Recently, the front-runner of a gang of hackers and cyber criminals, Ukrainian resident ‘Denis K.’ was arrested by Spanish police from Alicante, a city on the south-east coast of Spain. This man was under surveillance and was considered as the main suspect for stealing around 1 Billion euros ($1.2 Billion) from the banks of Russia.
The gang was involved in alteration of bank accounts and for manipulating the Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). The front-runner of this gang is responsible for malware attacks like “Carbanak” and “Cobalt” for stealing money. It was a joint operation done by police forces of United States, Asia, and Europe.
The Europol and the Internal Ministry stated that “Denis K., the leader of the criminal organization from Spain since 2013, was arrested with 3 members of his organization, who originally came from Russia and Ukraine”.
According to reports, the organization was operating since 2013 with almost 40 members at several places. This organization attacked over 100 financial institutions including banks.
The attackers used malware attacks to infect bank employee’s emails through and systems through phishing to gain access to the bank network and server.
On this incident Europol said in a statement “With that level of access, the nefarious individuals authorize fraudulent bank transfers, raise the balances of mule accounts or command affected ATMs to spit out the money for them.”
Europol said that U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Romanian, Belarusian and Taiwanese authorities, and private cyber security companies assisted on the case.
In an interview, Ross Rustici, a senior director at Boston-based digital security firm Cybereason, said, “The gang stood out from others because of the amount of care and planning it put into operations. They’re unusual in how slow and methodical they are and how organized they are. But nobody before them had strung all those things together on such a scale”.
As stated earlier, the arrest was made in Alicante, where police found out jewels valued 500,000 Euros and two luxury cars. The accounts of the active actors were blocked and two homes worth 1 million euros were also seized by the Spanish police.
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The hackers asked for the support of other cyber-criminal organizations as well. Earlier they used Russian mafia and later Moldovan mafia was involved in the activity.
The profits of the organization were first converted into the Bitcoins at the exchange in Russia and Ukraine respectively. Once the profit was converted, Bitcoins were transferred to the accounts estimating about total of 15,000 Bitcoins.
The suspected leader used these Bitcoins for luxury as well as for further criminal activities. Denis K. also planned enormous network for mining of Bitcoins that were about to be used later for money laundering.
How Cobalt Malware and Carbanak Malware works?
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