods and services.
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Although Genesis and Russian Markets have set up autoshops where threat actors can buy and sell infected devices, they can also be found on Telegram channels.
Risk actors distribute stolen accounts in different ways depending on the channel. They distribute the stolen accounts themselves for free, while monetizing access to the channel through subscription. This way, they can have access to new theft accounts without waiting for autoshop sales. For example, we found a channel with a subscription of $100 per month that promises at least 1,000 new accounts per day.
Even though they can be sold for a couple of dollars, browser fingerprints and stolen accounts can represent the digital lives of their victims. With stored login credentials and more (especially combined with OSINT), a threat actor can even guess the general geographic location of the victim.
Want to learn more about malware theft? Read our report: Cracking the dark web piracy lifecycle with the MITER ATT&CK Framework.
Telegram: Social Media Giant Or The New ‘dark Web’?
There are billions of stolen certificates on the dark web. In the hands of a threat actor, these credentials can be misused to cause horrific data breaches for individuals and organizations. Illegal Telegram channels are a common new vector that facilitates the constant distribution of stolen credentials. In some cases this can be free and in other cases certificates can be purchased through automated systems on specific channels.
Are you curious about Telegram channels and stolen credentials? Check out our Threat Alerts on leaky credentials and on leaky credentials and geography.
Through one-time password bots (OTP bots), threat actors can attempt to collect 2FA codes from victims at scale. When we did a search in 2022 on Telegram for the terms “OTP Bot” and “2FA Bot,” we found 1,700 results. To give more context: below are the number of search results in chat rooms the same for the following rules:
Active request for OTP bots, as many of these results show activity within minutes of the request. Generally, malicious actors buy access to bank account login credentials first, then look for bot OTP in fraudulent Telegram channels.
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Threat actors often use OTP bots for personal rather than corporate fraud. However, this method can be used against corporate attacks. For example, if a data breach exposes corporate logins, a malicious actor can find those victims’ phone numbers through OSINT, then use that to request one-time passwords to bypass 2FA controls. A threat actor used this TTP in the Cisco breach and a malicious actor used a similar approach to the Uber cyberattack.
Want to learn more about OTP bots? See our Threat Spotlight: Fake Telegram Products & OTP Bots.
Despite the emergence of Telegram as the new frontier of the dark web, it is likely that cyber criminals will continue to use underground dark web forums. These forums offer many features that Telegram does not, such as built-in rating systems, which allow players to establish reputations. Telegram’s previous policy of handing over and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement has also changed with the removal of many illegal channels and groups that get a lot of subscribers.
The dark web is unlikely to be abandoned anytime soon as a cybercrime hub. Expect cyber criminals to share their activities between messaging apps and traditional underground forums and marketplaces. Comprehensive monitoring requires coverage of the dark web and messaging applications.
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Disturbing expectations, the fall in cryptocurrency prices from 2021 will not have a meaningful impact on the dollar value of crypto-related crime in 2022. Indeed, TRM data
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