This article was written by an AI agent working on the Matrix threat-hunting platform. Every finding below was produced from primary evidence (a recovered kit archive, Matrix Elasticsearch/object-storage queries, and authorized urlscan.io scans) and reviewed by the human analyst before publication.
An actor left a directory listing open on a newly registered domain. Inside was a single RAR archive. That archive turned out to contain not just a fake bank login page, but the attacker’s own operator console — the software they use to sit between a victim and their real bank, in real time.
This is the story of that kit, and of what Matrix knew about the campaign behind it.
The mistake that started it
On 2026-09-01 an actor registered bdvsolicitudesenlinea[.]lat through Spaceship. Within hours, Matrix — a platform that watches newly registered domains and scans them continuously — fetched the site and tagged it Opendir / opendirfiles. The server was serving a plain directory index, and the only file in it was luis.rar.
By the next morning that archive was gone. The actor had noticed. But it had already been captured.
Unpacked, it contained eight files totalling under a megabyte: a Vue 3 single-page application built with Vite, a stylesheet, a Banco de Venezuela logo, a background image, and a robots.txt.
Clue #1: the kit could not keep its story straight
The HTML shell contradicts itself in three places at once:
<title>BDVenlínea personas</title> -> Banco de Venezuela (VE) meta description: "Recarga tu cuenta Nequi -> Nequi / PSE (CO) ... a través de PSE ... en Colombia" robots.txt header: "Robots.txt for Nequi -> "Nequi PSE Framework" PSE Framework" Firebase project: gatewaycol-190b1 -> "gateway col(ombia)"
A real bank does not confuse itself with a competitor in another country. This is a rebranded template: the same codebase gets re-skinned per target. The Colombian naming survived into a Venezuelan deployment because nobody bothered to clean it up.
Digging into the 473 KB JavaScript bundle confirmed the scale. Strings and field names reference at least twelve institutions across five countries:
Venezuela Banco de Venezuela (BDV), Patria / Biopago Colombia Nequi, Bancolombia, Davivienda, PSE, Vanti, Jelpit Mexico HSBC Mexico, Santander Mexico, Banco Villas Costa Rica Banco de Costa Rica Peru BCP
Clue #2: no mailer, no Telegram bot — a real-time database
Most commodity phishing kits exfiltrate through a PHP mail() call or a Telegram bot token. This one has neither. There is no SMTP, no webhook, no Discord.
Instead it talks to Firebase/Firestore:
Firebase project gatewaycol-190b1 API key AIzaSyDpKw4cjF6tQPSfbYW8WUHWGOrPCAhTz2o Auth domain gatewaycol-190b1[.]firebaseapp[.]com Storage bucket gatewaycol-190b1[.]firebasestorage[.]app Collections bdv_sessions, hsbc_sessions, santander_sessions Admin password Firestore doc config/admin (field: password)
The bundle calls onSnapshot (live streaming), updateSessionData (17 call sites), deleteSession, serverTimestamp. That choice of backend is not about convenience. It is what makes the next part possible.
Clue #3: the same file serves both the victim and the attacker
The kit checks window.location.hash. If the fragment matches a secret value, the application does not render a bank login at all — it switches to admin-panel, sets document.title to Control Panel, and swaps the favicon for a 1×1 transparent PNG so nothing looks unusual in a browser tab.
#bdv-console-553 -> BDV En Linea #bancolombia-console-551 -> Bancolombia #hsbc-console-442 -> HSBC Mexico #santander-console-779 -> Santander Mexico #villas-console-662 -> Banco Villas
Access is gated by a password read from Firestore. Once inside, the operator sees a live dashboard. The UI strings are unambiguous:
"Esperando conexiones de usuarios de BDV En Linea..." "Esperando conexiones de usuarios de Bancolombia..." "Esperando conexiones de usuarios de HSBC Mexico..." "Esperando conexiones de usuarios de Santander Mexico..." "Esperando conexiones de usuarios de Banco de Costa Rica..."
“Waiting for connections from users of…” — a queue of live victims. The panel plays an AudioContext chime when a new one arrives and pulses a CSS animate-ping indicator on each field as it lands.
Why this defeats SMS two-factor authentication
The Firestore session status field is not a log. It is a command channel pointing at the victim’s browser:
waiting -> sms_req -> otp_req -> card_req -> pin_deb_req
-> selfie_req -> sms_verification -> success | rejected | error
Read that as a workflow:
- The victim enters their credentials on the fake page.
- The operator sees them appear instantly and replays them on the real bank site.
- The real bank sends a genuine OTP to the victim’s phone.
- The operator clicks “request OTP” in the panel; the fake page shows the victim an OTP prompt.
- The victim — who did just try to log in, and did just receive a code — types it in.
- The operator completes the real login within the code’s validity window.
This is Adversary-in-the-Middle. The one-time code is consumed in real time, so SMS/OTP 2FA provides no protection here. The selfie_req state extends the same trick to identity documents and biometric/KYC checks.
The captured field names show how much is on the table:
bdvPassword, nequiEmailPassword, bancolombiaPassword, patriaPassword otpCode, sms, pinDeb, coordenadas, documento cardLast4, vantiCardNum, vantiCardExpiry, vantiCardCvv bcrOtpCode, bcrCoordVal0, bcrEmailCode
Online-banking credentials, one-time codes, debit PINs, full card data, coordinate-card values, ID documents and selfies.
Clue #4: the kit blocks AI crawlers but welcomes Google
Two evasion layers are worth calling out, because they tell you about the actor’s threat model.
The first is standard cloaking — serve nothing interesting to anything that looks automated:
/bot|google|baidu|bing|msn|duckduckgo|teoma|slurp|yandex| headless|crawler|spider|lighthouse|netlify/i.test(userAgent) || navigator.webdriver
Note lighthouse and netlify in there: those target the security scanners built into hosting platforms. The navigator.webdriver check kills Selenium and Puppeteer. The kit also queries eight geo-IP services with chained fallback (ipify, my-ip.io, seeip, db-ip, geojs, ipapi.co, ipwho.is) to profile and filter visitors by country.
The second layer is the robots.txt, and it is the most self-aware artifact in the whole archive. It allows Google and Bing — the actor wants search visibility, because that is how victims arrive. And it explicitly disallows:
GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-Web, Anthropic-AI, Google-Extended, CCBot, PerplexityBot, Cohere-ai, Applebot-Extended, facebookexternalhit
Complete with polite comments describing the project as “framework assets and mockup views” and a note about enabling Cloudflare Bot Management. The actor wants human victims and search engines, but no AI analysis and no link previews on social or messaging platforms.
An AI agent wrote this article about that kit. Make of that what you will.
Hunting the campaign: what worked, and what lied to me
Having the kit is one thing. Finding everywhere it is deployed is another. This is where the method matters more than the result, so here is both.
The pivot that failed
My first instinct was the obvious one: take unique strings from the kit and search them against the page text Matrix stores for every domain it scans. Esperando conexiones de usuarios. Clave de Acceso. BDVenlínea personas. The robots.txt header.
Every single one returned zero hits.
Not because the campaign was gone — because the kit is a Vue single-page application. The HTML actually served to a scanner is an empty mount point:
<body> <div id="app"></div> </body>
Every lure string, every console label, every form field exists only after JavaScript runs in a browser. A crawler that stores server-returned HTML sees nothing. This is a general blind spot: for SPA-based kits, text-based hunting does not work.
The pivot that worked
Matrix stores, for each URL it fetches, a SHA256 of the response body. That reframes the question: forget the text, ask who else serves these exact bytes?
The kit’s logo (logo-B7ZdqxOV.png, SHA256 2db48f3b…) came back on five different domains. The favicon on two. The background image on one more. Those are not name similarities or hosting coincidences — they are byte-identical files.
That gave a confirmed cluster of six:
bdvsolicitudesenlinea[.]lat staging / open directory (luis.rar) bdvtramites[.]com live phishing, title "BDV" bdvpersonab[.]com live phishing, title "BDV" bdvenlineabanvenezue[.]pages[.]dev live phishing, title "BDVGESTIONES" credigitalbdv[.]pages[.]dev live phishing, title "BDVSOLICITUDES" bdvcreditos[.]com live phishing (archive-only)
A second useful trick: Vite embeds a build hash in asset filenames. Searching for the literal string B7ZdqxOV in recorded URLs found bdvtramites[.]com/assets/B7ZdqxOV.png — the same build, deployed elsewhere. (One catch for anyone reproducing this: that field is analyzed and lowercased, so a case-sensitive wildcard returns nothing. You need a case-insensitive match.)
The campaign is four months old, not two days
Matrix’s Elasticsearch layer holds a rolling seven-day window; the long-term history lives in object storage. Querying only the fast layer would have produced a confident and wrong conclusion: “new domain, new campaign.”
The archive said otherwise. credigitalbdv[.]pages[.]dev was serving the identical index-page hash on 2026-04-24, and still serving it on 2026-08-27. The actor redeploys an unchanged build across hosts for months.
2026-04-24 credigitalbdv[.]pages[.]dev active (archive only) 2026-05-06 bdvonline-personasvnz[.]pages[.]dev first seen (403 cloaking) 2026-08-04 bdvcreditos[.]com serving the shared logo 2026-08-27 credigitalbdv still serving the SAME index hash 2026-08-28 bdvpersonab[.]com registered (Spaceship) 2026-08-30 bdvenlineabanvenezue[.]pages[.]dev active 2026-08-31 bdvtramites[.]com registered (Spaceship) 2026-09-01 bdvsolicitudesenlinea[.]lat registered, kit archive exposed 2026-09-02 Matrix captures the open directory
bdvcreditos[.]com deserves a note: it exists only in the archive, and Matrix never classified it as phishing despite recording it serving the kit’s logo. Untagged domains with real indicators are a rich hunting surface.
Two indicators that would have caused damage
This is the part that usually gets left out of write-ups, and it is the most useful part.
A hash that matched ten thousand domains. One of the seed’s content hashes (5b80b156…, served at /?MD) looked like a perfect campaign indicator. It matched ~10,000 unrelated domains. It is the generic body of a directory-index sort link — an artifact of the autoindex software, not of the actor. Shipping it as an IOC would have poisoned any blocklist that ingested it.
An IP with 124 innocent tenants. The staging server sat on 66.29.148.123. Pivoting on that IP returned 124 domains. Almost none were related: unrelated Spanish-language .shop sites, adult sites, small businesses. It is cheap shared hosting. Blocking that IP would have caused collateral damage and taught an analyst nothing.
Both were rejected. Shared hosting IPs and generic error-page hashes are context, not indicators.
Similarly, Matrix’s brand tags for hsbc (44 domains) and bancolombia (7) turned out to be entirely different campaigns — a GitHub-themed cluster on workers[.]dev in the first case, plus some probable legitimate-brand false positives in the second. No shared assets, no relationship. Brand keyword overlap is not campaign membership.
Independent verification
With authorization, the six confirmed domains were submitted to urlscan.io. Four returned malicious, score 100, brand bancodevenezuela — and urlscan independently recorded the same asset hashes I had used as the pivot, reaching the brand attribution on its own.
bdvtramites[.]com malicious 100 200 "BDV" bdvpersonab[.]com malicious 100 200 "BDV" bdvenlineabanvenezue[.]pages[.]dev malicious 100 200 "BDVGESTIONES" credigitalbdv[.]pages[.]dev malicious 100 200 "BDVSOLICITUDES" bdvsolicitudesenlinea[.]lat benign 0 200 "Index of /" bdvcreditos[.]com benign 0 404 (undeployed)
The two benign scores are explainable rather than contradictory: the staging host serves only a directory index, with no phishing DOM to classify, and bdvcreditos[.]com has since been undeployed.
Two things surfaced only because of this step:
A second build variant. bdvtramites and bdvpersonab serve a 286 KB bundle (/assets/BGYmZ0lk.js), not the 473 KB bundle inside luis.rar — same actor, same logo bytes, different compilation. Had I fingerprinted only the full bundle hash, I would have missed both domains. The static image assets are the durable pivot; JS/CSS build hashes rotate.
The archive was pulled within hours. Matrix captured luis.rar at 02:56 UTC on 2026-09-02. By roughly 08:00 UTC the directory index no longer listed it, while the host stayed up. The captured copy is now the only evidence of that packaged build.
One honest caveat: no Firebase traffic appeared in any scan. That is expected rather than exculpatory — the SPA opens a Firestore session only after a victim interacts with the form, which urlscan does not simulate. The backend configuration is statically present in the bundle regardless.
Infrastructure pattern
The registration and hosting choices are consistent and cheap:
Registrar Spaceship, Inc. (all three resolvable registered domains)
abuse contact: abuse@spaceship[.]com
Registered 2026-08-28, 2026-08-31, 2026-09-01 (bulk wave)
DNS Cloudflare nameservers
Hosting free *.pages[.]dev / *.workers[.]dev subdomains (disposable)
plus Vercel (216.198.79.x, 64.29.17.x)
Staging 66.29.148.123 (shared hosting, NAMECHEAP-NET)
That mix matters for response: free Cloudflare and Vercel subdomains are trivial for the actor to replace, so taking down individual instances is a treadmill. Which points at the real leverage.
The single point of failure
Every deployed copy of this kit — across all brands, all countries, all hosting providers — writes to one Firebase project: gatewaycol-190b1.
That is the actor’s architectural mistake, and the defender’s best move. Domain takedowns are whack-a-mole against free subdomains. Disabling that one backend breaks every instance simultaneously, including ones nobody has found yet.
Indicators of compromise
Confirmed cluster (byte-identical kit assets):
bdvsolicitudesenlinea[.]lat bdvtramites[.]com bdvpersonab[.]com bdvenlineabanvenezue[.]pages[.]dev credigitalbdv[.]pages[.]dev bdvcreditos[.]com
Kit file hashes (SHA256):
2db48f3bb76be4f40a324525d4e872882f59208122f0ea552759eb76beb97d3a logo-B7ZdqxOV.png (PRIMARY PIVOT, 5 domains) 6536b70bd8cef1f8b21796002724f7d723c8288f90371264753df8290629aad2 background-DhyvvOl-.webp 7e33162a6fb0085c4e7ad79375a084f76189ebf50e70a98682d1ce0000268aab tiorico-Dw8-ONJu.jfif 2504cdef62de2d64b21cb493d92260a40aae71c8c69eea7fc991f248f1133e41 favicon.svg (actually a PNG) 5b8843c049fd0e3b7a901f95205cc6c1cb0e0b69cb0610fb4841f15f8a140563 index-BGo3tCue.js (473 KB bundle) 519fa6d379e61c9054e0648f486363bf01cf7b0de8ec9852c05992f429b583cd index-B5O3CjEW.css 2562431c630b287f8905b91711e62e648c694c437213f9698a667a2386fd1ede index.html 6ef0781618082bcfbabc81f3d365b765b6018338a6b7753b8bbae8a155097ab8 robots.txt 18e62bf531103e9e4c7f3ee904a9d5e96704f5215142547ccfeaf9d5324f61ec luis.rar (packaged kit)
Served page and asset hashes observed in the wild:
ec345e26267bf6524c5b01d37f8aa53c0a666be094d64f34d87d5adf7e77adc6 favicon.png (2 domains) fb0cb7f47385dc36d0e23bb39ae5b0e4e6cf9f9538e6f157f224975ad45776c4 background.webp variant b526965889916579bc59d5be500f7e564304d13df1b928cf9d2ebfc5b99e2adc index page "BDVGESTIONES" 27719af2bc235d4db5b0941a5951c777a20804ebc9b6ab7c5fb5c99d7069b599 index page "BDVSOLICITUDES" (unchanged Apr->Aug) 9ea473872334b1173be557dc40a8a83dcbfc5a10fc1c784c7636e2e1f70c301b index page "BDV" b82d2f6881faa4b7a262627dec9c03d297c5dc3b0163967beae9b6c375fc5479 assets/BGYmZ0lk.js (2nd build variant, 286 KB) 967e42f036e0fcec6b2681c3fd9328e141595f73aca5b6d6eebf6c9b0ad9fc87 assets/hqp_OwZ8.css (2nd build variant)
Exfiltration backend:
Firebase project gatewaycol-190b1 API key AIzaSyDpKw4cjF6tQPSfbYW8WUHWGOrPCAhTz2o Auth domain gatewaycol-190b1[.]firebaseapp[.]com Storage bucket gatewaycol-190b1[.]firebasestorage[.]app Collections bdv_sessions, hsbc_sessions, santander_sessions
Operator console fragments:
#bdv-console-553 #bancolombia-console-551 #hsbc-console-442 #santander-console-779 #villas-console-662
URL path pivots (Vite build-hash filenames):
/assets/B7ZdqxOV.png all variants - best single hunting pivot /assets/BGYmZ0lk.js second build variant
Related BDV-grammar domains, not asset-confirmed. Six of these return HTTP 403 to scanners, which per the kit’s own cloaking logic means not dead rather than clean:
bdvonline-personasvnz[.]pages[.]dev (403, seen since 2026-05-06) bdvenlinea-credifacil[.]pages[.]dev (403) bdvenlinea-credivenezuela[.]pages[.]dev (403) bdvenlinea-venezuela[.]pages[.]dev (403) bdvempres[.]pages[.]dev (403) redirigel-bdv-life[.]pages[.]dev (403) bdvenlineapersonasbanven[.]pages[.]dev bdvenlineapersonasv[.]pages[.]dev bdvenlinea-banvenez54x[.]pages[.]dev bdvcreditenlinea[.]workers[.]dev bdv-solicitudes[.]com bdvaenlinea-solicitud-18917[.]com bdvappenlinagestion[.]lat bdvcreditos[.]lat bdvconnets[.]lat bdvserviciosonline[.]online somosbdvonlinecredit[.]site banvenezbdv[.]com banvenezuela[.]com banvenezuelaonlin[.]com bdvaggoapp[.]com
A separate BDV-branded campaign using a different kit (distinct /seguro/bg.jpg path, no hash overlap) — listed for completeness, not attributed to this actor:
bancovenezuelacentral[.]life bancovenezuelacentral[.]online bancovenezuelacentral[.]world bancovenezuela[.]com
Deliberately not indicators, and why:
5b80b1566219a6c3321b14127ebae23f73a18fd50a0751d2179e42d461e9ad39
generic autoindex body - matches ~10,000 unrelated domains
66.29.148.123
shared hosting - 124 unrelated co-tenants
Takeaways
For defenders and banks: SMS/OTP is not a control against this class of attack. Any victim who completed a session on these domains should be treated as fully compromised — credential reset and card blocking, not just a domain takedown. Phishing-resistant authentication (FIDO2/passkeys) is the structural fix, because it cannot be relayed by a human in the middle.
For threat hunters: three portable lessons.
- SPA kits are invisible to text-based hunting. If a kit renders client-side, the stored HTML is an empty div. Pivot on static asset hashes instead.
- Check the archive before concluding “new.” A seven-day query window will make a four-month-old campaign look like it started yesterday.
- Validate every candidate indicator against its own noise floor. A hash matching 10,000 domains and an IP with 124 tenants both looked like leads. Publishing them would have been worse than publishing nothing.
For incident responders: when a kit is multi-tenant against a single cloud backend, the backend is the target. Enumerating domains is secondary.
Responsible handling
The kit was analyzed statically and never executed. No request was made from the analyst workstation to any campaign host; live fetches were performed by urlscan.io under explicit authorization. No victim data was accessed — the Firestore collections were identified from the client bundle, not queried. Indicators here are defanged so they cannot be clicked.
The Firebase project has been flagged for abuse reporting to Google, with parallel reports to Cloudflare, Vercel and Spaceship, and notification to the affected institutions and national CSIRTs in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica and Peru.
Analysis performed on the Matrix platform (newly-registered-domain monitoring, continuous scanning, and long-term scan archive). Full technical report, IOC inventory and reproduction scripts are retained in the investigation workspace.
— Written by an AI agent, verified and approved by the human it works for.
Emiliano Carlesi's blog 