Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer
Summary: A Russian hacker using the handle Quotpw confirmed to KrebsOnSecurity that their spam software powered a crypto scam campaign that hit Mastodon communities starting May 4, 2023, using more than 1,500 Internet addresses across 400 providers to register accounts and send private mentions promoting sites like moonxtrade[.]com. Mastodon's Renaud Chaput said registrations at mastodon.social jumped from about three per minute to 900 per minute, prompting a brief halt on new signups, after which the servers faced a three-hour DDoS of 200,000 to 400,000 requests per second. Quotpw said the bot software was released as open source on GitHub and that they earned more than $2,000 sending roughly 100,000 private mentions over a few weeks.
Why it matters: The FBI reports cryptocurrency investment scam losses rose from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion in 2022, and this operation ran on residential proxies and open-sourced bot code that any other actor can now pick up.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Supply Chain & AppSec
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