Breachforums, the infamous darkweb hacking and stolen data marketplace recently had another setback when its remaining primary administrators were arrested in France, shutting down yet another iteration of the marketplace. This closes another chapter in a site that has caused immeasurable damage to consumer and enterprise systems alike, facilitating the sale and trade of initial access, credentials, and leaked data.

Last week, a number of news outlets and organizations posted a story (which was then followed by ~ a retraction) of a darkweb password leak comprising 16B records. This immediately triggered a fervor around whether this was really a single leak, where it came from, who and how was exposed and so on – as always occurs around these things.

Not a deep one this week, just a funny story about something that happened to me on Tuesday, July 17. It’ll unfortunately be a short one; one that should probably be turned into a youtube short talking about it, but moving pictures scare me.

Following on the Microsoft and DoJ takedown of Lumma infrastructure, and this week’s news from Sophos discussing a single user hosting over 100 malware github repos, I wanted to spend some time looking into the specific vectors leveraged by some of these repositories. Recently, some of these attacks have included taking screenshots upon execution, which can give us a look into specifically what a user ran that triggered the RAT (Remote Access Trojan) and harvested data from their machine.

Recently, a well-known software and security services company posted a blog post titled “Password encryption: What is it and how does it work?” which immediately raises a great deal of discussion points as well as questions. So I figured I’d do a short writeup on the difference between encryption and hashing, and why we do not encrypt passwords; and why it’s dangerous to consider encrypting secrets, rather than hashing them.

With the shutdown of Lumma Stealer’s infrastructure announced this week by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), the US DoJ, and others, it seemed timely to write about the reality of what is actually packaged up when a Lumma (or Redline) stealer runs on a machine and drops the package across the C2 (Command & Control) infrastructure.