In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a safety researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to construct Kimwolf, the world’s largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the individual in charge of Kimwolf — who goes by the deal with “Dort” — has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and e-mail flooding assaults in opposition to the researcher and this writer, and extra lately triggered a SWAT workforce to be despatched to the researcher’s dwelling. This publish examines what’s knowable about Dort primarily based on public data.
A public “dox” created in 2020 asserted Dort was an adolescent from Canada (DOB August 2003) who used the aliases “CPacket” and “M1ce.” A search on the username CPacket on the open supply intelligence platform OSINT Industries finds a GitHub account underneath the names Dort and CPacket that was created in 2017 utilizing the e-mail tackle jay.miner232@gmail.com.
Picture: osint.industries.
The cyber intelligence agency Intel 471 says jay.miner232@gmail.com was used between 2015 and 2019 to create accounts at a number of cybercrime boards, together with Nulled (username “Uubuntuu”) and Cracked (consumer “Dorted”); Intel 471 stories that each of those accounts had been created from the identical Web tackle at Rogers Canada (99.241.112.24).
Dort was a particularly lively participant within the Microsoft recreation Minecraft who gained notoriety for his or her “Dortware” software program that helped gamers cheat. However someplace alongside the best way, Dort graduated from hacking Minecraft video games to enabling way more critical crimes.
Dort additionally used the nickname DortDev, an identification that was lively in March 2022 on the chat server for the prolific cybercrime group generally known as LAPSUS$. Dort peddled a service for registering short-term e-mail addresses, in addition to “Dortsolver,” code that would bypass numerous CAPTCHA providers designed to forestall automated account abuse. Each of those choices had been marketed in 2022 on SIM Land, a Telegram channel devoted to SIM-swapping and account takeover exercise.
The cyber intelligence agency Flashpoint listed 2022 posts on SIM Land by Dort that present this individual developed the disposable e-mail and CAPTCHA bypass providers with the assistance of one other hacker who glided by the deal with “Qoft.”
“I legit just work with Jacob,” Qoft stated in 2022 in reply to a different consumer, referring to their unique enterprise accomplice Dort. In the identical dialog, Qoft bragged that the 2 had stolen greater than $250,000 price of Microsoft Xbox Sport Cross accounts by growing a program that mass-created Sport Cross identities utilizing stolen fee card information.
Who’s the Jacob that Qoft known as their enterprise accomplice? The breach monitoring service Constella Intelligence finds the password utilized by jay.miner232@gmail.com was reused by only one different e-mail tackle: jacobbutler803@gmail.com. Recall that the 2020 dox of Dort stated their date of beginning was August 2003 (8/03).
Looking out this e-mail tackle at DomainTools.com reveals it was utilized in 2015 to register a number of Minecraft-themed domains, all assigned to a Jacob Butler in Ottawa, Canada and to the Ottawa telephone quantity 613-909-9727.
Constella Intelligence finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com was used to register an account on the hacker discussion board Nulled in 2016, in addition to the account title “M1CE” on Minecraft. Pivoting off the password utilized by their Nulled account reveals it was shared by the e-mail addresses j.a.y.m.iner232@gmail.com and jbutl3@ocdsb.ca, the latter being an tackle at a site for the Ottawa-Carelton District College Board.
Knowledge listed by the breach monitoring service Spycloud means that at one level Jacob Butler shared a pc together with his mom and a sibling, which could clarify why their e-mail accounts had been related to the password “jacobsplugs.” Neither Jacob nor any of the opposite Butler family members responded to requests for remark.
The open supply intelligence service Epieos finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com created the GitHub account “MemeClient.” In the meantime, Flashpoint listed a deleted nameless Pastebin.com publish from 2017 declaring that MemeClient was the creation of a consumer named CPacket — considered one of Dort’s early monikers.
Why is Dort so mad? On January 2, KrebsOnSecurity revealed The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Native Community, which explored analysis into the botnet by Benjamin Brundage, founding father of the proxy monitoring service Synthient. Brundage found out that the Kimwolf botmasters had been exploiting a little-known weak spot in residential proxy providers to contaminate poorly-defended gadgets — like TV packing containers and digital photograph frames — plugged into the interior, personal networks of proxy endpoints.
By the point that story went dwell, many of the susceptible proxy suppliers had been notified by Brundage and had mounted the weaknesses of their programs. That vulnerability remediation course of massively slowed Kimwolf’s potential to unfold, and inside hours of the story’s publication Dort created a Discord server in my title that started publishing private details about and violent threats in opposition to Brundage, Yours Actually, and others.
Dort and associates incriminating themselves by planning swatting assaults in a public Discord server.
Final week, Dort and associates used that very same Discord server (then named “Krebs’s Koinbase Kallers”) to threaten a swatting assault in opposition to Brundage, once more posting his dwelling tackle and private data. Brundage informed KrebsOnSecurity that native law enforcement officials subsequently visited his dwelling in response to a swatting hoax which occurred across the identical time that one other member of the server posted a door emoji and taunted Brundage additional.
Dort, utilizing the alias “Meow,” taunts Synthient founder Ben Brundage with an image of a door.
Somebody on the server then linked to a cringeworthy (and NSFW) new Soundcloud diss monitor recorded by the consumer DortDev that included a stickied message from Dort saying, “Ur dead nigga. u better watch ur fucking back. sleep with one eye open. bitch.”
“It’s a pretty hefty penny for a new front door,” the diss monitor intoned. “If his head doesn’t get blown off by SWAT officers. What’s it like not having a front door?”
With a bit of luck, Dort will quickly have the ability to inform us all precisely what it’s like.
Replace, 10:29 a.m.: Jacob Butler responded to requests for remark, talking with KrebsOnSecurity briefly through phone. Butler stated he didn’t discover earlier requests for remark as a result of he hasn’t actually been on-line since 2021, after his dwelling was swatted a number of occasions. He acknowledged making and distributing a Minecraft cheat way back, however stated he hasn’t performed the sport in years and was not concerned in Dortsolver or every other exercise attributed to the Dort nickname after 2021.
“It was a really old cheat and I don’t remember the name of it,” Butler stated of his Minecraft modification. “I’m very stressed, man. I don’t know if people are going to swat me again or what. After that, I pretty much walked away from everything, logged off and said fuck that. I don’t go online anymore. I don’t know why people would still be going after me, to be completely honest.”
When requested what he does for a residing, Butler stated he largely stays dwelling and helps his mother round the home as a result of he struggles with autism and social interplay. He maintains that somebody should have compromised a number of of his previous accounts and is impersonating him on-line as Dort.
“Someone is actually probably impersonating me, and now I’m really worried,” Butler stated. “This is making me relive everything.”
However there are points with Butler’s timeline. For instance, Jacob’s voice in our telephone dialog was remarkably just like the Jacob/Dort whose voice will be heard on this Sept. 2022 Conflict of Code competitors between Dort and one other coder (Dort misplaced). At round 6 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording, Dort launches right into a cursing tirade that mirrors the stream of profanity within the diss rap that Dortdev posted threatening Brundage. Dort will be heard once more at round 16 minutes; at round 26:00, Dort threatens to swat his opponent.
Butler stated the voice of Dort isn’t his, precisely, however reasonably that of an impersonator who had doubtless cloned his voice.
“I would like to clarify that was absolutely not me,” Butler stated. “There must be someone using a voice changer. Or something of the sorts. Because people were cloning my voice before and sending audio clips of ‘me’ saying outrageous stuff.”
