The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week announced the arrest of a 55-year-old Latvian woman who’s alleged to have worked as a programmer for Trickbot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for infecting millions of computers and seeding many of those systems with ransomware.
Just how did a self-employed web site designer and mother of two come to work for one of the world’s most rapacious cybercriminal groups and then leave such an obvious trail of clues indicating her involvement with the gang? This post explores answers to those questions, as well as some of the ways Trickbot and other organized cybercrime gangs gradually recruit, groom and trust new programmers.
Alla Witte’s personal website — allawitte[.]nl — circa October 2018.
The indictment released by the DOJ (PDF) is heavily redacted, and only one of the defendants is named: Alla “Max” Witte, a 55-year-old Latvian national who was arrested Feb. 6 in Miami, Fla.
The DOJ alleges Witte was responsible for “overseeing the creation of code related to the monitoring and tracking of authorized users of the Trickbot malware, the control and deployment of ransomware, obtaining payments from ransomware victims, and developing tools and protocols for the storage of credentials stolen and exfiltrated from victims infected by Trickbot.”
The indictment also says Witte provided code to the Trickbot Group for a web panel used to access victim data stored in a database. According to the government, that database contained a large number of credit card numbers and stolen credentials from the Trickbot botnet, as well as information about infected machines available as bots.
“Witte provided code to this repository that showed an infec ..
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