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	"created_at": "2026-04-06T00:18:01.70718Z",
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	"sha1_hash": "f4ec468d05c0923c0e1ec72f51a15570670fef59",
	"title": "Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs",
	"llm_title": "",
	"authors": "",
	"file_creation_date": "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z",
	"file_modification_date": "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z",
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	"plain_text": "Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs\r\nPublished: 2025-05-23 · Archived: 2026-04-05 19:02:28 UTC\r\nThe U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling\r\nDanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since\r\n2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed\r\ntheir real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.\r\nDanaBot’s features, as promoted on its support site. Image: welivesecurity.com.\r\nInitially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.\r\nToday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the\r\nFBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the\r\nhttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs/\r\nPage 1 of 4\n\ninformation stealer platform.\r\nThe government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more\r\nthan $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a.\r\n“JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is\r\nan IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”\r\nAccording to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and\r\nJune 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that\r\nthe second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in\r\ntargeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the\r\nUnited States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.\r\n“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and\r\nsteal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand\r\njury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff,\r\ncorrespondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s\r\ninteractions with the United States.”\r\nThe indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well\r\nas the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in\r\nwhich the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen\r\ndata repositories that were seized by the feds.\r\n“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the\r\nmalware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the\r\nhazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by\r\nmistake.”\r\nhttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs/\r\nPage 2 of 4\n\nImage: welivesecurity.com\r\nA statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative\r\nService (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United\r\nStates. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help\r\nremediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the\r\ngovernment, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and\r\nZScaler.\r\nIt’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the\r\nZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and\r\nEurope between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.\r\nAs detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve\r\npurely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and\r\ndocuments that would likely only be found in classified documents.\r\nThe public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies\r\nin disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise\r\noffered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft\r\nfiled a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.\r\nFurther reading:\r\nDanabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire\r\nhttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs/\r\nPage 3 of 4\n\nZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense\r\nFlashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware\r\nTeam CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II\r\nMarch 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin\r\nSeptember 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants\r\nSource: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs/\r\nhttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs/\r\nPage 4 of 4",
	"extraction_quality": 1,
	"language": "EN",
	"sources": [
		"Malpedia"
	],
	"origins": [
		"web"
	],
	"references": [
		"https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs/"
	],
	"report_names": [
		"oops-danabot-malware-devs-infected-their-own-pcs"
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	"ts_updated_at": 1775826746,
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