This is the story of how River City Media (RCM), Alvin Slocombe, and Matt Ferris, accidentally exposed their entire operation to the public after failing to properly configure their Rsync backups.
The data from this well-known, but slippery spamming operation, was discovered by Chris Vickery, a security researcher for MacKeeper and shared with Salted Hash, Spamhaus, as well as relevant law enforcement agencies.
While security practitioners are familiar with spammers and their methods, this story afforded Salted Hash with a rare opportunity to look behind the curtain and view their day-to-day operations.
“If you have not changed your Skype and Hipchat passwords as yet, please do so ASAP,” wrote Alvin Slocombe in early February on HipChat.
He suspected the company had been hacked. In his all-staff message, he urged everyone to rotate passwords for “anything that we may have stored any information on in the past.”
The assumptions were wrong though.The company wasn’t hacked. Yet, the reality is, RCM still experienced a severe data breach – one they were directly responsible for. By this point, their backups had been exposed for more than a month.
Vickery had discovered everything. From Hipchat logs and domain registration records, to accounting details, infrastructure planning and production notes, scripts, and business affiliations. In addition, Vickery uncovered 1.34 billion email accounts. These are the accounts that will receive spam, or what RCM calls offers. Some of these records also contained personal information, such as full names, physical addresses, and IP addresses.
“The natural response is to question whether the data set is real,” Vickery explained in his notes on the discovery.
“That was my initial reaction. I’m still struggling with the best software solution to handle such a voluminous collection, but I have looked up several people that I know and the entries are accurate. The only saving grace is that some are outdated by a few years and the subject no longer lives at the same location.”
Vickery also discovered thousands of warm-up email accounts used by RCM to skirt anti-spam measures. As a whole, most of the personal records and email addresses he discovered were collected by a process called co-registration, or CoReg.
CoReg emails come from people who signed-up for something online, and had their address shared with a third-party or partner.
“Nobody would knowingly give their email address to spammers, so they have to be tricked into it. Usually, there is some kind of offer for a ‘free gift’ in exchange for giving up an email address and personal information. The fine print of these offers allows the company to share their address with their ‘partners’ which ends up also being their partner’s partners, and their partner’s partner’s partners, until every spammer on the planet has their address,” explained Spamhaus’ Mike Anderson.
He goes on to explain such address lists are the lifeblood of the industry, and they’re constantly being analyzed through tracking systems – examining which addresses are viewing spam ads, which ones are clicking on them, and which ones are buying.
“Meanwhile, the original contract for handing over the address is never fulfilled, since it turns out to be impossible to redeem the ‘free gift’ or only with extreme difficulty. And of course these addresses never go through a confirmation process, to ensure it’s the real owner of the address doing the signup.”
For this story, we’ll explore the finances and operations of RCM, but it is important to note the data is only a snapshot taken from backups. Many of the records are current as of January, 2017, while others were last updated in December of 2016.
After seeing some of the documents, and spending countless days explaining how things work with both Salted Hash and Vickery, Spamhaus concluded that RCM has been using illegal IP hijacking techniques during some of their campaigns.
Law enforcement was informed about the breach and the questionable activities it exposed. However, we cannot discuss those elements, because the agencies involved cannot comment on pending or ongoing investigations.
For their part, Spamhaus will be taking action on all of the IP addresses and other elements connected to abuse stemming from this incident. The problem is, organizations like River City Media use numerous aliases and affiliate programs, so while blocking their infrastructure will hurt, there is no assurance it will put them out of business for good.
Update: With regard to notification, Vickery said he didn’t reach out to RCM directly.
“Once we concluded that this was indeed related to a criminal operation, it was decided that we should approach law enforcement and the affected companies (like Microsoft and Yahoo) before making any attempts at contacting the spammers directly. The leaking servers went dark during the process of notifying law enforcement and the major companies. So, I did not directly contact the spammers themselves.”
The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database is maintained by Spamhaus, an organization dedicated to fighting spam. ROKSO tracks professional spam operations and lists them using a three-strike rule. Listed among dozens of operators on the database’s index is Alvin Slocombe, the owner of Cyber World Internet Services, Inc.
Slocombe is also connected to a few other aliases, including e-Insites, Brand 4 Marketing, Ad Media Plus, and Site Traffic Network. He’s often associated with Matt Ferris, and his company River City Media. In all, the documents exposed by RCM connect the organization to more than 20 business partners over the last two years, and more than 30 different aliases, including RCM Delivery, Pheasant Valley Marketing Group, eBox, and Wharton Dynamics, Inc.
Moreover, RCM’s data breach also exposed 2,199 IP addresses used for public-faced activities; as well as the group’s internal assets. This is in addition to the 60 IP blocks RCM has identified for activities in the past, as well as current and future operations; and the 140 active DNS servers that are rotated frequently.
Based on campaign logging documents, the data breach also exposed more than 300 active MX records. In just two spreadsheets alone, RCM recorded nearly 100,000 domains used for their campaigns.
As mentioned, Vickery discovered tens of thousands of email accounts used for warm-up. These warm-up accounts are computer generated and maintained by RCM staff. Their usage and creation almost certainly violates the terms of service (TOS) at the large email providers where they were created. The exposed RCM records show warm-ups at Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo, but others are sure to exist.
The process works like this: RCM will send messages for a given campaign to these warm-up accounts, and since they’re not generating complaints from these messages (they’re not going to complain about themselves after all), the Email Service Provider or affiliate program will mark them as a good sender. Once they have a solid reputation built-up, they’re ready to blast the rest of the internet with their offers.
If an offer doesn’t inbox (meaning it is rejected, or otherwise dumped into a spam or junk folder), or a given domain is blacklisted, RCM goes back to a list of thousands of domains and selects another to restart the process.
In some cases, RCM will use aged domains. Aged domains are valuable, as newly registered domains are immediately suspect – especially if they’ve never sent email before. Some of the documents exposed by RCM’s data breach show plans to purchase aged domains at auction. Other domains purchased in bulk are prepped for warm-up and used once they have a positive age and reputation.
If RCM is caught spamming, the domain being used is dropped and replaced. The process is the same for affiliate IDs. However, Slocombe and Ferris have good relationships with their providers and marketing partners, so there is little risk on their end.
For example: In December of 2016, one of the exposed chat logs shows Slocombe explaining to Ferris that their buddy Mike Boehm is “very close friends with the owner of Alpnames, so if any issues come up let me know and I will see if he can hook us up / not let us get pulled down.”
Alpnames is listed in first place on the Spamhaus list of abused domain registrars. Spamhaus says it now appears as if they prefer to work with spammers, by offering discounts on registrations and assurances that domains won’t be canceled for abuse. But Alpnames isn’t the only business relationship that stands out, there is also EmailTraffic.com (archive link).
EmailTraffic.com employs Sean McKeown as their Data Management Director, but in RCM chat logs, McKeown is also known as MX. He is the owner of MXLeads in Florida, and he’s behind another RCM partner, Fenix Network
In the RCM chat logs, McKeown is respected for his scripting work. His efforts enabled RCM to exploit a number of providers in order to inbox offers. Such examples include Apple (mac, me, iCloud), as well as Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, and more. Salted Hash reached out to all of the providers and shared the scripts and notes exposed by the data breach. As a precaution, we will not be publishing them or releasing details.
The CEO of EmailTraffic.com is Stefan Hansmann, who is also the CEO of Domainers Choice, a company owned by Nanjing Imperiosus Technology Co., Ltd. in China. In 2016, the Executive Office of the President of the United States listed Nanjing Imperiosus Technology Co. as a notorious market for its connection to illegal online pharmacies.
Based on the records exposed by RCM, the company gets a lot of its domains from Domainers Choice, and uses MXLeads or Fenix Network to handle click tracking and unsubscribes. The ties between these companies and RCM is strengthened by the development of Youngstown Systems LLC, which Spamhaus says could be a fake ISP.
Youngstown has MX records on EmailTraffic.com and an A Record pointed to Fenix Network. The exposed documents suggest this ISP was some sort of joint venture between McKeown and RCM, but that might not be the case.
Finally, there is TierPoint, a legitimate ISP with a relationship to Alvin Slocombe and Cyber World Internet Services. They are Cyber World’s only link to the rest of the internet. IP records exposed by RCM show Slocombe tracking TierPoint IP addresses while working on various campaigns. Salted Hash reached out to TierPoint, MXLeads, and Domainers Choice for comment, but only TierPoint responded by the time this article went to press.
In a statement, a Tierpoint spokesperson wouldn’t comment on Ferris, Slocombe, River City Media, or Cyber World Internet.
“What we can tell you is that we serve more than 5,000 clients; a number of them are hosting companies, and as part of our agreement with some of those companies, we assign a block of IP addresses, which these clients (or their clients) may use. In all cases, if we receive official notice from a law enforcement agency of suspected unlawful activity, spamming or otherwise, we work closely with the agency and take all appropriate steps to protect our larger client base, our facilities, and our network.” – Tierpoint
In addition to the image above, documents exposed by the RCM data breach show an emergency contact at Tierpoint (Dan S.) and a username of alvinslobombe. Moreover, engineering chat logs leaked by RCM show Slocombe discussing using Tierpoint servers.
The other business relationships discovered within the exposed RCM documents are central to their operations.