5socks.net sold access to hacked residential IPs from 2004 until the FBI seized it in May 2025. Dancho Danchev traces the service back to its Russian origins.
Dancho Danchev
Dancho Danchev
Dancho Danchev is a Bulgarian threat intelligence researcher who has spent more than two decades tracking cybercrime, malware campaigns, and the infrastructure behind the criminal underground. His research covers botnets, including Koobface, exploit kits, blackhat SEO, scareware, and large-scale domain abuse, with a focus on OSINT work that maps campaigns back to the operators running them. He has published through ZDNet Zero Day, Webroot, GroupSense, and WhoisXML API, and has run his own cybercrime research blog since the early 2000s.