Authorities seized computers and servers in the United States and seven other countries this week as part of an ongoing investigation of a hacking gang that stole $72 million by tricking people into buying fake anti-virus products. Police in Ukraine said the thieves fleeced unsuspecting consumers with the help of the infamous Conficker worm, although it remains unclear how big a role the fast-spreading worm played in this crime.
The FBI has scrubbed some 19,000 PCs that were infected with the Coreflood bot malware, the agency told a federal court this week. The effort is part of an ongoing and unprecedented legal campaign to tackle one of the longest-running and most menacing online crime machines ever built.
In April, the Justice Department and the FBI were granted unprecedented authority to seize control over a criminal botnet that enslaved millions of computers and to use that power to disable the malicious software on infected PCs. On April 11, 2011, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut was granted authority to seize 29 domain names used to control the daily operations of the botnet, and to redirect traffic destined for the control servers to a substitute server that the FBI controlled. More significantly, the FBI was awarded a temporary restraining order (TRO) allowing it to send individual PCs infected with Coreflood a command telling the machines to stop the bot software from running.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned this week that cyber thieves have stolen approximately $20 million over the past year from small to mid-sized businesses, through a series of fraudulent wire transfers sent to Chinese economic and trade companies located near the country’s border with Russia.
The FBI said that between March 2010 and April 2011, it identified twenty incidents in which small to mid-sized organizations had fraudulent wire transfers to China, and that the total losses from the fraud was about $11 million. The alert was sent out Tuesday, in cooperation with the Internet Crime Complaint Center and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), an industry consortium.
The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI this week were granted unprecedented authortiy to seize control over a criminal botnet that enslaved millions of computers and to use that control to disable the malicious software on infected PCs.
The target of the takedown was “Coreflood,” an infamous botnet that first emerged almost a decade ago as a high-powered virtual weapon designed to knock targeted Web sites offline. Over the years, the crooks running the botnet began using it to defraud owners of the victim PCs by stealing bank account information and draining balances.
McDonald’s and Walgreens this week revealed that data breaches at partner marketing firms had exposed customer information. There has been a great deal of media coverage treating these and other similar cases as isolated incidents, but all signs indicate they are directly tied to a spate of “spear phishing” attacks against e-mail marketing firms that have siphoned customer data from more than 100 companies in the past few months.
Authorities in the United States and Moldova apprehended at least eight individuals alleged to have helped launder cash for an international cyber crime gang that stole more than $70 million from small to mid-sized organizations in recent months. In Wisconsin,… Read More »
New fees levied by financial institutions are likely to push thousands of small businesses into banking online, whether or not they are aware of and prepared for the types of sophisticated cyber attacks that have cost organizations tens of millions of dollars in recent months.
Authorities in Ukraine this week detained five individuals believed to be the masterminds behind sophisticated cyber thefts that stole $70 million – out of an attempted $220 million — from hundreds of U.S.-based small to mid-sized businesses over the last several years, the FBI said Friday.
Cyber crooks stole just shy of $1 million from a satellite campus of The University of Virginia last week, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
Organized thieves stole more than $600,000 from the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa earlier this month, sending the money in small chunks overseas with the help of dozens of co-conspirators here in the United States.
