Vietnam’s Massive CAPTCHA crackers vs. Microsoft DCU

Earlier this month, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit was featured in a WIRED article by Lily Hay Newman – Microsoft’s Digital Crime Unit Goes Deep on How It Disrupts Cybercrime. In part, the article discusses MS-DCU’s case against the hackers that they call Storm-1152. According to DCU, Storm-1152 used their CAPTCHA-cracking capabilities to assist other criminals in the massive creation of Microsoft email accounts, such as Hotmail and Outlook accounts. How many? How about 750 MILLION email accounts created for illicit purposes! In their announcement about Storm-1152, DCU’s Amy Hogan-Burney calls out several of the websites run by the group, including Hotmailbox[.]me, 1stCAPTCHA[.]com, AnyCAPTCHA[.]com, and NoneCAPTCHA[.]com. (I’m not familiar with NoneCAPTCHA, but it looks like it was just a redirect domain to 1stCAPTCHA.) Amy shares that the group is based in Vietnam and names three of their operators: Duong Dinh Tu, Linh Van Nguyễn (also known as Nguyễn Van Linh), and Tai Van Nguyen.