An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the “Bundeskriminalamt” or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian — 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk — extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage.

Germany’s BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion — charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data.

Shchukin’s name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang’s activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency.

The GandCrab ransomware affiliate program first surfaced in January 2018, and paid enterprising hackers huge shares of the profits just for hacking into user accounts at major corporations. The GandCrab team would then try to expand that access, often siphoning vast amounts of sensitive and internal documents in the process. The malware’s curators shipped five major revisions to the GandCrab code, each corresponding with sneaky new features and bug fixes aimed at thwarting the efforts of computer security firms to stymie the spread of the malware.

On May 31, 2019, the GandCrab team announced the group was shutting down after extorting more than $2 billion from victims. “We are a living proof that you can do evil and get off scot-free,” GandCrab’s farewell address famously quipped. “We have proved that one can make a lifetime of money in one year. We have proved that you can become number one by general admission, not in your own conceit.”

The REvil ransomware affiliate program materialized around the same as GandCrab’s demise, fronted by a user named UNKNOWN who announced on a Russian cybercrime forum that he’d deposited $1 million in the forum’s escrow to show he meant business. By this time, many cybersecurity experts had concluded REvil was little more than a reorganization of GandCrab.

UNKNOWN also gave an interview to Dmitry Smilyanets, a former malicious hacker hired by Recorded Future, wherein UNKNOWN described a rags-to-riches tale unencumbered by ethics and morals.

“As a child, I scrounged through the trash heaps and smoked cigarette butts,” UNKNOWN told Recorded Future. “I walked 10 km one way to the school. I wore the same clothes for six months. In my youth, in a communal apartment, I didn’t eat for two or even three days. Now I am a millionaire.”

As described in The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, UNKNOWN and REvil reinvested significant earnings into improving their success and mirroring practices of legitimate businesses. The authors wrote:

“Just as a real-world manufacturer might hire other companies to handle logistics or web design, ransomware developers increasingly outsourced tasks beyond their purview, focusing instead on improving the quality of their ransomware. The higher quality ransomware—which, in many cases, the Hunting Team could not break—resulted in more and higher pay-outs from victims. The monumental payments enabled gangs to reinvest in their enterprises. They hired more specialists, and their success accelerated.”

“Criminals raced to join the booming ransomware economy. Underworld ancillary service providers sprouted or pivoted from other criminal work to meet developers’ demand for customized support. Partnering with gangs like GandCrab, ‘cryptor’ providers ensured ransomware could not be detected by standard anti-malware scanners. ‘Initial access brokerages’ specialized in stealing credentials and finding vulnerabilities in target networks, selling that access to ransomware operators and affiliates. Bitcoin “tumblers” offered discounts to gangs that used them as a preferred vendor for laundering ransom payments. Some contractors were open to working with any gang, while others entered exclusive partnerships.”

REvil would evolve into a feared “big-game-hunting” machine capable of extracting hefty extortion payments from victims, largely going after organizations with more than $100 million in annual revenues and fat new cyber insurance policies that were known to pay out.

Over the July 4, 2021 weekend in the United States, REvil hacked into and extorted Kaseya, a company that handled IT operations for more than 1,500 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. The FBI would later announce they’d infiltrated the ransomware group’s servers prior to the Kaseya hack but couldn’t tip their hand at the time. REvil never recovered from that core compromise, or from the FBI’s release of a free decryption key for REvil victims who couldn’t or didn’t pay.

Shchukin is from Krasnodar, Russia and is thought to reside there, the BKA said.

“Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia,” the BKA advised. “Travel behaviour cannot be ruled out.”

There is little that connects Shchukin to UNKNOWN’s various accounts on the Russian crime forums. But a review of the Russian crime forums indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows there is plenty connecting Shchukin to a hacker identity called “Ger0in” who operated large botnets and sold “installs” — allowing other cybercriminals to rapidly deploy malware of their choice to thousands of PCs in one go. However, Ger0in was only active between 2010 and 2011, well before UNKNOWN’s appearance as the REvil front man.

A review of the mugshots released by the BKA at the image comparison site Pimeyes found a match on this birthday celebration from 2023, which features a young man named Daniel wearing the same fancy watch as in the BKA photos.

Update, April 6, 12:06 p.m. ET: A reader forwarded this English-dubbed audio recording from a ccc.de (37C3) conference talk in Germany from 2023 that previously outed Shchukin as the REvil leader (Shchuckin is mentioned at around 24:25).

Tycoon 2FA, a major phishing kit and platform that allowed low-skilled cybercriminals to bypass multifactor authentication and conduct large-scale adversary-in-the-middle attacks, was dismantled Wednesday by a global coalition of security companies and law enforcement agencies.

Microsoft, which led the effort alongside Europol and authorities from six countries and 11 security firms or organizations, said it seized 330 domains that powered Tycoon 2FA’s core infrastructure, including control panels and fraudulent login pages.

The platform, which emerged in August 2023, was responsible for tens of millions of phishing messages that reached more than 500,000 organizations globally each month, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence. Thousands of cybercriminals used Tycoon 2FA to break into email and online services, including Microsoft 365, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and Google services.

“By mid‑2025, Tycoon 2FA accounted for approximately 62% of all phishing attempts Microsoft blocked, including more than 30 million emails in a single month. That placed Tycoon 2FA among the largest phishing operations globally,” Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said in a blog post about the takedown. 

“Despite extensive defenses, the service is linked to an estimated 96,000 distinct phishing victims worldwide since 2023, including more than 55,000 Microsoft customers,” Masada added. 

The phishing kit, which was developed and advertised by a group Microsoft tracks as Storm-1747, was sold to cybercriminals on Telegram and Signal for $350 a month. The platform provided core components for phishing on a single dashboard that allowed cybercriminals to configure, track and refine their campaigns.

The platform also provided cybercriminals with pre-built templates, attachment files for common phishing lures, domain and hosting configuration and redirect logic, Microsoft said. The monthly volume of phishing messages attributed to Tycoon 2FA peaked at more than 30 million messages in November 2025.

Organizations in education and health care were hit hardest by phishing attacks enabled by Tycoon 2FA. More than 100 members of Health-ISAC, a co-plaintiff in the court case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, were successfully phished, Masada said. 

Two hospitals, six schools and three universities in New York confronted attempts or successful compromises via Tycoon 2FA, resulting in incidents that disrupted operations, diverted resources and delayed patient care, he added. 

Microsoft and Health-ISAC filed a civil complaint against alleged creator Saad Fridi and four unnamed associates, demanding a $10 million injunction, for developing, running and selling Tycoon 2FA. The court order allowed Microsoft to dismantle and take ownership of Tycoon 2FA’s technical infrastructure.

Authorities from Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom assisted with the operation alongside Cloudflare, Coinbase, Crowell & Moring, eSentire, Intel 471, Proofpoint, Resecurity, Shadowserver, SpyCloud and Trend Micro. 

Selena Larson, staff threat researcher at Proofpoint who provided a formal declaration in support of the court order, said Tycoon 2FA was responsible for the highest volume of adversary-in-the-middle phishing attacks observed by Proofpoint. 

“Tycoon was the biggest MFA phishing threat in our data, and we anticipate seeing a significant decrease after this operation,” she told CyberScoop.

“Many customers will find their hacking tool is no longer working, and even if Tycoon 2FA is able to create new domains and infrastructure, the brand will be significantly harmed, with customers either purchasing less effective phishing kit, or potentially rethinking their life choices and getting out of the game,” Larson added.

Tycoon 2FA’s easy-to-use and robust capabilities contributed to its popularity, researchers said. The platform’s codebase was updated regularly and operators generated a high volume of subdomains for brief periods before abandoning them and moving on to new domains.

Researchers said the rapid turnover and shifts to temporary infrastructure complicated efforts to detect and block new campaigns.

The Tycoon 2FA takedown follows a recent wave of cybercrime crackdowns, including actions against Racoon0365 and the Lumma Stealer infostealer operation, which infected about 10 million systems.

The post Global coalition dismantles Tycoon 2FA phishing kit appeared first on CyberScoop.

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to build Kimwolf, the world’s largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf — who goes by the handle “Dort” — has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this author, and more recently caused a SWAT team to be sent to the researcher’s home. This post examines what is knowable about Dort based on public information.

A public “dox” created in 2020 asserted Dort was a teenager from Canada (DOB August 2003) who used the aliases “CPacket” and “M1ce.” A search on the username CPacket at the open source intelligence platform OSINT Industries finds a GitHub account under the names Dort and CPacket that was created in 2017 using the email address jay.miner232@gmail.com.

The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says jay.miner232@gmail.com was used between 2015 and 2019 to create accounts at multiple cybercrime forums, including Nulled (username “Uubuntuu”) and Cracked (user “Dorted”); Intel 471 reports that both of these accounts were created from the same Internet address at Rogers Canada (99.241.112.24).

Dort was an extremely active player in the Microsoft game Minecraft who gained notoriety for their “Dortware” software that helped players cheat. But somewhere along the way, Dort graduated from hacking Minecraft games to enabling far more serious crimes.

Dort also used the nickname DortDev, an identity that was active in March 2022 on the chat server for the prolific cybercrime group known as LAPSUS$. Dort peddled a service for registering temporary email addresses, as well as “Dortsolver,” code that could bypass various CAPTCHA services designed to prevent automated account abuse. Both of these offerings were advertised in 2022 on SIM Land, a Telegram channel dedicated to SIM-swapping and account takeover activity.

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint indexed 2022 posts on SIM Land by Dort that show this person developed the disposable email and CAPTCHA bypass services with the help of another hacker who went by the handle “Qoft.”

“I legit just work with Jacob,” Qoft said in 2022 in reply to another user, referring to their exclusive business partner Dort. In the same conversation, Qoft bragged that the two had stolen more than $250,000 worth of Microsoft Xbox Game Pass accounts by developing a program that mass-created Game Pass identities using stolen payment card data.

Who is the Jacob that Qoft referred to as their business partner? The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds the password used by jay.miner232@gmail.com was reused by just one other email address: jacobbutler803@gmail.com. Recall that the 2020 dox of Dort said their date of birth was August 2003 (8/03).

Searching this email address at DomainTools.com reveals it was used in 2015 to register several Minecraft-themed domains, all assigned to a Jacob Butler in Ottawa, Canada and to the Ottawa phone number 613-909-9727.

Constella Intelligence finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com was used to register an account on the hacker forum Nulled in 2016, as well as the account name “M1CE” on Minecraft. Pivoting off the password used by their Nulled account shows it was shared by the email addresses j.a.y.m.iner232@gmail.com and jbutl3@ocdsb.ca, the latter being an address at a domain for the Ottawa-Carelton District School Board.

Data indexed by the breach tracking service Spycloud suggests that at one point Jacob Butler shared a computer with his mother and a sibling, which might explain why their email accounts were connected to the password “jacobsplugs.” Neither Jacob nor any of the other Butler household members responded to requests for comment.

The open source intelligence service Epieos finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com created the GitHub account “MemeClient.” Meanwhile, Flashpoint indexed a deleted anonymous Pastebin.com post from 2017 declaring that MemeClient was the creation of a user named CPacket — one of Dort’s early monikers.

Why is Dort so mad? On January 2, KrebsOnSecurity published The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network, which explored research into the botnet by Benjamin Brundage, founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient. Brundage figured out that the Kimwolf botmasters were exploiting a little-known weakness in residential proxy services to infect poorly-defended devices — like TV boxes and digital photo frames — plugged into the internal, private networks of proxy endpoints.

By the time that story went live, most of the vulnerable proxy providers had been notified by Brundage and had fixed the weaknesses in their systems. That vulnerability remediation process massively slowed Kimwolf’s ability to spread, and within hours of the story’s publication Dort created a Discord server in my name that began publishing personal information about and violent threats against Brundage, Yours Truly, and others.

Last week, Dort and friends used that same Discord server (then named “Krebs’s Koinbase Kallers”) to threaten a swatting attack against Brundage, again posting his home address and personal information. Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that local police officers subsequently visited his home in response to a swatting hoax which occurred around the same time that another member of the server posted a door emoji and taunted Brundage further.

Someone on the server then linked to a cringeworthy (and NSFW) new Soundcloud diss track recorded by the user DortDev that included a stickied message from Dort saying, “Ur dead nigga. u better watch ur fucking back. sleep with one eye open. bitch.”

“It’s a pretty hefty penny for a new front door,” the diss track intoned. “If his head doesn’t get blown off by SWAT officers. What’s it like not having a front door?”

With any luck, Dort will soon be able to tell us all exactly what it’s like.

Update, 10:29 a.m.: Jacob Butler responded to requests for comment, speaking with KrebsOnSecurity briefly via telephone. Butler said he didn’t notice earlier requests for comment because he hasn’t really been online since 2021, after his home was swatted multiple times. He acknowledged making and distributing a Minecraft cheat long ago, but said he hasn’t played the game in years and was not involved in Dortsolver or any other activity attributed to the Dort nickname after 2021.

“It was a really old cheat and I don’t remember the name of it,” Butler said of his Minecraft modification. “I’m very stressed, man. I don’t know if people are going to swat me again or what. After that, I pretty much walked away from everything, logged off and said fuck that. I don’t go online anymore. I don’t know why people would still be going after me, to be completely honest.”

When asked what he does for a living, Butler said he mostly stays home and helps his mom around the house because he struggles with autism and social interaction. He maintains that someone must have compromised one or more of his old accounts and is impersonating him online as Dort.

“Someone is actually probably impersonating me, and now I’m really worried,” Butler said. “This is making me relive everything.”

But there are issues with Butler’s timeline. For example, Jacob’s voice in our phone conversation was remarkably similar to the Jacob/Dort whose voice can be heard in this Sept. 2022 Clash of Code competition between Dort and another coder (Dort lost). At around 6 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording, Dort launches into a cursing tirade that mirrors the stream of profanity in the diss rap that Dortdev posted threatening Brundage. Dort can be heard again at around 16 minutes; at around 26:00, Dort threatens to swat his opponent.

Butler said the voice of Dort is not his, exactly, but rather that of an impersonator who had likely cloned his voice.

“I would like to clarify that was absolutely not me,” Butler said. “There must be someone using a voice changer. Or something of the sorts. Because people were cloning my voice before and sending audio clips of ‘me’ saying outrageous stuff.”

Further reading:

Jan. 8, 2026: Who Benefited from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?

Jan. 20, 2026: Kimwolf Botnet Lurking in Corporate, Govt. Networks

Jan. 26, 2026: Who Operates the Badbox 2.0 Botnet?

Feb. 11, 2026: Kimwolf Botnet Swamps Anonymity Network I2P

Mar. 19, 2026: Feds Disrupt IoT Botnets Behind Huge DDoS Attacks

The cybersecurity community on Reddit responded in disbelief this month when a self-described Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance began questioning the arrangement they’d made with company called DSLRoot, which was paying $250 a month to plug a pair of laptops into the Redditor’s high-speed Internet connection in the United States. This post examines the history and provenance of DSLRoot, one of the oldest “residential proxy” networks with origins in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The query about DSLRoot came from a Reddit user “Sacapoopie,” who did not respond to questions. This user has since deleted the original question from their post, although some of their replies to other Reddit cybersecurity enthusiasts remain in the thread. The original post was indexed here by archive.is, and it began with a question:

“I have been getting paid 250$ a month by a residential IP network provider named DSL root to host devices in my home,” Sacapoopie wrote. “They are on a separate network than what we use for personal use. They have dedicated DSL connections (one per host) to the ISP that provides the DSL coverage. My family used Starlink. Is this stupid for me to do? They just sit there and I get paid for it. The company pays the internet bill too.”

Many Redditors said they assumed Sacapoopie’s post was a joke, and that nobody with a cybersecurity background and top-secret (TS/SCI) clearance would agree to let some shady residential proxy company introduce hardware into their network. Other readers pointed to a slew of posts from Sacapoopie in the Cybersecurity subreddit over the past two years about their work on cybersecurity for the Air National Guard.

When pressed for more details by fellow Redditors, Sacapoopie described the equipment supplied by DSLRoot as “just two laptops hardwired into a modem, which then goes to a dsl port in the wall.”

“When I open the computer, it looks like [they] have some sort of custom application that runs and spawns several cmd prompts,” the Redditor explained. “All I can infer from what I see in them is they are making connections.”

When asked how they became acquainted with DSLRoot, Sacapoopie told another user they discovered the company and reached out after viewing an advertisement on a social media platform.

“This was probably 5-6 years ago,” Sacapoopie wrote. “Since then I just communicate with a technician from that company and I help trouble shoot connectivity issues when they arise.”

Reached for comment, DSLRoot said its brand has been unfairly maligned thanks to that Reddit discussion. The unsigned email said DSLRoot is fully transparent about its goals and operations, adding that it operates under full consent from its “regional agents,” the company’s term for U.S. residents like Sacapoopie.

“As although we support honest journalism, we’re against of all kinds of ‘low rank/misleading Yellow Journalism’ done for the sake of cheap hype,” DSLRoot wrote in reply. “It’s obvious to us that whoever is doing this, is either lacking a proper understanding of the subject or doing it intentionally to gain exposure by misleading those who lack proper understanding,” DSLRoot wrote in answer to questions about the company’s intentions.

“We monitor our clients and prohibit any illegal activity associated with our residential proxies,” DSLRoot continued. “We honestly didn’t know that the guy who made the Reddit post was a military guy. Be it an African-American granny trying to pay her rent or a white kid trying to get through college, as long as they can provide an Internet line or host phones for us — we’re good.”

WHAT IS DSLROOT?

DSLRoot is sold as a residential proxy service on the forum BlackHatWorld under the name DSLRoot and GlobalSolutions. The company is based in the Bahamas and was formed in 2012. The service is advertised to people who are not in the United States but who want to seem like they are. DSLRoot pays people in the United States to run the company’s hardware and software — including 5G mobile devices — and in return it rents those IP addresses as dedicated proxies to customers anywhere in the world — priced at $190 per month for unrestricted access to all locations.

The GlobalSolutions account on BlackHatWorld lists a Telegram account and a WhatsApp number in Mexico. DSLRoot’s profile on the marketing agency digitalpoint.com from 2010 shows their previous username on the forum was “Incorptoday.” GlobalSolutions user accounts at bitcointalk[.]org and roclub[.]com include the email clickdesk@instantvirtualcreditcards[.]com.

Passive DNS records from DomainTools.com show instantvirtualcreditcards[.]com shared a host back then — 208.85.1.164 — with just a handful of domains, including dslroot[.]com, regacard[.]com, 4groot[.]com, residential-ip[.]com, 4gemperor[.]com, ip-teleport[.]com, proxysource[.]net and proxyrental[.]net.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 finds GlobalSolutions registered on BlackHatWorld in 2016 using the email address prepaidsolutions@yahoo.com. This user shared that their birthday is March 7, 1984.

Several negative reviews about DSLRoot on the forums noted that the service was operated by a BlackHatWorld user calling himself “USProxyKing.” Indeed, Intel 471 shows this user told fellow forum members in 2013 to contact him at the Skype username “dslroot.”

USProxyKing had a reputation for spamming the forums with ads for his residential proxy service, and he ran a “pay-per-install” program where he paid affiliates a small commission each time one of their websites resulted in the installation of his unspecified “adware” programs — presumably a program that turned host PCs into proxies. On the other end of the business, USProxyKing sold that pay-per-install access to others wishing to distribute questionable software — at $1 per installation.

Private messages indexed by Intel 471 show USProxyKing also raised money from nearly 20 different BlackHatWorld members who were promised shareholder positions in a new business that would offer robocalling services capable of placing 2,000 calls per minute.

Constella Intelligence, a platform that tracks data exposed in breaches, finds that same IP address GlobalSolutions used to register at BlackHatWorld was also used to create accounts at a handful of sites, including a GlobalSolutions user account at WebHostingTalk that supplied the email address incorptoday@gmail.com. Also registered to incorptoday@gmail.com are the domains dslbay[.]com, dslhub[.]net, localsim[.]com, rdslpro[.]com, virtualcards[.]biz/cc, and virtualvisa[.]cc.

Recall that DSLRoot’s profile on digitalpoint.com was previously named Incorptoday. DomainTools says incorptoday@gmail.com is associated with almost two dozen domains going back to 2008, including incorptoday[.]com, a website that offers to incorporate businesses in several states, including Delaware, Florida and Nevada, for prices ranging from $450 to $550.

As we can see in this archived copy of the site from 2013, IncorpToday also offered a premiere service for $750 that would allow the customer’s new company to have a retail checking account, with no questions asked.

Global Solutions is able to provide access to the U.S. banking system by offering customers prepaid cards that can be loaded with a variety of virtual payment instruments that were popular in Russian-speaking countries at the time, including WebMoney. The cards are limited to $500 balances, but non-Westerners can use them to anonymously pay for goods and services at a variety of Western companies. Cardnow[.]ru, another domain registered to incorptoday@gmail.com, demonstrates this in action.

WHO IS ANDREI HOLAS?

The oldest domain (2008) registered to incorptoday@gmail.com is andrei[.]me; another is called andreigolos[.]com. DomainTools says these and other domains registered to that email address include the registrant name Andrei Holas, from Huntsville, Ala.

Public records indicate Andrei Holas has lived with his brother — Aliaksandr Holas — at two different addresses in Alabama. Those records state that Andrei Holas’ birthday is in March 1984, and that his brother is slightly younger. The younger brother did not respond to a request for comment.

Andrei Holas maintained an account on the Russian social network Vkontakte under the email address ryzhik777@gmail.com, an address that shows up in numerous records hacked and leaked from Russian government entities over the past few years.

Those records indicate Andrei Holas and his brother are from Belarus and have maintained an address in Moscow for some time (that address is roughly three blocks away from the main headquarters of the Russian FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB). Hacked Russian banking records show Andrei Holas’ birthday is March 7, 1984 — the same birth date listed by GlobalSolutions on BlackHatWorld.

A 2010 post by ryzhik777@gmail.com at the Russian-language forum Ulitka explains that the poster was having trouble getting his B1/B2 visa to visit his brother in the United States, even though he’d previously been approved for two separate guest visas and a student visa. It remains unclear if one, both, or neither of the Holas brothers still lives in the United States. Andrei explained in 2010 that his brother was an American citizen.

LEGAL BOTNETS

We can all wag our fingers at military personnel who should undoubtedly know better than to install Internet hardware from strangers, but in truth there is an endless supply of U.S. residents who will resell their Internet connection if it means they can make a few bucks out of it. And these days, there are plenty of residential proxy providers who will make it worth your while.

Traditionally, residential proxy networks have been constructed using malicious software that quietly turns infected systems into traffic relays that are then sold in shadowy online forums. Most often, this malware gets bundled with popular cracked software and video files that are uploaded to file-sharing networks and that secretly turn the host device into a traffic relay. In fact, USPRoxyKing bragged that he routinely achieved thousands of installs per week via this method alone.

There are a number of residential proxy networks that entice users to monetize their unused bandwidth (inviting you to violate the terms of service of your ISP in the process); others, like DSLRoot, act as a communal VPN, and by using the service you gain access to the connections of other proxies (users) by default, but you also agree to share your connection with others.

Indeed, Intel 471’s archives show the GlobalSolutions and DSLRoot accounts routinely received private messages from forum users who were college students or young people trying to make ends meet. Those messages show that many of DSLRoot’s “regional agents” often sought commissions to refer friends interested in reselling their home Internet connections (DSLRoot would offer to cover the monthly cost of the agent’s home Internet connection).

But in an era when North Korean hackers are relentlessly posing as Western IT workers by paying people to host laptop farms in the United States, letting strangers run laptops, mobile devices or any other hardware on your network seems like an awfully risky move regardless of your station in life. As several Redditors pointed out in Sacapoopie’s thread, an Arizona woman was sentenced in July 2025 to 102 months in prison for hosting a laptop farm that helped North Korean hackers secure jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies, including Fortune 500 firms.

Lloyd Davies is the founder of Infrawatch, a London-based security startup that tracks residential proxy networks. Davies said he reverse engineered the software that powers DSLRoot’s proxy service, and found it phones home to the aforementioned domain proxysource[.]net, which sells a service that promises to “get your ads live in multiple cities without getting banned, flagged or ghosted” (presumably a reference to CraigsList ads).

Davies said he found the DSLRoot installer had capabilities to remotely control residential networking equipment across multiple vendor brands.

“The software employs vendor-specific exploits and hardcoded administrative credentials, suggesting DSLRoot pre-configures equipment before deployment,” Davies wrote in an analysis published today. He said the software performs WiFi network enumeration to identify nearby wireless networks, thereby “potentially expanding targeting capabilities beyond the primary internet connection.”

It’s unclear exactly when the USProxyKing was usurped from his throne, but DSLRoot and its proxy offerings are not what they used to be. Davies said the entire DSLRoot network now has fewer than 300 nodes nationwide, mostly systems on DSL providers like CenturyLink and Frontier.

On Aug. 17, GlobalSolutions posted to BlackHatWorld saying, “We’re restructuring our business model by downgrading to ‘DSL only’ lines (no mobile or cable).” Asked via email about the changes, DSLRoot blamed the decline in his customers on the proliferation of residential proxy services.

“These days it has become almost impossible to compete in this niche as everyone is selling residential proxies and many companies want you to install a piece of software on your phone or desktop so they can resell your residential IPs on a much larger scale,” DSLRoot explained. “So-called ‘legal botnets’ as we see them.”