The U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday introduced the disruption of the web infrastructure related to DanaBot (aka DanaTools) and unsealed fees towards 16 people for his or her alleged involvement within the improvement and deployment of the malware, which it mentioned was managed by a Russia-based cybercrime group.
The malware, the DoJ mentioned, contaminated greater than 300,000 sufferer computer systems all over the world, facilitated fraud and ransomware, and brought about at the very least $50 million in damages. Two of the defendants, Aleksandr Stepanov (aka JimmBee), 39, and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin (aka Onix), 34, each from Novosibirsk, Russia, are presently at massive.
Stepanov has been charged with conspiracy, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and financial institution fraud, aggravated id theft, unauthorized entry to a protected pc to acquire info, unauthorized impairment of a protected pc, wiretapping, and use of an intercepted communication. Kalinkin has been charged with conspiracy to achieve unauthorized entry to a pc to acquire info, to achieve unauthorized entry to a pc to defraud, and to commit unauthorized impairment of a protected pc.
The unsealed felony criticism and indictment present that lots of the defendants, counting Kalinkin, uncovered their real-life identities after unintentionally infecting their very own techniques with the malware.
“In some circumstances, such self-infections seemed to be intentionally finished to be able to take a look at, analyze, or enhance the malware,” the criticism [PDF] learn. “In different circumstances, the infections gave the impression to be inadvertent â one of many hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will typically infect themselves with their very own malware by mistake.”
“The inadvertent infections typically resulted in delicate and compromising knowledge being stolen from the actor’s pc by the malware and saved on the DanaBot servers, together with knowledge that helped determine members of the DanaBot group.”
If convicted, Kalinkin is predicted to face a statutory most sentence of 72 years in federal jail. Stepanov would face a jail time period of 5 years. Concurrent with the motion, the legislation enforcement effort, carried out as a part of Operation Endgame, noticed DanaBot’s command-and-control (C2) servers seized, together with dozens of digital servers hosted in the US.
“DanaBot malware used quite a lot of strategies to contaminate sufferer computer systems, together with spam e mail messages containing malicious attachments or hyperlinks,” the DoJ mentioned. “Sufferer computer systems contaminated with DanaBot malware turned a part of a botnet (a community of compromised computer systems), enabling the operators and customers of the botnet to remotely management the contaminated computer systems in a coordinated method.”
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| Instance of typical Danabot infrastructure |
DanaBot, just like the lately dismantled Lumma Stealer malware, operates beneath a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) scheme, with the directors leasing out entry ranging from $500 to “a number of thousand {dollars}” a month. Tracked beneath the monikers Scully Spider and Storm-1044, is a multi-functional device alongside the strains of Emotet, TrickBot, QakBot, and IcedID that is able to appearing as a stealer and a supply vector for next-stage payloads, akin to ransomware.
The Delphi-based modular malware is supplied to siphon knowledge from sufferer computer systems, hijack banking classes, and steal gadget info, person looking histories, saved account credentials, and digital forex pockets info. It may possibly additionally present full distant entry, log keystrokes, and seize movies. It has been energetic within the wild since its debut in Could 2018, when it began off as a banking trojan.
“DanaBot initially focused victims in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Australia previous to increasing its focusing on posture to incorporate U.S.- and Canada-based monetary establishments in October 2018,” CrowdStrike mentioned. “The malware’s reputation grew as a consequence of its early modular improvement supporting Zeus-based net injects, info stealer capabilities, keystroke logging, display screen recording, and hidden digital community computing (HVNC) performance.”
In keeping with Black Lotus Labs and Staff Cymru, DanaBot employs a layered communications infrastructure between a sufferer and the botnet controllers, whereby the C2 site visitors is proxied by way of two or three server tiers earlier than it reaches the ultimate degree. No less than 5 to 6 tier-2 servers had been energetic at any given time. A majority of DanaBot victims are concentrated round Brazil, Mexico, and the US.
“The operators have proven their dedication to their craft, tailored to detection and adjustments in enterprise protection, and with later iterations, insulating the C2s in tiers to obfuscate monitoring,” the businesses mentioned. “All through this time, they’ve made the bot extra user-friendly with structured pricing and buyer assist.”
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| Variety of DanaBot campaigns noticed in Proofpoint e mail risk knowledge from Could 2018 to April 2025 |
Telemetry knowledge gathered by Proofpoint exhibits that DanaBot was “almost totally absent” from the e-mail risk panorama from July 2020 by way of June 2024, indicating that risk actors propagated the malware by way of different strategies like search engine marketing poisoning and malvertising campaigns.
The DoJ mentioned DanaBot directors operated a second model of the botnet that was specifically designed to focus on sufferer computer systems in army, diplomatic, authorities, and associated entities in North America and Europe. This variant, rising in January 2021, got here fitted with capabilities to file all interactions taking place on a sufferer gadget and ship the info to a unique server.
“Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms a whole lot of 1000’s of victims all over the world, together with delicate army, diplomatic, and authorities entities, and causes many tens of millions of {dollars} in losses,” mentioned United States Lawyer Invoice Essayli for the Central District of California.
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| Excessive-level diagram of multi-tiered C2 structure |
The DoJ additional credited a number of personal sector corporations, Amazon, CrowdStrike, ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Spycloud, Staff Cymru, and Zscaler, for offering “beneficial help.”
Among the noteworthy features of DanaBot, compiled from varied stories, are under –
- DanaBot’s sub-botnet 5 obtained instructions to obtain a Delphi-based executable leveraged to conduct HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults towards the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence (MOD) webmail server and the Nationwide Safety and Protection Council (NSDC) of Ukraine in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of the nation
- Two DanaBot sub-botnets, 24 and 25, had been particularly used for espionage functions probably with an purpose to additional intelligence-gathering actions on behalf of Russian authorities pursuits
- DanaBot operators have periodically restructured their providing since 2022 to give attention to protection evasion, with at the very least 85 distinct construct numbers recognized so far (The latest model is 4006, which was compiled in March 2025)
- The malware’s infrastructure consists of a number of parts: A “bot” that infects goal techniques and performs knowledge assortment, an “OnlineServer” that manages the RAT functionalities, a “consumer” for processing collected logs and bot administration, and a “server” that handles bot era, packing, and C2 communication
- DanaBot has been utilized in focused espionage assaults towards authorities officers within the Center East and Japanese Europe
- The authors of DanaBot function as a single group, providing the malware for lease to potential associates, who subsequently use it for their very own malicious functions by establishing and managing their very own botnets utilizing personal servers
- DanaBot’s builders have partnered with the authors of a number of malware cryptors and loaders, akin to Matanbuchus, and provided particular pricing for distribution bundles
- DanaBot maintained a mean of 150 energetic tier-1 C2 servers per day, with roughly 1,000 day by day victims throughout greater than 40 nations, making it one of many largest MaaS platforms energetic in 2025
Proofpoint, which first recognized and named DanaBot in Could 2018, mentioned the disruption of the MaaS operation is a win for defenders and that it’ll have an effect on the cybercriminal risk panorama.
“Cybercriminal disruptions and legislation enforcement actions not solely impair malware performance and use but additionally impose a value to risk actors by forcing them to vary their techniques, trigger distrust within the felony ecosystem, and doubtlessly make criminals take into consideration discovering a unique profession,” Selena Larson, a workers risk researcher at Proofpoint, mentioned.
“These successes towards cyber criminals solely come about when enterprise IT groups and safety service suppliers share much-needed perception into the most important threats to society, affecting the best variety of individuals all over the world, which legislation enforcement can use to trace down the servers, infrastructure, and felony organizations behind the assaults. Personal and public sector collaboration is essential to figuring out how actors function and taking motion towards them.”
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| DanaBot’s options as promoted on its assist website |
DoJ Unseals Costs In opposition to QakBot Chief
The event comes because the DoJ unsealed fees towards a 48-year-old Moscow resident, Rustam Rafailevich Gallyamo, for main efforts to develop and preserve the QakBot malware, which was disrupted in a multinational operation in August 2023. The company additionally filed a civil forfeiture criticism towards over $24 million in cryptocurrency seized from Gallyamov over the course of the investigation.
“Gallyamov developed, deployed, and managed the Qakbot malware starting in 2008,” the DoJ mentioned. “From 2019 onward, Gallyamov allegedly used the Qakbot malware to contaminate 1000’s of sufferer computer systems all over the world to be able to set up a community, or ‘botnet,’ of contaminated computer systems.”
The DoJ revealed that, following the takedown, Gallyamov and his co-conspirators continued their felony actions by switching to different techniques like “spam bomb” assaults to be able to achieve unauthorized entry to sufferer networks and deploy ransomware households like Black Basta and CACTUS. Courtroom paperwork accuse the e-crime group of participating in these strategies as lately as January 2025.
“Mr. Gallyamov’s bot community was crippled by the proficient women and men of the FBI and our worldwide companions in 2023, however he overtly continued to deploy various strategies to make his malware out there to felony cyber gangs conducting ransomware assaults towards harmless victims globally,” mentioned Assistant Director in Cost Akil Davis of the FBI’s Los Angeles Subject Workplace.
