In April, 2024 the National Public Data breach was discussed in various cybersecurity circles. In August, 2024 we see non-nerds discussing it.

Network Engineers: how serious of a problem is a 10,518,984,000 millisecond latency?

we've got the malware

Today we ingested roughly 447,000 samples

New PC setup (ignore the cat)

Imagine a 24/7 livestream of our malware ingestion feed. It would be a CMD window displaying the SHA256 hash, the ingestion code status, and the unique file counter.

Today Qilin has successfully solidified itself as a colossal piece of shit. Of course, all ransomware is bad, but Qilin ransomed Promise2Kids, a California non-profit which rescues children from abusive homes.

Russia-based cyber hacktivists claim to have compromised Zoom. Let's review the data.

tl;dr not compromised, but kind of depressing to review

Size (uncompressed): 1.49MB
Total files: 5

Unusually small size of a 'compromise' from a Fortune 1000 company, right?

What's in this 'leak'? A text file which contains 95 (that's not a typo, it is literally just 95 lines) username and passwords. Each username and password listed is present in HaveIBeenPwned. The data present is formatted similar to stealer logs.

Other files included are 'web_domains.txt' which appears to be ... an nmap scan (???). There is also a web_dump.txt file which contains.... whois data (???) and some super 1337 ASCII art.

They forgot to include the password protected zip file in their post, so we had to review their chatroom. The password was 'usersec_fucknato'.

> check DMs
> "vx-underground we think your group is capable of social change can you help ..."

Capable of social change? Our entire audience is terminally online degenerates. If you want someone who can make an impact write to Taylor Swift, not us.

Administrative updates:

- August 21st, new hardware arrives.
- We'll occasionally livestream malware ingestion. The streams will take place on Xitter. You can watch numbers go up.
- New papers will be pushed once new hardware arrives

Enjoy your weekend. Love you

Malware ASMR: Extracting, compressing, and uploading malware while a cooling system works in the background

It will actually put you to sleep — it's super cold, dark, and magic numbers just keep being magical. You will pass out in your chain

If you like to watch numbers go up: we're currently livestreaming our malware ingestion.

https://www.twitch.tv/vxunderground_live

vx-underground in 2019:
- simple and free shared hosting
- 20gb in total
- 1 old crappy pc

vx-underground 2024:
- home lab setup with 4 pc's (soon 5)
- fiber
- ingesting 20gb - 60gb per day
- 10 people team
- 8 servers, custom software suite for vxug
- 7.15tb in total
- anime

This started off as a side-project created to collect and share cool malware stuff that I liked – I hoped maybe other people would find it useful and think it's cool too.

Now it's gotten wildly out of control.

Hello,

We need to make something very clear: we are not like VirusTotal. We are not a competitor to VirusTotal.

VirusTotal does file detections, allows retrohunting, sandboxing and blah blah blah.

We just collect it

They're enterprise malware tooling. We're a public library

We'll be aiming to share our malware ingestion feed on Xitter everyday. You can watch numbers go up and listen to a cooling system.

Alternatively, you can do something better with your time while we watch numbers go up.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Today ZachXBT noted unusual BTC activity – at 04 UTC August, 19th, $238,000,000 was moved to Avalanche Bridge, ChangeNow, eXch, Kucoin, Railgun, and ThorChain.

Ransomware? Draining? Money laundering? Anime?

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/4b277ba298830ea538086114803b9487558bb093b5083e383e94db687fbe9090

Today journalist Brian Krebs released an article about the recent (sort of) compromise of National Public Data. Previously, National Public Data was (sort of) compromised which resulted in the theft of billions of records on individuals residing in the United States.

The drama update:
National Public Data owns a sub-company named RecordsCheck dot net. A customer of RecordsCheck dot net (later unveiled to be a law enforcement officer) was a victim of Information Stealer malware (e.g. Redline, Formbook, Lumma, etc). The malware stole login credentials to RecordsCheck for the law enforcement officer which allowed Threat Actors access to RecordsCheck with essentially infinite credits for searches. The Threat Actor(s) then subsequently began dumping as much data as possible.

The Brian Krebs plot twist:
Brian Krebs discovered that previously RecordsCheck publicly exposed a file on their website noscriptd: "members dot zip". This zip file contained the username and password for every customer on their platform (and supposedly other entities owned by National Public Data) in a plain text file. Krebs discovered that by default, each customer is assigned a 6-character password. As of a result of this accidental exposure, RecordsCheck instructed customers to change their default 6-character password. It turns out many DID NOT change their default assigned 6-character password.

More information on the file exposure, back story, discovery, etc. Can be found on Brian Kreb's article here: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/08/national-public-data-published-its-own-passwords/