Hacktivist Group CyberBerkut Behind Attacks on German Official Websites

A pro-Russian group called CyberBerkut claimed responsibility for a recent hack on certain German government websites in early January. We were able to gather some information on some of its members based on Pastebin data that had been leaked by the Ukrainian nationalist political party (Pravy Sektor).

A Background on CyberBerkut

CyberBerkut is an organized group of pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian hacktivists. The group’s name was derived from Ukraine’s special police force named Berkut (or “golden eagle” in Ukrainian), which was created in 1992 under the Ministry of Interior Affairs. Not only did the CyberBerkut group use the Special Forces’ designation, they also imitated their insignia. Below the CyberBerkut name reads their slogan “We Won’t forget, We won’t forgive.”

Figure 1. Left: Ukraine’s special police force insignia; Right: CyberBerkut insignia

Berkut was created for high-risk interventions during riots and hostage situations, similar to the SWAT (Strategic Weapons and Tactics) team in the United States. It was rumored, however, that the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, had been using the Berkut for various violent intents against Ukrainian protesters. The Berkut unit is remembered for its violent intervention during the Euromaidan protest last November 2013.

The Euromaidan protest marked the beginning of group CyberBerkut, which has since been involved in different cyber attacks toward different western government entities. They claimed responsibility for all of their attacks on their website and social network profiles.

Taking Credit for Attacks on German Government websites

On January 7^th 2015, CyberBerkut made an announcement on their website, Twitter, and Facebook accounts that they brought down websites for Germany’s parliament and Chancellor, Angela Merkel. According to reports, the websites did not load for several hours, but the German government announced two days after the attack that “they’re in the midst of getting things back to normal.”

Figure 2. Announcement of the German government website hack on the CyberBerkut website.

The pro-Russian cyber hacktivism group expressed their opposition against the independence of Ukrainians and its current government, accusing them of being behind the creation of the ongoing conflict in Crimea. CyberBerkut also accused Germany and the United States for helping Ukraine in this matter.

Other organizations have also been targeted and accused of the same counts. Take for instance, the attack on NATO websites last March 2014, Polish websites last August 2014, as well as the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense last October 2014. CyberBerkut claimed that the Ukranian Government received secret information about the MH17 investigation and posted leaked document on their website.

The Cyrillic version of the CyberBerkut website includes a section called “BerkutLeaks” that doesn’t show up on the English version of the site. The URL is listed as the following:

Figure 3. The ‘BerkutLeaks’ section of the CyberBerkut website lists several documents leaked regarding specific individuals considered as traitors.

Who is part of CyberBerkut?

It is difficult to exactly identify the individuals involved in a hacktivist group as the group is usually composed of several people using different monikers. For this CyberBerkut, we know for a fact that there are at least 4 members, and their handles are “Mink,” “Artemov,” “MDV,” and “KhA.”

On January 7^th 2015, the same day the German attack happened, personal information about certain members of the cyber group had been posted on Pastebin by “PravyjSektorUANationalistsUkraineAnon ” of the Pravy Sektor (Ukrainian right wing activists). The Pastebin post has since been removed but we were able to take a screenshot.

Figure 4. Pastebin post containing information on CyberBerkut members

Below is a rough translation of the text:

/ **

* Members CyberBerkut tasks

* Here are the key members CyberBerkut exposed

* (CyberBerkut @ Cyberberkut1)

*

* Brought to you right quadrant

* ##PravyjSektorUANationalistsUkraineAnon ##

** /

 –

Full name: Alexander Ulyanov

Aliases: MDV

Date of Birth: 24/03/1986

Country: Russia

Residence: 14 Polozova Street, St. Petersburg

I.T.B Identification: 649

Twitter: http://twitter.com/CyberBerkut

Notes: Found at ITB database, he lead the operation Privat. Interference in the work of the Central Election Commission of Ukraine by IFES damage to the system before the election. Temporarily blocked the work of MOI of Ukraine and the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. Temporarily blocked the work sites of TV channels “Inter” and “1 + 1″. The attacks on the NATO website. The attack on the websites of private military companies in the US.

—

Full Name: Zac Olden

Aliases: Mink, M. Rodchenko

Date of Birth: Unknown

Country: Australia

Residence: Unknown

VKontakte: http://vk.com/infiltrate

Twitter: http://twitter.com/zacolden

 Notes: Hacking mailbox and publication of correspondence IV Kolomoiskiy with the prosecutor in Lviv region, and computer hacking and e-mail Assistant oligarch. Also lined with the contents of the archives 89 email accounts of employees of the Lviv regional prosecutor’s office. He is the leader of retribution network (http://retribution.in).

 –

Full name: August “Artemov” Pasternak

Aliases: Artemova, Artemov

Date of Birth: 07/04/1994

Country: UKRAINE

Residence: 194, 15 Pushkin, Megeve, Dnipropetrovsk region

I.T.B Identification: 151403

 Notes: Putting public access telephone recording Supreme representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton and Foreign Minister Urmas Paet. Hacking and publication of the correspondence of the Acting Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine AB Avakova.

 Zac Olden aka ”Mink”

The member named Zac Olden (alias: “Mink”) caught our attention so we decided to dig up a little more information on him. The initial data we had from the Pastebin post was:

Full Name: Zac Olden

Aliases: Mink, M. Rodchenko

Date of Birth: Unknown

Country: Australia

Residence: Unknown

VKontakte: http://vk.com/infiltrate

Twitter: http://twitter.com/zacolden

Notes: Hacking mailbox and publication of correspondence IV Kolomoiskiy with the prosecutor in Lviv region, and computer hacking and e-mail Assistant oligarch. Also lined with the contents of the archives 89 email accounts of employees of the Lviv regional prosecutor’s office. He is the leader of retribution network (http://retribution.in).

Our findings revealed that he has been involved in more than just what it is mentioned in the Pastebin post.

Figure 5. Graph that summarizes different information about “Mink.” (Click the image above to zoom in)

Mink uses different monikers such as “Videsh”, “Videshkin” and “Gmr.” We found that he is part of different Russian underground forums such as inattack.ru, antichat.ru, damagelab, and an old security focused forum named rootkit.com.

He also owns a website that is a fake version of a legitimate Australian Bead online store.

 Real store: http://www.beadcotasmania.com.au

Fake Store: https://zacolden.com/

Here are the emails addresses he uses:

• minkrr@yandex.ru
• alexandernot@mail.ru
• mink@retribution.in
• appalled@outlook.com
• retribution@null.net
• support@xakep.ru
• x@k0d.biz
• videshkin@ya.ru

On the Russian social network Vkontakte.ru he advertises the forum k0d.cc and a website named crypting.net.

Domains:

• net
• cc
• sx
• com
• in

The fake names he uses are “Kolesnikov Alexandr“ and  “MIKHAILOVICH RODCHENKO.” His other online profiles can be found here:

•  http://my.mail.ru/mail/alexandernot/
• Skype: CyberBerkut

Mink has a Pastebin account where you can find his different posts. He appears to be a bit paranoid about his fellows colleagues and on Oct 14^th 2014, he declared “MDV” a traitor and released information about him, which can be found at the following Pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/DYhPfTSx

He also did the same thing to “artemova” on Jun 16^th 2014, with the information found at this Pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/2LY7isZ8

Regarding CyberBerkut websites, we found the following information:

Figure 6. CyberBerkut.net has been registered using the above information.

Figure 7. Information about the domains associated with CyberBerkut.net. Click the image above to zoom in.

There is only little information about the domains as they are behind a CloudFlare infrastructure.

How does CyberBerkut Perform Their DDoS Attacks?

Last May 14 2014, CyberBerkut posted a new message on their VK profile and asked for volunteers to join the battle against Ukraine by running a DDoS tool dubbed as ClientPort. The tool came in two versions: one for Windows and one for Linux. The attack was allegedly executed on May 14, 2014 at 10 AM. In addition, the group also asked the persons joining the said attack to visit their website (http://cyber-berkut.org/army.php)  to download the tool.

Figure 8. Original VK post

Figure 9. Original page of http://cyber-berkut.org/army.php

We were able to get a copy of both versions of the ClientPort tool. The ClientPort tool connects to Tor and then connects to epwokus5rkeekoyh.onionto get the domain name that should be targeted. The ClientPort tool can perform routines such as HTTP connection flooding, UDP flooding, and TCP flooding. This is a typical case of botnet by agreement. We also suspect that the latest DDoS attacks may have been perpetrated the same way, by recruiting Pro-Russia volunteers to join the cause. Volunteers are recruited via their several social networks profiles such as VK and Odnokalsninki and any other social networks where CyberBerkut has pages:

• http://ok.ru/kiberberkut
• http://vk.com/cyberberkut1
• https://twitter.com/cyberberkut2
• https://www.facebook.com/cyberberkut3

Conclusion

CyberBerkut members are first and foremost Pro-Russians cyber-criminals, fighting for a political cause. As with most hacktivist groups, they used distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to take down and disturb official government websites, as well as infect specific targets. This is all done in order to gather email credentials to read their target’s communication and documents. The malware used could either be a Trojan, keylogger or other forms of badness they would leverage to gain their victims’ email credentials.

CyberBerkut’s attacks are definitely falling into the targeted attack umbrella type of threats as they are politically motivated and have targeted operations.