Teenagers Arrested for Involvement in Huge Cyber Crime Forum

The PCeU (Police Central e-crime Unit) of Britain announced on June 23, 2010 that 2 teenagers had been taken into custody on suspicion that they participated in the world's biggest English-language forum for cyber-crime.

The eight months probe by PCeU revealed that there were sub forums to the mentioned criminal forum where around 8,000 malicious hackers bought and sold stolen information of bank accounts, phished passwords, and PIN numbers. The hackers also gave out botnets on rent used for DDoS attacks as well as openly supplied data for sale that were captured with the insidious Zeus malware.

To cite an example, cyber criminals rented botnets comprising of 10,000 zombies for executing DDoS attacks at the cost of $200/day.

Furthermore, the probe disclosed that 65,000 credit card details had been recovered from the cyber crook forum, entailing the industry a massive £7.9 Million in loss.

Additionally, the investigators revealed that crooks associated with the malicious online forum interacted on it anonymously with the help of screen nicknames. The forum site had a managerial set-up where an administrator created and controlled the site, enabling him to permit or forbid members and change their forum status altogether.

The forum offered tutorials regarding the methods for committing cyber crimes, including eluding and defeating efforts of law enforcement, the investigators stated. The arrest of the teenagers was based on the suspicion that they assisted or encouraged crime, made illegal access within the purview of Computer Misuse Act as well as connived to commit scam. However, they are now tentatively on bail.

Talking about the arrests, Detective Terry Wilson, Chief Inspector of Metropolitan Police Service PCeU, said that they demonstrated the agency efforts to fight Internet crime and mitigating damage to Britain's public and economy, as reported by Theregister on June 24, 2010.

Commending the PCeU on their latest job, Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant, Sophos, said that the authorities should be appreciated because of their investigations into the illegal forums, and of foiling the fraudsters' activities on time, as reported by Sophos on June 24, 2010.

Related article: Teenager Proved Guilty of Hacking Swedish Universities’ Computers

» SPAMfighter News - 7/2/2010