On Tuesday, March 24, 2020, the FBI has taken down Deer.io, a Russian hackers platform that provides Shopify like platform and hosting allowing criminals to sell illegal products that include ripped credit cards, hacked servers, gaming accounts, malicious software.
Suspected Russian hackers Kirill Victorovich Firsov was arrested and is charged with cyber crimes of hacking of U.S. companies for customers’ personal information.
Deer.io was active from the last seven years and was hosting 24,000 active shops and the sales exceeding $17 million that includes selling of cracked accounts such as Netflix, Hulu, etc, malicious software.
According to a federal complaint, the services provided by the deer.io are:
- Hacked or compromised data of compromised U.S. and international financial and corporate data
- Financial information, PII
- Usernames and Passwords
- Harvested credentials and hacked servers
DEER.IO platform provides an automated set-up and guides for new shop owners to upload their products and to configure cryptocurrency wallets for payment of purchased products. The cost to set up a storefront was approximately $12.50 per month and the monthly fee can be payable through Bitcoin or WebMoney( Russian money transfer system).
Anyone who wants to purchase from Deer.io can navigate to deer.io domain and deer.io contains a search function where users can search hacked accounts or PII from specific countries or cyber-criminal services for sale. Payment can be conducted using cryptocurrency.
Hackers are a threat to our economy, and our privacy and national security, and cannot be tolerated.
justice.gov said.
For confirmation FBI purchased 999 individual PII accounts from a deer.io store SHIKISHOP.DEER.IS for approximately $170 in Bitcoin on March 5, 2020, after this on the same day FBI purchased 2,650 individual PII account from SHIKISHOP.DEER.IS for approximately $522 in Bitcoin after that FBI checked the names, dates of birth and U.S. Social Security numbers.
Deer.io was the largest centralized platform, which promoted and facilitated the sale of compromised social media and financial accounts, personally identifiable information (PII) and hacked computers on the internet. The FBI will continue to be at the forefront of protecting Americans from foreign and domestic cyber criminals.
justice.gov said.
However, the FBI has seized the website.
After viewing the Kirill Victorovich Firsov’s twitter account it says that he is a cybersecurity researcher and a developer who lives in Moscow after viewing his tweets said that he has found many security vulnerabilities in Telegram.
