What Happened

• Officers from the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU), jointly run by the London Met Police and City of London Police, secured the conviction of a man who used an SMS Blaster device to send fraudulent text messages as part of an organised criminal operation in London.
• The conviction relates to an investigation that previously led to the sentencing of Ruichen Xiong in July 2025, who was apprehended while driving a vehicle in North London as the device was in operation. During that incident, officers in the vicinity received fraudulent text messages purporting to be from HMRC.
• Ruichen Xiong was a student from China who drove around London using the SMS Blaster between 22 and 27 March 2025, sending messages to tens of thousands of potential victims.
• Following Xiong’s arrest and subsequent conviction, enquiries identified another individual called Di Li who was a key organiser. Li facilitated Xiong’s involvement by arranging access to the device, assisting with obtaining a vehicle, and supporting his day-to-day living costs.
• Xiong had accrued significant gambling debts after arriving in the UK as a student. To pay off his debts, Li instructed that he could repay what he owed by driving routes in a car with the SMS Blaster.
• On 20 August 2025, officers searched Li’s home address, where digital evidence was recovered showing communications between Li and Xiong relating to the deployment of the SMS blaster. Li was arrested on 1 September 2025 and charged with offences linked to the operation.
• At the court trial, Li’s defence was that the device was intended for “advertising” purposes and described himself as a middleman acting on behalf of an individual based in China. He maintained that he had been merely attempting to help Xiong repay his debts.

Analyst Comment

An SMS Blaster acts as a portable mobile phone mast that forces nearby mobile devices to connect to it by silently downgrading it to 2G while they try to connect to 5G or LTE. By doing so, criminals can bypass safeguards designed to block malicious senders and harmful links, enabling them to deliver fraudulent messages directly to victims nearby without needing their phone numbers. The SMS Blaster allow an operator to customise all aspects of the messages, so they can make it look like it has come from a genuine organisation like HMRC, the UK tax authority.

SMS Blasters are a relatively new technology for scammers. Police in the UK only encountered them for the first time in 2025, but they have been used in other parts of the world. SMS Blaster are also a type of IMSI catcher that mirrors the capability of law enforcement tools such as a Stingray.

When used in busy metropolitan areas, they allow criminals to easily send out SMS phishing messages to hundreds of people at a time. These SMS messages typically have a malicious link that host scam websites that trick victims into entering their personal details. These details can then used by fraudsters to make payments, steal funds, or resell it to others.

This report also highlights the concerning trend of organised cybercrime gangs from China are actively hunting for individuals who are financially vulnerable (like students with gambling debts) to conduct high-risk in-person operations. 

Defensive Takeaways

• Block and Report: If you receive a suspicious text message, do not engage with it. Instead, forward it to 7726, a free reporting service, and block the number.
• Move Away from SMS: If your organisation relies on SMS for One-Time Passcodes (OTPs), this threat highlights that the SMS sender ID can be perfectly spoofed locally. Organisations should migrate to authenticator apps, hardware tokens, or application push notifications to avoid spoofing.
• Proactive Takedown Programs: Since the attack relies on hosting malicious links to harvest credentials, defenders can perform proactive domain monitoring. Detecting and taking down lookalike domains immediately minimises the impact.

Relevant Sources

1. https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/2026/june/man-jailed-for-role-in-sms-blaster-fraud-operation-following-city-of-london-police-investigation
2. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/news-and-insight/press-release/police-warn-sms-scams-following-prison-sentence-criminal-who
3. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jun/24/police-sms-scams-blaster-texts-smishing

Relevant CTI Resources

1. https://www.m3aawg.org/blog/SMSBlasterEngagementSeries

What Happened:

• On 11 May 2026, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined South Staffordshire Water £963,900 after the Cl0p ransomware group lurked completely undetected in its network for nearly two years.
• Initial access reportedly occurred via a malicious phishing email in September 2020, which downloaded Cl0p’s Get2Loader malware and their SDBBOT backdoor to establish persistence.
• The breach itself, however, was only discovered two years later in July 2022 when staff began investigating IT performance slowdowns and ultimately found out that 4.1 terabytes of data was exfiltrated and the personal data of 633,887 customers and employees being published in August 2022 on Cl0p’s Tor data leak site.
• The ICO’s investigation also revealed a staggering list of systemic failures, such as South Staff’s outsourced Security Operations Center (SOC) was blind to 95% of the network and that they conducted zero internal or external vulnerability scans over an 18-month window. 
• At the time of the attack they were still running Windows Server 2003 machines long after extended support ended. Further, two of their domain controllers were left completely unpatched against ZeroLogon (CVE-2020-1472), a critical, easily exploitable vulnerability published years before the intrusion.

Analyst Comment:

This case is a sobering look at the technical debt hiding inside the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). A dwell time of nearly two years is practically unheard of in modern ransomware operations, and the TTPs used by the adversary points to a total breakdown of their defences. Cl0p didn’t need sophisticated, state-sponsored techniques or zero-days to pull this one off, they just walked back in through an infection that went undetected.

The ICO’s findings also reveal the reality that many UK organisations still treat cybersecurity as a set-and-forget compliance check rather than routine efforts to mature and upgrade systems or proactive measures to hunt and detect threats lurking inside the network.

Defensive Takeaways:

• Audit Your Outsourced SOC: As we learned from this incident, never assume the third-party security provider sees everything or is doing everything right. Establish audits to verify that endpoint telemetry and logs from your entire estate are actively ingested, retained, and monitored in the right platform.
• Harden Your Crown Jewels Against Old Flaws: Ensure that active directory and domain controllers are strictly monitored and prioritised for critical patches. Vulnerabilities like ZeroLogon remain a ransomware operator’s favourite tool for fast lateral movement and escalation to Domain Admin access. This is exactly what Cl0p and a dozen or so other groups use.

Relevant Sources:

1. https://ico.org.uk/media2/xdrfahsw/south-staffordshire-plc-and-south-staffordshire-water-plc-monetary-penalty-notice.pdf
2. https://therecord.media/uk-water-company-had-hackers-lurking-for-years
3. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uk-fines-water-supplier-13m-for-exposing-data-of-664k-customers/
4. https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/05/11/ico-fines-south-staffordshire-963k-over-2022-breach/5237875
5. https://www.theregister.com/security/2022/08/18/ransomware-attack-on-a-uk-water-company-clouded-by-confusion/1394557

Relevant CTI Resources

1. https://malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de/details/win.clop 
2. https://malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de/details/win.get2
3. https://malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de/details/win.sdbbot
4. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/cve-2020-1472-zerologon-security-advisory/
5. https://github.com/BushidoUK/Ransomware-Vulnerability-Matrix/blob/main/GroupProfiles/Clop.md
6. https://www.ransomware.live/group/clop

Introduction to Infrastructure Pivoting

Pivoting on infrastructure is a handy skill for cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analysts to learn. It can help to reveal the bigger picture when it comes to malware, phishing, or network exploitation campaigns. Infrastructure pivoting essentially is the act of looking for more systems an adversary has created. The main benefit of this pursuit is the identification of additional targets or victims, more tools or malware samples, and ultimately new insights about the adversary’s capabilities.

If done correctly, being able to pivot on adversary infrastructure will be very useful during incident response (IR) engagements. For example, it may lead to being able to attribute the intrusion to a known adversary. This will help others during an IR engagement understand the level of threat posed to the victim organisation.

Receiving Threat Data

To be able to pivot on adversary infrastructure, threat data is needed such as the intelligence shared by threat reports put out by various researchers from public and private sector organisations. This scenario, however, involves relying on the analysis skills of other researchers to explain what the infrastructure is and when they observed it in use.

This blog will examine threat data provided by public sector organisations such as the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) as well as cybersecurity vendors such as Deep Instinct, Cyble, and Fortinet. These organisations have shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) uncovered following analysis of adversary intrusion activities or upload to online malware sandboxes, such as VirusTotal, among others.

Introduction to the Ghostwriter Campaign

On 3 June 2024, Fortinet shared a report on malicious XLS macro documents leading to Cobalt Strike Beacons. Analysis of the XLS documents showed that they appeared to be targeting the Ukrainian military and linked to a known Belarusian state-sponsored APT group tracked as Ghostwriter (aka UNC1151, UAC-0057, TA445). On 4 June 2024, Cyble also shared a report on a similar campaign.  

In both reports, if the XLS was opened and the macros were executed by the target, a malicious DLL file was downloaded from an adversary-created domain. In Fortinet’s report, two similar “.shop” domains were mentioned. In Cyble’s report another “.shop” domain was also called out.

Overlapping IOCs

The first pivot on Ghostwriter APT infrastructure that will be demonstrated involves finding indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as domains and IP addresses that appear in multiple threat reports.

The fastest way to realize these overlaps is through continuous collection of reported IOCs into a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP). This will reveal IOCs that appear in multiple threat reports through tagging and sources of where IOCs come from. Eventually, one domain or IP address will get reported by multiple entities and the connection will make itself apparent.

In Figure 1 (see below) the domain “goudieelectric[.]shop” appeared in both Cyble’s blog and Fortinet’s blog. Analysis of all three domains found that they use the same generic top-level domain (gTLD), registrar, and name servers, as well as have a robots.txt directory configured. These common infrastructure characteristics indicate that all three domains were created by the same adversary.

Figure 1. Three similar domains appearing in two threat reports.

Domain Registration & Hosting Overlaps

When more IOCs are reported in other threat reports it is possible to link them to other known domains, this is due to adversaries reusing the same registrars, name servers, and gTLDs.

In Figure 2 (see below), Deep Instinct reported two more domains that could also be linked to the previous three domains through the mutual use of the PublicDomainsRegistry registrar, Cloudflare name servers, and the robots.txt file.

Figure 2. Five similar domains that appear across three threat reports.

Further, CERT-UA reported three more domains (see Figure 3 below) that could be linked to the infrastructure cluster through this same method as well. This pattern of behaviour is a strong indicator that these domains were created by the same adversary.

Figure 3. Eight similar domains that appear across four threat reports.

Finding Unreported Domains

Since the domains from the above threat reports were collected and linked together through overlapping attributes, it is now possible to use these attributes to find more domains that had gone unreported.

Using a VirusTotal domain attribute query, additional domains can be found by using the following registration pattern:

• Name Servers: CLOUDFLARE
• Registrar: PublicDomainRegistry
• TLD: *.shop

This revealed up to 24 domains that matched this pattern that were likely created by Ghostwriter, a state-sponsored APT group:

• backstagemerch[.]shop
• bryndonovan[.]shop
• chaptercheats[.]shop
• clairedeco[.]shop
• connecticutchildrens[.]shop
• disneyfoodblog[.]shop
• eartheclipse[.]shop
• empoweringparents[.]shop
• foampartyhats[.]shop
• goudieelectric[.]shop
• ikitas[.]shop
• jackbenimblekids[.]shop
• kingarthurbaking[.]shop
• lansdownecentre[.]shop
• lauramcinerney[.]shop
• medicalnewstoday[.]shop
• moonlightmixes[.]shop
• penandthepad[.]shop
• physio-pedia[.]shop
• semanticscholar[.]shop
• simonandschuster[.]shop
• thevegan8[.]shop
• twisterplussize[.]shop
• utahsadventurefamily[.]shop

Note: VirusTotal domain searches are only available to VirusTotal Enterprise users. There are other providers which allow you to search for domain registration patterns such as DomainTools, Validin, and Zetalytics. There also some free OSINT sites such as nslookup.io and viewdns.info that can be useful in certain scenarios.

Finding Related Malware Samples

Using the list of similar domains that were uncovered through the registration pattern search, it is then possible to find additional malware samples communicating with them.

This can be achieved by looking at domains in VirusTotal and checking the Relations tab can show communicating files as shown in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4. Additional malware samples uncovered via the VirusTotal relations tab

Using a VirusTotal graph can help to reveal every communicating file with every domain discovered through the registration pattern search, as shown in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5. All communicating files with every additional domain identified.

URL to the VirusTotal Graph: https://www.virustotal.com/graph/embed/gd2c04407d9ba4b75b2ce73d6155d166d3ef75eaf29894ff5ac287c90400072bc?theme=dark

URL to the VirusTotal Collection: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/collection/2aa6b36a717be8bc49f7925434ca40f3ecb9f628414b491da3e985677508ca08/iocs

Lessons Learned

In conclusion, it is important for CTI analysts to closer inspect the attributes of the IOCs they come across. It is not uncommon for state-sponsored APT groups to make such mistakes when creating their infrastructure to launch attacks from. By exploiting this fact, CTI analysts can learn much more about the adversary’s targets, capabilities, and the behaviours of the humans themselves behind such campaigns.

The importance of this type of work was demonstrated in December 2023 when the US Treasury sanctioned members of the Russian APT group known as Callisto (aka Star Blizzard, BlueCharlie, COLDRIVER, GOSSAMER BEAR). The real world identity of Andrey Korinets was revealed after he was sanctioned for fraudulently creating and registering malicious domain infrastructure for Russian federal security service (FSB) spear phishing campaigns.