Operation First VPN: Analyzing the Infrastructure Takedown
Just saw the news about the 'First VPN' dismantling. France and the Netherlands, backed by several other nations, took down a major criminal VPN infrastructure that was catering to at least 25 ransomware groups. It wasn't just for ransomware either; they were facilitating data theft, scanning, and DoS attacks.
What's interesting here is that this wasn't a standard CVE patch scenario. The threat was in the infrastructure itself—a service marketed specifically to cybercriminals to obscure their origins. Since the takedown happened recently, we should be hunting for any historical traffic to these IPs in our logs, specifically looking for lateral movement or data exfiltration patterns that might have previously been whitelisted as 'VPN traffic'.
If you want to check your environment for any historical interaction with their infrastructure (assuming IOCs are published soon), here is a basic KQL query template to start hunting for high-volume connections to suspicious IP ranges:
DeviceNetworkEvents
| where ActionType == "ConnectionAccepted"
| where RemoteIP has_any (dynamic(['', '']))
| summarize Count=count(), BytesSent=sum(SentBytes), BytesReceived=sum(ReceivedBytes) by DeviceName, RemoteIP, RemotePort
| where Count > 1000
This query looks for devices making frequent connections to specific IPs, which is typical for C2 beaconing or VPN tunnel maintenance.
Since this service was operational since December, the dwell time for some compromised machines could be significant. How is everyone planning to handle the IOC scrub for this? Are you just blocking the domains/IPs, or are you doing a full retrospective hunt on your NetFlow data?
Good call on the retrospective hunt. We're currently parsing our Zeek logs to see if any of our remote offices, which often use commercial VPNs, accidentally hit any of these ranges. It's a nightmare trying to distinguish between malicious VPN traffic and legit remote worker traffic without proper context. We're using this simple grep to pull potential hits from our archived Suricata logs first:
zgrep -i "FirstVPN" /var/log/suricata/fast.log* > /tmp/vpn_hits.txt
Still waiting for the full IOCs to be dropped by the authorities though.
This takedown reminds me of the 'IPStorm' operation. It disrupts the attackers' op-sec, but they usually scatter to residential proxy services or compromised SOHO routers almost immediately. From a red team perspective, we often see a shift toward tools like ligolo-ng or chisel over standard VPN protocols because they blend in better with HTTP/S traffic. I'd recommend focusing detection on protocol anomalies rather than just IP blocklists.
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