The Richest Phisherman in Colombia

Presented at DEF CON 30 (2022), Aug. 12, 2022, 12:10 p.m. (20 minutes)

Adversaries have increasingly been leveraging completely legitimate 3rd party web hosting products to circumvent traditional domain reputation analysis engines, and successfully get their phishing pages in front of their victims. Using these third party services also offers them a great opportunity to limit the exposure of their own infrastructure, offering a great OPSEC advantage. However, in one investigation, a few breadcrumbs left in the adversaries code led us down a rabbit hole to slowly uncovering the person behind what is perhaps the largest Facebook credential harvesting campaign ever investigated (over 100 million potentially impacted at the time of this submission).

In this talk, we will follow the breadcrumb trail left by a threat actor, demonstrating how we pieced together the shocking scale of their credential harvesting and malversating operation. From comments in their code, to their various online identities, to accessing their infrastructure - we will walk through our investigation into a wanted Colombian Cyber Criminal.


Presenters:

  • Matt Mosley
    Matt Mosley is a security professional with 30+ years experience in various technical and executive roles, former UNIX sysadmin and software engineer, and reformed grey hat hacker who wears his original “I miss crime” shirt proudly. In his current role as Chief Product Officer and CISO of security startup PIXM, Matt guides the company’s product and security strategy and manages several functional teams. Matt has held the CISSP, CISM and CISA credentials since the mid 90s and has spoken on security topics many times over the years, from large audiences at RSA to local ISSA meetings. Matt believes that security starts with the basics that most companies fail to get right, and would be happy to debate the merits of the principles in the orange book vs your need for the latest XDR/SOAR/ABCDXYZ product. He is still waiting for the right opportunity to avenge his team’s finals loss in Hacker Jeopardy during Defcon 5.
  • Nick Ascoli
    Nick Ascoli is the founder and CEO of Foretrace, an External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solution. Prior to starting Foretrace, Nick was a Cyber Research Scientist and Consultant with Security Risk Advisors and has published several open-source tools including pdblaster and TALR. Nick has been a speaker at Blackhat Arsenal, SANS, and B-Sides conferences on SIEM, Recon, and UEBA topics.