No arrest yet but the good news is that the US and Europe have, via the FBI and Europol’s European Cybercrime Center, dismantled on Wednesday a network of as many as 12,000 computers that cyber-criminals used to elude security firms and law enforcement agencies for some years. Check out the video clip and Bloomberg article below.
Meanwhile, recall yesterday’s blog on data breach and the 22 countries where stolen data were most frequently accessed.
Police Shut Europe Computer Network Enabling Theft, Extortion
by Cornelius RahnChris Strohm
European and U.S. police shut down a computer network on Wednesday used by cybercriminals to facilitate the theft of banking passwords and extortion which had eluded security companies and law enforcement for years.
Agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the European Cybercrime Center seized servers across Europe that had been responsible for spreading malware on thousands of mainly U.S.-based victim computers, said Raj Samani, chief technology officer for Intel Corp.’s security unit in the region, which helped prepare the takedown.
Governments are responding to increasing frequency and impact of online attacks by setting up dedicated cybercrime units and working with security-software companies to weed out threats before more damage is done. The network functioned as a portal offered by criminals to others seeking to spread their own malware, according to Paul Gillen, head of operations at Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre.
“If that carried on in earnest, it had great potential from a criminal perspective,” Gillen said. “People set up infrastructure like that and rent it out to others, saying ‘here are a lot of infected computers so you can upload all your banking malware or other things on them.’”
FBI and Europol said there had been no arrests yet as it was too early to say who the perpetrators were, or what damage the malware had caused. Police will now sift through the data gained from the seized machines before notifying victims and determining the culprits, according to Gillen.
The malicious code, labeled W32/Worm-AAEH, was first detected in 2009 but was difficult to weed out because it changed its shape as many as six times a day, Intel’s Samani said. The worm had evolved capabilities such as shutting down connections with servers from antivirus companies and disabling tools that could terminate it, he said.
Even after the control servers are no longer available to the criminals to morph existing pieces of malware, users must still clean up their machines. Computer owners can stop the software’s core function by setting rules that prevent new software from running automatically and shutting certain ports, Intel said.