Three Russian nationals — Alexey Chertkov, Kirill Morozov and Aleksandr Shishkin — and Kazakhstani national Dmitriy Rubtsov were charged for operating the proxy services, which were built on hijacked, older-model wireless routers around the world, according to a DOJ release. Prosecutors believe the defendants made more than $46 million through the schemes.
The compromised routers formed a botnet that served as the backbone for the proxies, designed to hide users’ locations. Such tools, which redirect internet traffic through intermediary servers, have long allowed hackers to camouflage their whereabouts.
5socks, which claimed to have been operating since 2004, said users can purchase “elite anonymous proxies at affordable price” and access some 7,000 proxy service offerings with cryptocurrency payments, according to an archived version of the group’s homepage.
Users could also navigate 5socks in Russian, signaling that Russian-speaking hacking groups relied on 5socks tooling to mask their exploits. Its site is also registered to an address in Moscow, according to publicly available data. Both website domains were managed by an unnamed company headquartered in Virginia and hosted on computer servers around the world, the DOJ charges say.
The sites now display a takedown banner with DOJ, FBI and Dutch National Police seals. The FB ..
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