A Ukrainian man has been sentenced to four years in US federal prison for selling stolen login credentials for more than 6,700 compromised servers on a dark web market.
Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev, 28, was arrested by Polish authorities in Korczowa, Poland on October 3, 2020, and extradited to America. He pleaded guilty on February 22 and has been condemned Thursday in federal district court in Florida. The court also ordered Ivanov-Tolpintsev, of Chernivtsi, Ukraine, to forfeit his ill-gotten gains of $82,648 from the credential theft scheme.
The accusation documents [PDF] detail an anonymous dark web market where usernames and passwords as well as personal data, including more than 330,000 birthdates and social security numbers belonging to US residents, were bought and sold illegally.
This market exchanged details of more than 700,000 “compromised servers”, according to prosecutors, including at least 150,000 in the United States and 8,000 in Florida. After criminals purchased credentials for these systems, they used them for all manner of illicit activities, including tax evasion and ransomware attacks, according to federal authorities.
“Victims spanned the globe and industries including local, state and federal government infrastructure, hospitals, 911 and emergency services, call centers, major metropolitan transit authorities, law firms accounting and legal, pension funds and universities,” according to the plea agreement. . “No legitimate activity was conducted on the Marketplace.”
Although it is only called “the market”, the documents indicate that in late January 2019, US law enforcement seized the online souk’s domain names and dismantled its infrastructure, shutting it down.
The timing of this coincides with the takedown of xDedic Marketplace, which sold details of compromised computers and personally identifiable information of US residents.
Ivanov-Tolpintsev controlled a botnet and used brute force malware, which he “bragged” could crack the login credentials of at least 2,000 computers each week, according to court documents.
Between January 2017 and January 2019, he sold these stolen credentials on the market. Court records say he listed details of about 6,700 servers for sale during that time, and buyers paid at least $82,648 for those compromised login credentials.
Ivanov-Tolpintsev’s sentencing follows several other steps taken by law enforcement to shut down dark web activity.
In April, German Federal Police, in coordination with US law enforcement, seized Hydra servers and cryptocurrency wallets containing $25 million in Bitcoin, shutting down the oldest known souk.
In the same month, the US Department of Justice revealed details of a court-authorized takedown of the command-and-control systems that the Kremlin-backed Sandworm cybercrime network was using to direct network devices infected with its Cyclops malware. Blink.
Federal authorities have also offered up to $10 million for vital information on each of six Russian GRU officers linked to the Sandworm gang, who Uncle Sam says plotted to carry out destructive cyber attacks on infrastructure. American reviews. ®
