Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
When a big cybersecurity threat emerges, the people in charge of taking it down are the engineers and network operators who keep the internet running.
I think of them as wizards, the wizards of the internet.
That's our colleague Bob McMillan, who covers cybersecurity. And he says that over the last year, the wizards of the internet faced something at a scale they had never encountered before. It was called KimWolf.
Kim Wolf. Kim Wolf. A fast-growing botnet called Kim Wolf.
One of the most extreme botnet operations ever observed.
What makes Kim Wolf different is how it spreads.
Quietly hijacking nearly 2 million Android devices across the globe. The scale alone is staggering.
What the internet wizards saw was a somewhat familiar threat, a network of bots engaging in distributed denial of service attacks.
So DDoS attacks are basically when you get a bunch of computers and they flood another computer with just like junk data, like, hey, could you send me this webpage? And that junk data eventually slows down the computer to the point where it doesn't work. They sort of flood the zone with internet traffic and then the target doesn't work anymore.
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Chapter 2: How did Kim Wolf become one of the biggest cyber threats?
How would your friends describe you?
I think it probably ranges, but I think maybe hardworking, passionate, sometimes lazy too, I guess. A mix of things for sure.
Who isn't? When we spoke, Ben was in a white T-shirt, which set off his bright red hair. He grew up in Washington State. His parents work in tech, but as a kid, he never caught the bug for computers. Instead, Ben preferred hiking and skiing rather than staring at screens. But that changed when Ben was 16 years old in 2020.
You know, I was playing a lot of online video games for like way too long, especially during like COVID. And I started to kind of find like Minecraft super interesting.
Minecraft. The open world game where players use pixelated blocks to build whatever they want, mine in caves, and yes, fight exploding enemies called creepers. But what Ben found most interesting was the code behind the game.
You can build stuff in Minecraft with this programming language and add on functionality that you normally wouldn't get. And so to me, that was like super cool and kind of drove, I think, a lot of that initial interest where, you know, I'd stay up super late, like watching Java tutorials. How do you build a Minecraft mod?
Ben discovered godlike powers in Minecraft, using code to create entirely new plants and creatures.
And so it was kind of like, I think to me, like largely like, wow, like, you know, there's so much imagination that I can kind of just put it into this real world. It's a really, I don't know how to describe the feeling, but really rewarding feeling where you can take your ideas and you can, you know, see them in fruition. To me, that was super cool.
Ben didn't just find creative ways to modify the game. He also found ways to cheat.
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Chapter 3: What role did Benjamin Brundage play in addressing the cyber threat?
What kinds of apps or devices?
One place you need to be wary in is if you're downloading an app or buying a device that's going to let you watch content for free that you're supposed to be paying for, there's a decent chance that's going to put you on a residential proxy network. Like that's a very common way. Yeah, nothing is truly free. Yeah, yeah. There's a reason why you're getting something that seems too good to be true.
Other devices, like internet connected appliances, can come with ResProxy malware pre-installed.
It was like a crazy thing to start to realize that a lot of these IP addresses are, in fact, unethically obtained.
Between classes, Ben Brundage used his free time to learn everything he could about residential proxies.
To me, it was just like, oh, I feel like there's something more here. Like, it was just, you know, I feel like people should talk about it more. It seems interesting. There's a whole world here that people rarely touch on.
So from his dorm room, Ben started exploring that shady world. But what Ben didn't realize was that underneath that world, there lived a monster. That's after the break. After he got interested in residential proxies, Ben decided to analyze the IP addresses that made up their networks. He started keeping track of the suspicious IP addresses in a list, information he thought could be valuable.
By August of last year, Ben had created his own one-man company called Synthiant. But as he cataloged IP addresses, Ben noticed something stranger still. The websites for a lot of the res proxy providers were eerily similar.
I was like, OK, these are exactly the same, right? They have a cookie cutter website where checkout flow is the same. The website user interface is the same. The only thing that's different is like the brand name and, you know, the color palette may be different.
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Chapter 4: How did Ben's early experiences with gaming influence his skills?
The cat meme worked. It lightened the mood. And the hacker started sharing more details with Ben.
He was able to obtain all these compromised devices using an unknown method, right? And like these things stood out to me at the time because it was like, huh, I wonder what's actually going on here. The hacker also told them that the operation was huge. He told me that they were spending like $30,000 a month on infrastructure. Like, that was an insane amount of money.
He also told me, he's like, this isn't some rinky-dink operation, right? And there was another comment which was like, don't investigate us, essentially, right? And I think all three of those comments were like, okay, that's kind of... You know, suspicious, something way bigger is going on here.
The something way bigger was Kim Wolf. Ben had stumbled onto a dangerous botnet that had been launching massive DDoS attacks designed to knock websites offline with floods of junk data. One attack was so large that it was as if everyone in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom had gone to the same website at the exact same second. Cybersecurity experts had been studying this botnet for months.
One of those experts was an engineer at a networking company called Lumen. So not to be confused with the company from the show Severance, right?
Not to be confused with that, yes. Although it did increase our popularity.
At Lumen, Chris Formosa had been researching the threat that residential proxy networks could pose to internet infrastructure. And a lot of his work focused on one res proxy company in particular, IP Idea. That's where the botnet attacks seem to be coming from.
The main thing we were interested in, how do we deal with this giant botnet? We were seeing it was growing at kind of an unchecked pace. And a botnet of that scale can do a lot of extreme damage. So one of the challenges we were facing is we didn't know how they were gathering these victims.
But something didn't add up. While residential proxies enable plenty of crimes, companies like IP Idea generally discourage DDoS attacks like the one Kim Wolf was engaging in. That's because when devices participate in DDoS attacks, their IP addresses generally get blacklisted by websites across the internet, making them useless. That's bad business if you're trying to rent out IP addresses.
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