A new individual or group that appears to be a reincarnation of GnosticPlayers is offering millions of user records for sale on the dark web.
The records offered by “ShinyHunters” on a well-known dark web market appear to come from 11 firms.
The firms listed by ShinyHunters include Tokopedia (91 Million), HomeChef (8 Million), Bhinneka (1.2 Million), Minted (5 Million), StyleShare (6 Million), Ggumim (2 Million), Mindful (2 Million), Star Tribune (1 Million), Chatbooks (15 Million), Chronicle of Education (3 Million), and Zoosk (30 Million).
Although Tokopedia and Chatbooks have confirmed that they had breaches, for the most part, the other entities listed have yet to confirm or dispute any claimed hacks. In the past, hackers had claimed to hack Zoosk, but the firm had denied the claims. The current listing offers no sample records but claims to have 30 million records with no hashes, with the structure of the users table offered as the only proof. Zoosk was not immediately available to respond to this site’s inquiry about the claim. Proof for other listings also generally consisted of structure or fields without actual personal info.
Who is ShinyHunters?
The group known as “ShinyHunters” first appeared under that alias on RaidForums on April 17, 2020. A companion Twitter account, @sh_corp opened in January, 2020, as did the ShinyHunters dark web account.
The 11 firms currently listed on the dark web market are not the only hacks or dumps attributed to this group. They have also listed other databases on RaidForums as ShinyHunters: ActionNetwork.com (693k), Bitrewards.com (547k), and Ulmon.com (1m).
In addition to databases listed under their name, there are other databases or dumps that have also been attributed to them. The recently disclosed Unacademy breach, which has also been attributed to the same threat actors by ZeroFox Alpha Team, is not listed as part of their sale offerings.
ShinyHunters have also been linked to another account on RaidForums that listed 500 GB of Microsoft’s private source code. That account calls itself “fs0c131y,” using the well-known Twitter identity of a French security researcher (Elliot Alderson). The RaidForums fs0c131y account links to the the ShinyHunters Twitter account and not Alderson’s Twitter account.
Why ShinyHunters or one particular member of ShinyHunters has a grudge against @fs0c131y on Twitter is unclear, but one of their posts on Raid Forums mocked the researcher’s Twitter account:
Fighting FOIA at fs0c131y. Utterly schizophrenic. Taking pleasure to publicly bully and humiliate beginners on Twitter, toxic information security dumbass, decided to upload whole Microsoft source code taken from its Github.48GB using 7z compression, just enough to store on the cloud.Black hat. Freedom of doing illegal things isn’t dead.Enjoy
Prior to calling themelf “fs0c131y” on RaidForums, the same user had called themself “whysodank.” Like at least two members of the former GnosticPlayers, whysodank favored jabber.ua as their Jabber server.
Regardless of what they call themself or themselves, the new listings are certainly reminiscent of Gnosticplayers, and the recent listing of Bukapalak data from a breach that had also linked to Gnosticplayers would be consistent with that hypothesis, even though the listing is not by “ShinyHunters” or “fs0c131y” and has been offered by individuals with various usernames.
While ZeroFox compared ShinyHunters to GnosticPlayers, they did not go so far as to say that Shiny Hunters is the same threat actor(s) formerly known as GnosticPlayers. DataBreaches.net strongly suspects that Shiny Hunters *is* the threat actor(s) formerly known as GnosticPlayers — in particular, one specific individual who had been known as “NSFW.”
NSFW disappeared from public spaces in January after Vinny Troia had publicly accused NSFW of involvement in numerous criminal hacks. At the time, Troia seemed to think that NSFW was going to turn himself into law enforcement or be arrested soon. Neither appears to have occurred, and a new account on RaidForums called “Vinny Troia” that seems intended to harm Troia’s reputation could be the spiteful work of NSFW. Then again, it might be any of a number of other people whom Troia has accused of criminal conduct. Troia believes that people are vindictive because he is right in his accusations. They might also be ticked off because he is wrong in some cases. DataBreaches.net believes that Troia has made several errors in his attributions, but is waiting to see his alleged proof before responding in more detail.
In the interim, DataBreaches has reached out to one member of the former GnosticPlayers and will update this post is additional information is received.