TypoSquatting, GRU & More
I’m going to throw a few things into this one.
I did get an opportunity to join Hans for a pretty good chat on Tuesday night with Matt Taibbi and Tom Fitton joining us and we got into Russiagate a bit. You can listen to that below:
I also wanted to talk a bit about the live email chain between TrustCor, researchers, and some Tech Companies, it’s quite interesting and I’ve connected to Joel Reardon a couple times now.
For those who may not remember, TrustCor and Measurement Systems LLC are companies who’ve been found to be surreptitiously harvesting data on users, selling that data to the US government, and their corporate registrations are in Panama. They also share corporate ownership with Packet Forensics and Vostrom Holdings, which we know are owned by Rodney Joffe, Raymond Saulino and Victor Oppleman.
I visited Vostrom Holdings in the summer, I’ll re-share that experience soon.
The first thing I want to discuss is the typo-squatting that Joel notes:
To answer one question, it’s worth noting that Wylie Swanson worked for Rodney Joffe’s Genuity during the mid 1990’s. I’m not clear on whether Limelight, another company Wylie worked for, is also tied to Joffe but it comes as no surprise that Wylie came back into the picture as Co-Founder of TrustCor.
The lightbulb went off in my head on this typo squatting, because we saw some of that during the “alleged” Russian hacking efforts of 2016. In this article, they noted:
This is the angle I want to go with this for now, they based much of their attribution for the DNC hack on “methods” being similar to known GRU activity.
But now we see that companies tied to Rodney Joffe were doing the exact same thing. Should we stand on our chairs and point and scream “GRU! GRU!”
There are dozens of news articles associating typo squatting with Fancy Bear and the big bad Russians being behind hacks. Meanwhile, the more substantive evidence has been withheld from us.
One thing the group does not seem to know is that the extremely suspect audit firm, Princeton Audit Group, who audited TrustCor, had its accounting license suspended (probably not related to this story). The auditor/owner, had his license suspended (and it’s since been reinstated). Very unusual to see a tiny audit practice like this, it’s a big red flag.
I don’t have enough time to cover all the Joffe/Saulino/Oppleman companies tonight, that’s probably going to be a podcast episode. Many of them appear to be shell companies.
The quantity of corporate entities, the registrations to homes or UPS locations, the companies co-locating with other entities they already had set up and were doing similar work at, and the Panamanian registrations are huge red flags for me. If this was another story, I would’ve said money laundering (and I did speculate a bit about a year ago, and we have a major question on transfers made from the Vatican to Neustar).
These guys have massive government contracts. They have extensive ties to the intelligence community and law enforcement entities.
Is all the obfuscation really necessary just for that? Or….is this the dirty side of our intelligence operations? Are they moving money off the books so-to-speak?
Apps collecting data at Measurement Systems appear targeted for Islamic nations. That would seem to suggest that perhaps it’d fall in the CIA’s purview, either by tasking or some negotiated incentive.
Amongst the shell companies, there are varying degrees of operations. In talking to Reardon, he noted some of these websites in a blog last spring [and there are more].
Take a look through some of these at your own risk, I don’t know the intention of some of the sites. Consilio is the name of a legitimate and large law firm, but the links here go to pretty bland law firm websites and it doesn’t look like a company in operation. It becomes interesting that it shares the name of a legitimate law firm. It looks like a serviceable website which can be helpful in a laundering operation, but another red flag, especially for a law firm is that no individuals are described on the website. No partner biographies, nothing but stock images. Inconspicuously, a legal page linked to at the very bottom disclaims that, this is not a law firm.
On the Contact page, the address appears to be for a UPS location (remember that was a signature we flagged above), not an office location. And this location matches an address used on paperwork for Packet Forensics.
The live email chain also notes Saulino and ties to holding companies called Frigate Bay Holdings LLC and Chivalric Holding Company LLC. I’ve come across Frigate Bay at some point, I just can’t place it.
We still need to discuss Global Resource Systems, Lola Office Services, Martin Jannol, and so many other companies and individuals tied to this group.
There’s something big here.
Someone needs to hire Rachel McPherson of Trustcor. She jumped fearlessly into the dog fight. The pack overwhelmed her, but she damn sure fought back.