Earlier this month, the administrator of the cybercrime discussion board Breached obtained a cease-and-desist letter from a cybersecurity agency. The missive alleged that an public sale on the location for knowledge stolen from 10 million clients of Mexico’s second-largest financial institution was pretend information and harming the financial institution’s repute. The administrator responded to this empty menace by buying the stolen banking knowledge and leaking it on the discussion board for everybody to obtain.
On August 3, 2022, somebody utilizing the alias “Holistic-K1ller” posted on Breached a thread promoting knowledge allegedly stolen from Grupo Financiero Banorte, Mexico’s second-biggest monetary establishment by complete loans. Holistic-K1ller mentioned the database included the total names, addresses, cellphone numbers, Mexican tax IDs (RFC), e-mail addresses and balances on greater than 10 million residents.
There was no motive to imagine Holistic-K1ller had fabricated their breach declare. This id has been extremely lively on Breached and its predecessor RaidForums for greater than two years, principally promoting databases from hacked Mexican entities. Final month, they bought buyer data on 36 million clients of the Mexican cellphone firm Telcel; in March, they bought 33,000 pictures of Mexican IDs — with the entrance image and a selfie of every citizen. That very same month, additionally they bought knowledge on 1.4 million clients of Mexican lending platform Yotepresto.
However this historical past was both neglected or ignored by Group-IB, the Singapore-based cybersecurity agency apparently employed by Banorte to assist reply to the info breach.
“The Group-IB group has found a useful resource containing a fraudulent put up providing to purchase Grupo Financiero Banorte’s leaked databases,” reads a letter the Breach administrator mentioned they obtained from Group-IB. “We ask you to take away this put up containing Banorte knowledge. Thanks on your cooperation and immediate consideration to this pressing matter.”
The administrator of Breached is “Pompompurin,” the identical particular person who alerted this creator in November 2021 to a evident safety gap in a U.S. Justice Division web site that was used to spoof safety alerts from the FBI. In a put up to Breached on Aug. 8, Pompompurin mentioned they purchased the Banorte database from Holistic-K1ller’s gross sales thread as a result of Group-IB was sending emails complaining about it.
“Additionally they tried to submit DMCA’s towards the web site,” Pompompurin wrote, referring to authorized takedown requests beneath the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “Make sure that to inform Banorte that now they should fear concerning the knowledge being leaked as a substitute of simply being bought.”
Group-IB CEO Dmitriy Volkov mentioned the corporate has seen some success up to now asking hackers to take away or take down sure data, however that making such requests shouldn’t be a typical response for the safety agency.
“It’s not a standard observe to ship takedown notifications to such boards demanding that such content material be eliminated,” Volkov mentioned. “However these abuse letters are legally binding, which helps construct a basis for additional steps taken by regulation enforcement businesses. Actions opposite to worldwide guidelines within the regulated house of the Web solely result in extra extreme crimes, which — as we all know from the case of Raidforums — are efficiently investigated and stopped by regulation enforcement.”
Banorte didn’t reply to requests for remark. However in a quick written assertion picked up on Twitter, Banorte mentioned there was no breach involving their infrastructure, and the info being bought is outdated.
“There was no violation of our platforms and technological infrastructure,” Banorte mentioned. “The set of data referred to is inaccurate and outdated, and doesn’t put our customers and clients in danger.”
That assertion could also be one hundred pc true. Nonetheless, it’s tough to think about a greater instance of how not to do breach response. Banorte shrugging off this incident as a nothingburger is baffling: Whereas it’s nearly definitely true that the financial institution stability data within the Banorte leak is now old-fashioned, the remainder of the data (tax IDs, cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses) is tougher to vary.
“Is there one individual from our group that assume sending stop and desist letter to a hackers discussion board operator is a good suggestion?,” requested Ohad Zaidenberg, founding father of CTI League, a volunteer emergency response group that emerged in 2020 to assist struggle COVID-19 associated scams. “Who does it? As a substitute of serving to, they pushed the group from the hill.”
Kurt Seifried, director of IT for the CloudSecurityAlliance, was equally perplexed by the response to the Banorte breach.
“If the info wasn’t actual….did the financial institution assume a stop and desist would end result within the itemizing being eliminated?” Seifried puzzled on Twitter. “I imply, isn’t promoting breach knowledge a worse crime often than slander or libel? What was their thought course of?”
A extra typical response when a big financial institution suspects a breach is to strategy the vendor privately by an middleman to establish if the data is legitimate and what it may cost a little to take it off the market. Whereas it could appear odd to anticipate cybercriminals to make good on their claims to promote stolen knowledge to just one occasion, eradicating bought stolen objects from stock is a reasonably primary perform of nearly all cybercriminal markets at the moment (aside from maybe websites that site visitors in stolen id knowledge).
At a minimal, negotiating or just participating with a knowledge vendor should purchase the sufferer group further time and clues with which to research the declare and ideally notify affected events of a breach earlier than the stolen knowledge winds up on-line.
It’s true that a lot of hacked databases put up on the market on the cybercrime underground are bought solely after a small subset of in-the-know thieves have harvested the entire low-hanging fruit within the knowledge — e.g., entry to cryptocurrency accounts or consumer credentials which might be recycled throughout a number of web sites. And it’s definitely not remarkable for cybercriminals to return on their phrase and re-sell or leak data that they’ve bought beforehand.
However corporations within the throes of responding to a knowledge safety incident do themselves and clients no favors after they underestimate their adversaries, or attempt to intimidate cybercrooks with authorized threats. Such responses typically accomplish nothing, besides unnecessarily upping the stakes for everybody concerned whereas displaying a harmful naiveté about how the cybercrime underground works.
Replace, Aug. 17, 10:32 a.m.: Because of a typo by this creator, a request for remark despatched to Group-IB was not delivered prematurely of this story. The copy above has been up to date to incorporate a remark from Group-IB’s CEO.
