Fifty Hackers Arrested in Russia during One Biggest Cyber-Crime Raid

Russian agencies carrying out one joint operation against cyber crime recently led to 50 people's arrest belonging to a gang on suspicion that they stole 1.7bn Roubles (18m pounds; $25m) from a theft orchestrated on financial institutions and banks within the country.

The bust of the hackers was of a scale that never happened before and the country's Ministry of Interior in coordination with partners such as Kaspersky Lab the security company and FSB (Federal Security Service) stated that a further benefit of the operation was that another theft of 2.3bn Roubles was prevented because outstanding money transfers were stopped.

Those arrested participated in an overall eighteen assaults by the gang against state agencies and financial entities in Russia during 2015 employing malware for invading PCs, says Russia's Interior Ministry.

As per Kaspersky Lab, cyber crime in Russia has a notorious linkage to online assaults against financial institutions worldwide, like the Carbanak gang which pilfered around $1bn out of banks within thirty nations. Darkreading.com posted this dated June 2, 2016.

The current cyber crime was waged for grabbing login credentials for accessing Internet banking A/Cs. The most notable target was on accounts existing within a biggest Russian bank namely Sberbank.

According to investigation chief of computer attacks, Ruslan Stoyanov at Kaspersky Lab, the gang called Lurk began its bank heists 18 months back prior to which its malware attacked different consumer and business computers.

The criminals used the data which their Trojan collected for pilfering funds out of bank accounts. Although Sberbank was the sole name authorities mentioned within their press statement, nevertheless, they stated other institutions of finance too were attacked.

Kaspersky explains the gang utilized hijacked Wi-Fi connection nodes, VPNs and Tor while infiltrated servers so they could conceal their actual Internet Protocol address during attacks on organizations. The servers sometimes were of different telecom and information technology firms of Russia.

The group crafted e-mails with the help of Buhtrap while making those e-mails look as arriving from industrial syndicates which authorize accounting staff and banks. This was done for duping people into clicking the malicious electronic mails.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/8/2016