A 152,973-message archive of the Verified forum shows how Russian-speaking cybercrime governed itself between 2005 and 2010, using rules, penalty points and bans.
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.
Quake3, a moderator on the XSS.is cybercrime forum, is the persona DEF CON 33 research placed at REvil’s source-code development, and the man the German BKA named in April 2026. We trace the forum record that ties the handles together.
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.