Dutch authorities have announced they seized 127 servers run by a Russian-based hosting service used by some of the world’s most notorious cyber gangs.
Zservers/XHost is a bulletproof hosting (BPH) service based in the small Russian town of Barnaul in Western Siberia, but the company is reported to play a critical role in the infrastructure of major cyber criminal groups such as LockBit and BlackCat.
The company offers cyber criminals the ability to host their malicious activities and promises to be ‘fully bulletproof’, meaning they do not respond to takedown requests from law enforcement or DMCA notices, and can provision new IP addresses quickly if their customer is flagged as a hacker.
After a year-long investigation, Dutch police raided one of the firm’s facilities in Amsterdam and physically took the servers offline, reporting they contained ransomware, botnets, and malware.
UK, US, and Australian authorities announced they would be sanctioning Zservers on 11 February 2025, a few days before the Dutch police operation, after its servers were identified as a key component of the Russian cyber crime supply chain.
The firm is said to have been in operation since 2011 offering a variety of elicit hosting services for brute-forcing and vulnerability scanning on cyber crime forums.
Australia goes after group hosting stolen Medibank data
Australia’s national cyber agency, the Australian Signal’s Directorate (ASD), has been tracking the group behind the organization over the last two and half years after linking them with a major cyber attack in 2022.
The ASD discovered that the hacker behind a huge data breach affected a major Australian health insurer that was using Zservers to host the stolen data.
Aleksandr Ermakov, linked to the Russian threat actor REvil, was unmasked by the Australian government as the mastermind behind an attack on the Medibank health insurer in 2022 that saw nearly 10 million customer’s sensitive data exfiltrated and offered to the highest bidder.
The ASD was able to track Ermakov’s various identities across the dark web and linked them to ZServers, which they ascertained was where the 502GB of PII of millions of Australian citizens stolen from Medibank was being stored.
According to reporting from Australia’s Nine News, the ASD was able to take action against the organization and cut off their access to their cloud and on-premises servers.
Abigail Bradshaw, director general at the ASD, said the agency had been targeting a range of BPH providers over the last year alongside partners from the UK and US, and said that it has deleted roughly 250TB of information stolen from victims all around the world in that time period.
Law enforcement making ground in stemming the tide of cyber crime
Richard Cassidy, EMEA CISO at Rubrik, said the combined efforts of law enforcement agencies have been essential in neutralizing major criminal organizations like LockBit.
“While submarines might take the headlines, the cyber cooperation under AUKUS is critical to our national security. Law enforcement from the UK, the US, and Australia combined to take down ZServer infrastructure and cripple the ability of the Lockbit ransomware gang to launch their attacks.”
Law enforcement operations look to be having a tangible impact on cyber crime, too, Cassidy noted, stating takedowns like this have contributed to an overall dip in ransomware payments last year.
“Law enforcement actions like these have a real impact on the cyber landscape. Last year, ransomware payments declined significantly, falling 35 per cent from USD$1.25 billion to USD$814 million. Takedowns like this were a key contributor to the fall in payments, along with increased refusals by victims to pay ransoms due to a greater maturity around improving cyber resilience.”
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Yet the work of cyber agencies is never done and there are always willing threat actors ready to fill the space left by suppressed groups like LockBit and BlackCat.
“These actions should be celebrated, but organisations can’t afford to be complacent. For every seizure, there is another group waiting in the wings. When it comes to ransomware recovery, a proactive response posture which includes immutable backups, pre-calculated recovery points, and an ability to scan both production and backup data for threats is critical to ensuring rapid restoration of operations.”
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