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What’s more threatening than the thought of a cybercriminal sitting at their laptop and carefully manipulating their way into your bank account, stealing all of your hard-earned savings, and nonchalantly selling your login information to the highest bidder on a prestigious cybercriminal forum…?
A cybercriminal who can do all of this just using their mobile device!
The notion of threat actors adopting novel methods to facilitate their online activities is nothing new: The cybercriminal underground is continuously evolving and responding to new technologies and challenges. However, forums continue to be very much an active part of the cybercriminal landscape.
Digital Shadows (now ReliaQuest) recently observed the proposed development of a mobile application (app) for the English-language cybercriminal forum Nulled, indicating the site’s desire to keep the forum format very much alive. Historically, we’ve seen users across the cybercriminal community using and endorsing third-party applications, such as Telegram, Discord, and Jabber. But—as another subset of the cybercriminal underground is quick to point out—these come with their risks. This latest move might be an attempt to reduce these risks and cut out the middleman.
This blog will assess the historical concept of mobile-oriented forums, the benefits this stance could have for a forum in a world that is increasingly mobile-centric, and the potential pitfalls that explain why it may still not be a feasible idea in reality.
Nulled is an English-language cybercriminal cracking forum, founded in 2015, that has amassed over three million members to date. The site describes itself as a place “where you can find tons of great leaks, make new friends, participate in active discussion”. The forum’s statistics page highlights that the site has a large user base, with more than 3,000 new registrants a day and a daily average of 24,000-plus new posts.
Although Nulled may not be held in such high regard when compared to such prestigious forums as Exploit or XSS, the community aspect the forum has created remains intact. Nulled’s longevity in the volatile English-language cybercriminal scene indicates it’s stable and reliable.
Throughout early 2020, we observed a select number of users of Nulled actively developing an app on GitHub that aimed to provide a portable format of the forum in its entirety. Although mobile UIs for cybercriminal forums have existed for a long time, they are clunky and not very user friendly. This app seems to be trying to change this narrative and bring the traditional desktop forum to a mobile-centric audience. Initial feedback on the Nulled app was mostly positive. However, in recent days, its leading developer was suddenly banned from the forum for unknown reasons.
While the Nulled app’s existence hangs in the balance, the whole episode got us thinking: If it’s that simple, why has such a thing not emerged in the past? Although it’s not abundantly clear, we thought of a few potential reasons:
So at this point, we asked ourselves why the Nulled team even bothered initiating the project in the first place. Such an app is likely to have been intended as a proof of concept, to see whether the idea is feasible, and could add another legitimate way to access the forum in a world where the mobile device is increasingly becoming everyone’s go-to computer.
We’ll now look into the potential benefits a mobile-oriented forum could bring to the cybercriminal scene and, conversely, explore why mobile forums haven’t struck a chord before.
Although there are potential negatives to any new concept, there are various positives that a forum app could bring:
Let’s examine those positives in detail.
The benefits of a mobile-oriented forum sound great, so what’s holding the cybercriminal community back? There are a few possible answers:
Now let’s break down those pitfalls to see if they hold weight.
At the time of writing, the Nulled app is very much in a beta stage, with the latest updates released in early April 2020. But with the developer’s ban from the forum, it’s not clear if the app will ever get released publicly. Accessibility and convenience can both be significant driving factors in the longevity and success of a forum and the uptake from its members. Still, these must not come at the cost of security and anonymity. Maybe Weighing up these considerations ultimately determines whether a project is a success or a failure in the cybercriminal underground.
What we can say for sure is that this whole Nulled debacle suggests the forum is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Although its current format may adapt to suit an evolving society, the heartbeat of the cybercriminal community is drumming faster than ever.