On May 7, 2025, the LockBit admin panel was hacked by an anonymous actor who replaced their TOR website with the text ‘Don’t do crime CRIME IS BAD xoxo from Prague’ and shared a SQL dump of their admin panel database in an archived file ‘paneldb_dump.zip’:
There is not much information available regarding the individual identified as 'xoxo from Prague' whose objective seems to be the apprehension of malicious ransomware threat actors. It is uncommon for a major ransomware organization's website to be defaced; more so for its administrative panel to be compromised. This leaked SQL database dump is significant as it offers insight into the operational methods of LockBit affiliates and the negotiation tactics they employ to secure ransom payments from their victims.
Trellix Advanced Research Center’s investigations into the leaked SQL database confirmed with high confidence that the database originates from LockBit's affiliates admin panel. This panel allows the generation of ransomware builds for victims, utilizing LockBit Black 4.0 and LockBit Green 4.0, compatible with Linux, Windows and ESXi systems, and provides access to victim negotiation chats.
The leaked SQL database dump encompasses data from December 18, 2024 to April 29, 2025, including details pertaining to LockBit adverts (aka ransomware affiliates), victim organizations, chat logs, cryptocurrency wallets and ransomware build configurations.
After ignoring the advice from my friend, I bought a new ASUS motherboard for my PC. I was a little concerned about having a BIOS that would by default silently install software into my OS in the background. But it could be turned off so I figured I would just do that.
DriverHub is an interesting piece of driver software because it doesn’t have any GUI. Instead it’s just a background process that communicates with the website driverhub.asus.com and tells you what drivers to install for your system and which ones need updating. Naturally I wanted to know more about how this website knew what drivers my system needed and how it was installing them, so I cracked open the Firefox network tab.
As I expected, the website uses RPC to talk to the background process running on my system. This is where the background process hosts an HTTP or Websocket service locally which a website or service can connect to by sending an API request to 127.0.0.1 on a predefined port, in this case 53000.
Right about now my elite hacker senses started tingling.
