Earlier this month, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached received a cease-and-desist letter from a cybersecurity firm. The missive alleged that an auction on the site for data stolen from 10 million customers of Mexico’s second-largest bank was fake news and harming the bank’s reputation. The administrator responded to this empty threat by purchasing the stolen banking data and leaking it on the forum for everyone to download.
On August 3, 2022, someone using the alias “Holistic-K1ller” posted on Breached a thread selling data allegedly stolen from Grupo Financiero Banorte, Mexico’s second-biggest financial institution by total loans. Holistic-K1ller said the database included the full names, addresses, phone numbers, Mexican tax IDs (RFC), email addresses and balances on more than 10 million citizens.
There was no reason to believe Holistic-K1ller had fabricated their breach claim. This identity has been highly active on Breached and its predecessor RaidForums for more than two years, mostly selling databases from hacked Mexican entities. Last month, they sold customer information on 36 million customers of the Mexican phone company Telcel; in March, they sold 33,000 images of Mexican IDs — with the front picture and a selfie of each citizen. That same month, they also sold data on 1.4 million customers of Mexican lending platform Yotepresto.
But this history was either overlooked or ignored by Group-IB, the Singapore-based cybersecurity firm apparently hired by Banorte to help respond to the data breach.
“The Group-IB team has discovered a resource containing a fraudulent post offering to buy Grupo Financiero Banorte’s leaked databases,” reads a letter the Breach administrator said they received from ..
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