Vinny Troia | |
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| Occupation | Researcher |
| Years active | 2018-present |
| Organizations |
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| Known for | Cyber security |
| Website | vinnytroia.com |
Vincenzo "Vinny" Troia is an American cybersecurity researcher who is known for reporting on and identifying members of The Dark Overlord hacker group as well as hacker pompompurin, who was the owner-operator of the website BreachForums and was involved in the 2021 FBI email hacking.
Troia serves as owner and CEO of Night Lion Security, a cyber-security firm based in the US, and founded a threat intelligence firm named Shadowbyte. [1]
In 2018, Troia found a data leak of nearly 340 million detailed records about individual people available on a publicly accessible server of Exactis. [2] [3]
In 2019, he found a data breach in People Data Labs where records of personal data, including email addresses, employers, locations, job titles, names, phone numbers and social media profiles of 1.2 billion people were exposed. [4] [5]
In July 2020, one of Troia's own websites, Data Viper, was hacked. The site contained over 8,200 databases from data breaches. [6] [7] [8]
In August 2020, Troia wrote a report on the underground cybercrime economy built on the stealing of reselling of video game passwords. [9] The white paper outlines the process by which hackers make money by stealing and reselling Fortnite video game cosmetics, some making nearly a million dollars per year. [10]
In November 2021 the founder of the Dark Web data sharing forum BreachForums publicly harassed Troia by emailing 100,000 people from the FBI's servers. Vinny claimed that they had previously performed a DDoS attack one of Troia's websites and also hacked the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's blog to create a fake blog post about him. [11] [12] [13] [14]
Troia is the author of the book "Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker’s Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques" (Wiley Books), which illustrates various investigative tools and techniques used to track down and investigate cybercriminals using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering tools and techniques. [15] The book provides a detailed account of Troia's investigation into cyber criminal hacking group The Dark Overlord. [16]
Troia's book provides evidence and analysis to support claims that the masterminds behind The Dark Overlord cybercrime group are two teenagers living in Calgary, Canada. Evidence provided in the book, as well as a subsequent report published by Troia and Night Lion Security, link the members of The Dark Overlord hacking group to other "database focused" hacking groups such as ShinyHunters and GnosticPlayers, along with people such as Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, also known as pompompurin, who owned BreachForums. [17]
Troia's doctoral thesis, "The Cybersecurity Framework as an Effective Information Security Baseline: A Qualitative Exploration" was published in 2018 by Capella University. [18]
Computer security is the protection of computer software, systems and networks from threats that can lead to unauthorized information disclosure, theft or damage to hardware, software, or data, as well as from the disruption or misdirection of the services they provide.
Cybercrime encompasses a wide range of criminal activities that are carried out using digital devices and/or networks. These crimes involve the use of technology to commit fraud, identity theft, data breaches, computer viruses, scams, and expanded upon in other malicious acts. Cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems and networks to gain unauthorized access, steal sensitive information, disrupt services, and cause financial or reputational harm to individuals, organizations, and governments.
The Internet has a long history of turbulent relations, major maliciously designed disruptions, and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.
A supply chain attack is a cyber-attack that seeks to damage an organization by targeting less secure elements in the supply chain. A supply chain attack can occur in any industry, from the financial sector, oil industry, to a government sector. A supply chain attack can happen in software or hardware. Cybercriminals typically tamper with the manufacturing or distribution of a product by installing malware or hardware-based spying components. Symantec's 2019 Internet Security Threat Report states that supply chain attacks increased by 78 percent in 2018.
Trellix is a privately held cybersecurity company that was founded in 2022. It has been involved in the detection and prevention of major cybersecurity attacks. It provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.
Trustwave is an American cybersecurity subsidiary of The Chertoff Group. It focuses on providing managed detection and response (MDR), managed security services (MSS), database security, and email security to organizations around the globe.
TheRealDeal was a darknet website and a part of the cyber-arms industry reported to be selling code and zero-day software exploits.
The Lazarus Group is a hacker group made up of an unknown number of individuals, alleged to be run by the government of North Korea. While not much is known about the Lazarus Group, researchers have attributed many cyberattacks to them since 2010. Originally a criminal group, the group has now been designated as an advanced persistent threat due to intended nature, threat, and wide array of methods used when conducting an operation. Names given by cybersecurity organizations include Hidden Cobra and ZINC or Diamond Sleet. According to North Korean defector Kim Kuk-song, the unit is internally known in North Korea as 414 Liaison Office.
In 2013 and 2014, the American web services company Yahoo was subjected to two of the largest data breaches on record. Although Yahoo was aware, neither breach was revealed publicly until September 2016.
A medical device hijack is a type of cyber attack. The weakness they target are the medical devices of a hospital. This was covered extensively in the press in 2015 and in 2016.
Exactis LLC is a data broker established in 2015 and based in the U.S state of Florida. The firm reportedly handles business and consumer data in an effort to refine targeted advertising.
The Dark Overlord is an international hacker organization which garnered significant publicity through cybercrime extortion of high-profile targets and public demands for ransom to prevent the release of confidential or potentially embarrassing documents.
GnosticPlayers is a computer hacking group, which is believed to have been formed in 2019 and gained notability for hacking Zynga, Canva, and several other online services.
REvil was a Russia-based or Russian-speaking private ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation. After an attack, REvil would threaten to publish the information on their page Happy Blog unless the ransom was received. In a high profile case, REvil attacked a supplier of the tech giant Apple and stole confidential schematics of their upcoming products. In January 2022, the Russian Federal Security Service said they had dismantled REvil and charged several of its members.
In 2020, a major cyberattack suspected to have been committed by a group backed by the Russian government penetrated thousands of organizations globally including multiple parts of the United States federal government, leading to a series of data breaches. The cyberattack and data breach were reported to be among the worst cyber-espionage incidents ever suffered by the U.S., due to the sensitivity and high profile of the targets and the long duration in which the hackers had access. Within days of its discovery, at least 200 organizations around the world had been reported to be affected by the attack, and some of these may also have suffered data breaches. Affected organizations worldwide included NATO, the U.K. government, the European Parliament, Microsoft and others.
ShinyHunters is a black-hat criminal hacker group that is believed to have formed in 2020 and is said to have been involved in numerous data breaches. The stolen information is often sold on the dark web.
On November 13, 2021, a hacker named Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, going by his alias "Pompompurin", compromised the FBI's external email system, sending thousands of messages warning of a cyberattack by cybersecurity CEO Vinny Troia who was falsely suggested to have been identified as part of The Dark Overlord hacking group by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Verifications.io is a defunct email-focused technology firm whose primary practice was to validate email addresses for email marketing platforms. The company's platform allowed for email marketing firms to submit lists to the company, which would verify the lists for valid email addresses.
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