The Insider and The IRA Data That’s Been On Auction For Over A Year

Today a tweet was directed at me concerning some new information posted on a Russian news site back on February 21st that no one in the US media seems to have noticed nor the NATSEC community. In fact, I had not seen this and I kinda have chided myself for not paying better attention to the Joker Buzz site that the data was for sale on, for a year! I had actually been on their site(s) in the clearnet and darknet and thought I had posted a blog about the notion of the site and what they sell but I can’t seem to locate it. I guess maybe I just tweeted about it and moved on …My bad.

Anyway, the post on The Insider has the skinny on how a user there named “AlexDA” had ALL of the IRA’s internal documents on the active measures campaign for sale for over a year and no one really took notice. This means that we could have bought the data and had all of the actors, their data, and their METADATA if we had only seen or purchased them back in January/February 2017. What’s more is that had we had this intelligence in the open much more could have been easily available for the general public to be aware of how this was all working and what to look for. Of course now after the Indictment by Mueller of the 13 entities the op has been completely blown and the infrastructure is likely not to be operational, but, we could see operational details and OPSEC mistakes that the players made and extend that to the upcoming years election cycle and Russian influence and active measures campaigns to come right?

Even so, big things are in the small details even within the offering itself that AlexDA is making on JokerBuzz. I have been going through the images from the auction site that Alex put up to entice and prove that they are legit and here is what I have found by doing my thing as usual mining:

Proxy IP Space Used:

In the offering images you can see that AlexDA tried to obfuscate the last couple octets but if you look real hard you can see the numbers pop up. Of course if you just take the first two or three octets and you put that into Google you can see what pops right up. So, the first thing to see is that the service mentioned in the indictment is actually Total Server Solutions LLC out of Plano Texas. I would like to call your attention to how much “Texas” was involved in many of the Twitter and facebook accounts that were super patriotic. It was mentioned in the indictment that they rented the server space to appear that they were in the US. Well, there you have it kids. The data fits and it makes sense that they would try to do this to appear as if they were in the US to fool first pass looking right? I ran an Nmap of the /24 and as you can see if you look, there are some proxies, port 80 and 22 open but none are available to access at this time, so maybe they went back to being just space owned by Total server… I would hope though that those there servers had been, ya know, collected on by subpoena by the FBI right?

Wink wink nudge nudge.

 

Meanwhile, there’s a bunch of servers/IP’s listed in the images as well that are in Russia using port 8888. I haven’t looked at those with Nmap but they are VPS as well so maybe they are still in play. Suffice to say though, it is interesting data and could lead to more things coming to light if you look into them a little further. If you want to play the home game please feel free. I will be circling back over this stuff in the near future and enlightenment will be posted here when I have it for you all.

Alias and Users To Search:

Gee, look at all those aliases man! I have yet to dig into these and I am sure some are already known but you now too can play the home game! Take a look and see what histories you can find on these accounts/nicks. I am willing to bet we can put together quite the timeline and then use that as data to look at future attacks as well. All those Blacktivist accounts though were the appetizer to what I saw next in the screen shots. Alex gives us a whole thing to work with in the image below and if you start digging on that you can get some good stuff.

 

http://aktivnyye.com/t/20171013-blackmattersus.html

Nolan Hack, a name that I believe others have seen in the press accounts, has a Facebook page, a phone number, and a site blackmattersus.com that is in fact still live but not updated since 2017 it seems. His Facebook is live still as well (Why no take down Facecult?) I looked up his details on there and the blackmatersus site and what I came back with was a cell phone out of california marked as a bad number and a site that has been around since 2015 that was registered anonymously and kept so throughout the time it has been up.

http://aktivnyye.com/t/20171013-blackmattersus.html

I am sure with more digging on the name (Nolan Hack *amusing*) I can put together more of the breadcrumb trail to show the cutout’s actions. Maybe in a post to come, but suffice to say that this data also is legit and tracks with everything we have been told by the IC and the news up to today on the active measures by the IRA.

Passwords:

Amazingly enough in the screen shots given on the jokerbuzz site you can also see where Alex tried to remove at least half the passwords in a couple posts. I immediately knew what the password was because, I mean, come on! The phrase “Greed is good” is a classic line from Wall Street and Gordon Gekko. If you look close enough at these images though you can make out the lower part of the G so you know it is that. Now we have to work backwords on those accounts and get the full data in order to attempt top maybe log into them and see what intel we can gather from them (see below for lower part of the g) It also amusing to see that these guys were sloppy and re-using passwords in various accounts. If we get the accounts right I am betting we could own them all and gather much more insight.

Greedisgood…. You guys amuse me.

Illegals Names and drop sites:

In amongst all the stuff is also an address and name where drops were made in NV used by the IRA and more likely the illegals who were in country. The address comes back to a known bad drop/company in NV that has a history of being used for Ebay scams. The cutout name of Gneeda Harris has zero history on first pass but I will look again and dig a little more. Maybe I can turn up something more on this ID but at the very least we have something more to work with than what the special counsel decided to drop on us.

Maybe the FBI can check this place out and see if they have had DVR’d video surveillance? Maybe this dead drop is still live? Are there still illegals in country that have been told to sleep? I wonder…

Metadata:

Lastly, or near the last thing I will cover here on this is the metadata. I used wget to pull down the jokerbuzz site and in the folder for the page of the auction are the screen caps used. Pulling those down and then running them through the old EXIF scan you can see that these captures were done September 28th and 29th 2016. The time stamp says +3hrs and that as of today they were done 1 year 4 months 28 days ago. So, back in September 2016, this data was in the hands of AlexDA and ostensibly about to be put up on Jokerbuzz. This means that either someone on the INSIDE decided to sell out the operation because they knew they were blown and wanted some cash, OR, someone hacked them and downloaded all this shit making the screen shots in September for the jokerbuzz auction. This in tandem with all the backstopping I just did shows that this data is legit and it has been on sale for at least a year and no one knew or was clued in enough to say anything about it.

Who is AlexDA?

Lastly, who is AlexDA? How did they get this data and what is the motive here other than money? Money mind you that they did not get in over a year as the auction timed out and NO ONE bought it. Now, I have been looking at who this may be and there is a case to be made that this dump came from Shaltai Boltai (humpty dumpty) a group that is now broken up due to arrests but has one last player on the loose. That player is in fact a guy named Alexander Glazastikov who has not been caught and may in fact be AlexDA. I will also point to the fact that if you look at the Jokerbuzz auctions there are a number of them from Shaltai Boltai offering all kinds of interesting data leaked from Russian operations. So, it is my guess that this is the case but just an educated one. I for one would like to have a conversation with AlexDA and see just how much he wants for the dump now that it has not sold in over a year. Maybe we all can crowdsource it?

Summing Up:

Anywho, this is what I found just by looking at the details here in the auction post. Imagine what we could have if we actually had all the documents? Hell, I would love to get my hands on them, prize out all the details and then pass it along to the feds. The data is legit, it has been around for a year online, and we all missed it man!

Hey AlexDA, you wanna just gimme that data for free feel free to reach out to my protonmail acct!

More stuff when I have it kids.

K.