404media.co - Infostealer data can include passwords, email and billing addresses, and the embarrassing websites you use. Farnsworth Intelligence is selling to divorce lawyers and other industries.
When your laptop is infected with infostealing malware, it’s not just hackers that might get your passwords, billing and email addresses, and a list of sites or services you’ve created accounts on, potentially including some embarrassing ones. A private intelligence company run by a young founder is now taking that hacked data from what it says are more than 50 million computers, and reselling it for profit to a wide range of different industries, including debt collectors; couples in divorce proceedings; and even companies looking to poach their rivals’ customers. Essentially, the company is presenting itself as a legitimate, legal business, but is selling the same sort of data that was previously typically sold by anonymous criminals on shady forums or underground channels.
Multiple experts 404 Media spoke to called the practice deeply unethical, and in some cases the use of that data probably illegal. The company is also selling access to a subset of the data to anyone for as little as $50, and 404 Media used it to uncover unsuspecting victims’ addresses.
The activities of the company, called Farnsworth Intelligence, show a dramatic shift in the bevvy of companies that collect and sell access to so-called open source intelligence, or OSINT. Historically, OSINT has included things like public social media profiles or flight data. Now, companies increasingly see data extracted from peoples’ personal or corporate machines and then posted online as fair game not just to use in their own investigations, but to repackage and sell too.
“To put it plainly this company is profiting off of selling stolen data, re-victimizing people who have already had their personal devices compromised and their data stolen,” Cooper Quintin, senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media. “This data will likely be used to further harm people by police using it for surveillance without a warrant, stalkers using it to gather information on their targets, high level scams, and other damaging motives.”
Infostealers are pieces of malware, often stealthily bundled in a piece of pirated software, that steal a victim’s cookies, login credentials, and often more information stored in their browser too. On its website, Farnsworth lays out several potential uses for that stolen data. This includes “skip tacing,” presumably a typo of skip tracing, which is where a private individual or company tracks someone down who owes a debt. The website says users can “find debtors up-to-date addresses.” Another use case is to “Find high impact evidence that can make/break the case of million dollar lawsuits, high value divorce cases, etc.” A third is to “generate lead lists of customers/users from competitors [sic] companies,” because the data could show which competing products they have login credentials for, and, presumably, use.
Trend™ Research uncovered a campaign on TikTok that uses videos to lure victims into downloading information stealers, a tactic that can be automated using AI tools.
Threat actors are now using TikTok videos that are potentially generated using AI-powered tools to socially engineer users into executing PowerShell commands under the guise of guiding them to activate legitimate software or unlock premium features. This campaign highlights how attackers are ready to weaponize whichever social media platforms are currently popular to distribute malware.
This report details the observed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), indicators of compromise (IoCs), and the potential impact of this trend.
Just days after reporting on the Samsung Tickets data breach, another massive leak has surfaced, this time targeting Royal Mail Group, a British institution with over 500 years of history.
On April 2, 2025, a threat actor known as “GHNA” posted on BreachForums, announcing the release of 144GB of data stolen from Royal Mail Group. The breach, once again facilitated through Spectos, a third-party service provider, exposes personally identifiable information (PII) of customers, confidential documents, internal Zoom meeting video recordings, delivery location datasets, a WordPress SQL database for mailagents.uk, Mailchimp mailing lists, and more.
Inexpensive information-stealing malware surged in 2024, infecting 23 million hosts, according to Flashpoint.
Following detections from our Managed Threat Detection (CyberSOC) teams, our CERT analysts were able to uncover several recent campaigns leading to CryptBot and Lumma infostealers.
Some of these campaigns are still active and target various organizations worldwide.
These campaigns leverage a little-documented loader we dubbed “Emmenhtal”, (because we are cheese lovers), which hides in the padding of a modified legitimate Windows binary and uses HTA.
Emmenhtal likely surfaced at the beginning of 2024 and is possibly being distributed by several financially motivated threat actors through various means (from traditional email phishing lures to fake videos).
IoCs can be found on our dedicated GitHub page here.
Note: The analysis cut-off date for this report was August 07, 2024.
Learn about the latest threats to macOS as Infostealers continue to rapidly adapt to evade static signatures.
Plus furtive et discrète que les cyberattaques avec rançongiciel, la menace des maliciels dérobeurs se maintient à un niveau élevé. Panorama de la menace en collaboration avec Sekoia.io.
