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Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

timsh.org

101–110 of 165 posts

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#101
post #11

I think Microsoft has a general problem with getting rid of unwanted things within their eco-system. I keep complaining that their feedback.azure.com portal is filled with spam/malware comments and links, but even internally their teams can't reach anyone to get it fixed. Example https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/idea/9d0b22d8-c025-...

These have got to be AI generated. The ones that mention details from the post are borderline comical: > Sounds like deleting a VM in Azure is as tedious as trying to manage resources in a complex role-playing game—one wrong step, and you’re stuck dealing with frustrating dependencies! If you’re tired of that kind of hassle, maybe it’s time to switch things up with Download SpinRP. Instead of deleting VMs in the righ…

yeah, that was my suspicion as well, seems that AI generated content is mixed with seo-spam or malware. I even tried to report feedback.azure.com as a deceptive site to the major browsers, but they don't share my concerns ;)

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#102
post #11

I think Microsoft has a general problem with getting rid of unwanted things within their eco-system. I keep complaining that their feedback.azure.com portal is filled with spam/malware comments and links, but even internally their teams can't reach anyone to get it fixed. Example https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/idea/9d0b22d8-c025-...

These have got to be AI generated. The ones that mention details from the post are borderline comical: > Sounds like deleting a VM in Azure is as tedious as trying to manage resources in a complex role-playing game—one wrong step, and you’re stuck dealing with frustrating dependencies! If you’re tired of that kind of hassle, maybe it’s time to switch things up with Download SpinRP. Instead of deleting VMs in the righ…

Can't be more obvious.

How hard could it be to add "add a few grammatical and spelling mistakes. Use no emojis. Reply like someone on instagram" or something to the system prompt? I shouldn't give them ideas, but come on, that's low hanging fruit.

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#103

These repos post to Discord webhooks to notify of newly compromised systems. I’ve found Discord to be responsive to abuse complaints in the past. If someone wrote a simple script to download these repos and extract the Discord webhook links I bet you could get Discord to shut down their accounts. In my past experience Discord was aggressive about this, going so far as to ban the accounts of people who had participate…

> going so far as to ban the accounts The responsible thing would be also to release all related data, icluding personal information (IP adresses, emails, list of contacts, chat logs) to investigation (police, etc)

I’m sure they report serious crimes and at least retain records for questionable activity.

I don’t get visibility into internal Discord operations, though. We just see that the perpetrators lost both their Discord server and their accounts disappeared from other Discords they were in. They angrily returned later with new usernames.

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#104

These repos post to Discord webhooks to notify of newly compromised systems. I’ve found Discord to be responsive to abuse complaints in the past. If someone wrote a simple script to download these repos and extract the Discord webhook links I bet you could get Discord to shut down their accounts. In my past experience Discord was aggressive about this, going so far as to ban the accounts of people who had participate…

...why? what's the difference between "POST payload to discord webhook" vs. "POST payload to VPS rented anonymously"? it seems like an inexplicably bad decision to use a proprietary US service for your malware C&C

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#105
post #25

Fun fact: if you come across one of these discord webhooks you can delete them. Just curl -X DELETE https://discord.com/api/webhooks/ [...]

LOL okay going to write a little search&destroy script tonight. Actually, no, f microsoft, let them do it.

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#106

These repos post to Discord webhooks to notify of newly compromised systems. I’ve found Discord to be responsive to abuse complaints in the past. If someone wrote a simple script to download these repos and extract the Discord webhook links I bet you could get Discord to shut down their accounts. In my past experience Discord was aggressive about this, going so far as to ban the accounts of people who had participate…

> extract the Discord webhook links

there's a large variety of malware, they don't all phone home the same way and they don't all phone home to discord

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#107
post #104

These repos post to Discord webhooks to notify of newly compromised systems. I’ve found Discord to be responsive to abuse complaints in the past. If someone wrote a simple script to download these repos and extract the Discord webhook links I bet you could get Discord to shut down their accounts. In my past experience Discord was aggressive about this, going so far as to ban the accounts of people who had participate…

...why? what's the difference between "POST payload to discord webhook" vs. "POST payload to VPS rented anonymously"? it seems like an inexplicably bad decision to use a proprietary US service for your malware C&C

These are not high effort malware distributors. Its very low hanging fruit done by script kiddies essentially.

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#108
post #88

I think to an extent Microsoft is the guilty party here. For may cracks Windows Defender will trip saying "Win32/Keygen" even if there's no actual malware https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo... This trains people that do a lot of piracy to be used to turning off their antivirus to let something through, which is fine until it's not. It's like drugs, if we know a subset of the population will…

Bundling malware with keygens is a very common practice. It helps because the victim doesn’t suspect anything is wrong when the thing they downloaded appears to work, unlike the sham downloads in the linked article. Gives the attackers more time to exploit the system. You also need to look at the bigger picture: Keygens are something you very much do not want anywhere in a corporate environment for obvious reasons. B…

some brands put cocaine in soda, let's ban soda altogether

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#109
post #104

These repos post to Discord webhooks to notify of newly compromised systems. I’ve found Discord to be responsive to abuse complaints in the past. If someone wrote a simple script to download these repos and extract the Discord webhook links I bet you could get Discord to shut down their accounts. In my past experience Discord was aggressive about this, going so far as to ban the accounts of people who had participate…

...why? what's the difference between "POST payload to discord webhook" vs. "POST payload to VPS rented anonymously"? it seems like an inexplicably bad decision to use a proprietary US service for your malware C&C

These are not sophisticated attackers.

Discord is free and easy. The notification pops up right where they’re already chatting with each other for 16 hours every single day.

Renting a VPS and writing custom software to accept a POST request requires a credit card, programming skill, and time.

Re: Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data

#110

These repos post to Discord webhooks to notify of newly compromised systems. I’ve found Discord to be responsive to abuse complaints in the past. If someone wrote a simple script to download these repos and extract the Discord webhook links I bet you could get Discord to shut down their accounts. In my past experience Discord was aggressive about this, going so far as to ban the accounts of people who had participate…

> extract the Discord webhook links there's a large variety of malware, they don't all phone home the same way and they don't all phone home to discord

Did you read the linked article? The template they’re duplicating phones home via Discord.

I’m not saying every malware uses Discord. I’m talking about the article.

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