Investigating Anonymous VPS services used by Ransomware Gangs
One of the challenges with investigating cybercrime is the infrastructure the adversaries leverage to conduct attacks. Cybercriminal infrastructure has evolved drastically over the last 25 years, which now involves hijacking web services, content distribution networks (CDNs), residential proxies, fast flux DNS, domain generation algorithms (DGAs), botnets of IoT devices, the Tor network, and all sorts of nested services. This blog shall investigate a small UK-based hosting provider known as BitLaunch as an example of how challenging it can be to tackle cybercriminal infrastructure. Research into this hosting provider revealed that they appear to have a multi-year history of cybercriminals using BitLaunch to host command-and-control (C2) servers via their Anonymous VPS service. The year-on-year growing number of CobaltStrike C2 servers hosted on BitLaunch’s services could be an indicator of tacit collusion with cybercriminals through the facilitation of cheap and quick to procureme...