Europol | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In a joint effort by several law enforcement agencies from 6 different countries, officials have dismantled a major global organized cybercrime network behind GozNym banking malware . GozNym banking malware is responsible for stealing nearly $100 million from over 41,000 victims across the globe, primarily in the United States and Europe, for years. GozNym was created by combining two known powerful Trojans—Gozi ISFB malware, a banking Trojan that first appeared in 2012 and Nymaim, a Trojan downloader that can also function as ransomware. In a press conference held on Thursday, Europol said the operation was successfully conducted with the cooperation between Bulgaria, Germany, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and the United States. The United States has charged ten members of the GozNym criminal network, 5 of which were arrested during several coordinated searches conducted in Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. However, rest of the five defendants reside in Russia and a

Europol announced the shut down of two prolific dark web marketplaces— Wall Street Market and Silkkitie (also known as Valhalla)—in simultaneous global operations against underground websites for trading drugs, stolen credit card numbers, malicious software, and other illegal goods. Police in western Germany has also arrested three men who were allegedly running Wall Street Market, the world's second largest dark marketplace with more than a million users and 5,400 vendors. Besides this, the operation involving Europol , Dutch police and the FBI also led to the arrests of two major suppliers of narcotics via the Wall Street Market site in Los Angeles, the United States. According to the Europol, the police officers seized the computers used to run the illegal market place, along with more than €550 000 (£472,000 or $621,000) in cash, more than €1 Million in Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrencies, expensive cars, and other evidence. In a press release published today, Eu

Follow this real-life network attack simulation, covering 6 steps from Initial Access to Data Exfiltration. See how attackers remain undetected with the simplest tools and why you need multiple choke points in your defense strategy. Surprisingly, most network attacks are not exceptionally sophisticated, technologically advanced, or reliant on zero-day tools that exploit edge-case vulnerabilities. Instead, they often use commonly available tools and exploit multiple vulnerability points. By simulating a real-world network attack, security teams can test their detection systems, ensure they have multiple choke points in place, and demonstrate the value of networking security to leadership. In this article, we demonstrate a real-life attack that could easily occur in many systems. The attack simulation was developed based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Atomic Red Team,  Cato Networks ' experience in the field, and public threat intel. In the end, we explain why a holistic secur

In an international operation involving law enforcement authorities from the U.S. and several European countries, feds have shut down an online underground marketplace and arrested three suspects in Ukraine. Dubbed xDedic, the illegal online marketplace let cybercriminals buy, sell or rent out access to thousands of hacked computers and servers across the world and personally identifiable information of U.S. residents. The underground website had been around for years with its administrators strategically maintaining and concealing the locations of its servers all over the world to facilitate the operation of the underground site. xDedic offered buyers to search for over 176,000 unique compromised servers—which were usually in the form of credentials for compromised Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) accounts—from around the world by price, operating system, or even their geographic location from where it was stolen. xDedic impacted victims in multiple industries, "including

In a major hit against international cybercriminals, the Dutch police have taken down the world's biggest DDoS-for-hire service that helped cyber criminals launch over 4 million attacks and arrested its administrators. An operation led by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Dutch Police, dubbed " Power Off, " with the support of Europol and a dozen other law enforcement agencies, resulted in the arrest of 6 members of the group behind the " webstresser.org " website in Scotland, Croatia, Canada and Serbia on Tuesday. With over 136,000 registered users, Webstresser website lets its customers rent the service for about £10 to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against their targets with little or no technical knowledge. "With webstresser.org, any registered user could pay a nominal fee using online payment systems or cryptocurrencies to rent out the use of stressers and booters," Europol said. The service was also

Spanish Police has arrested the alleged leader of an organised Russian cybercrime gang behind the Carbanak and Cobalt malware attacks, which stole over a billion euros from banks worldwide since 2013. In a coordinated operation with law enforcement agencies across the globe, including the FBI and Europol, Police detained the suspected leader of Carbanak hacking group in Alicante, Spain. Carbanak hacking group started its activities almost five years ago by launching a series of malware attack campaigns such as Anunak and Carbanak to compromise banks and ATM networks, from which they swiped millions of credit card details from US-based retailers. According to the Europol, the group later developed a sophisticated heist-ready banking malware known as Cobalt, based on the Cobalt Strike penetration testing software, which was in use until 2016. "The magnitude of the losses is significant: the Cobalt malware alone allowed criminals to steal up to EUR 10 million per heist,

In a coordinated International cyber operation, law enforcement agencies have seized over 20,520 website domains for illegally selling counterfeit products, including luxury products, sportswear, electronics, pharmaceuticals and online piracy on e-commerce platforms and social networks. Counterfeiting is a form of trademark infringement that involves the manufacturing and/or distribution of fake lookalike branded products with a primary purpose to confuse or dupe consumers into buying them. The operation, dubbed " In Our Sites (Project TransAtlantic VIII) ," was conducted by Europol in association with the Interpol, the US National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre (NIPRCC), FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and law enforcement authorities from 27 European Member States. Counterfeit goods are a huge business, as the International Trademark Association suggested that around $460 billion worth of counterfeit goods were bought and sold last year alone.

Law enforcement authorities from Europe and Russia have arrested five members of an international cyber criminal gang for stealing $3.2 million cash from ATMs using malware. Three of the suspects, Andrejs Peregudovs (41), of Latvia, Niklae Penkov (34) of Moldova, and Mihail Colibaba (30) of Romania, were arrested in Taiwan by the Taiwanese Criminal Investigation Bureau last summer, have already been sentenced to 5 years in prison for their role in a massive ATM heist operation, involving 22 individuals from 6 countries. The European-based cyber criminal gang used a variety of different hacking techniques to infect ATMs with malware and force them to dispense cash. According to Europol that began its investigation in early 2016, the gang used spear-phishing emails containing malicious attachments to target bank employees and penetrate the bank's internal networks. From there, the cyber crooks then located and hacked into the network of ATMs from the inside, and used a m

Europol has announced that the law enforcement agencies from 13 countries around the globe have arrested 34 users of Netspoof DDoS attack tool and interviewed and warned 101 suspects in a global crackdown. According to the report published on the official website of Europol, law enforcement authorities worldwide have made the arrest between 5 December and 9 December 2016. Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) supported the law enforcement agencies in their efforts to identify suspects in the European Union and beyond. Arrested Suspects Are Mainly Teenagers All those arrested are mainly "young adults under the age of 20," who are suspected of paying for Netspoof stresser as well as booters services to maliciously deploy DDoS-for-hire software and using them to launch cyber attacks. The ddos attacks flooded target websites and web servers with massive amounts of data, leaving those services inaccessible to users. Europol's European Cybercrime Cent

A Romanian man has been arrested and charged with conspiracy relating to his involvement in a prolific ATM malware campaign. Emanual Leahu, 30, was arrested in the western city of Bacău, Romania by the London Regional Fraud Team (LRFT) London police run by the City of London Police on Tuesday 20 September, extradited to the United Kingdom last week. Leahu is believed to be a member of a European ATM hacking gang that stole more than £1.5 Million ($2 Million) from cash machines across the UK in 2014 using ATM malware to bypass security controls. The gang physically broke into ATMs to directly load malware onto the machines, allowing it to withdraw "large amounts of cash." The malware was good enough to erase itself to hide its tracks, making it difficult to identify the culprit. Three out of Five Gang Members Arrested Luckily, due to the gang's carelessness, one of its members was recorded by a hidden ATM surveillance camera, which allowed the police to id

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have arrested more than 70 people suspected of carrying out cyber criminal activities associated with one of the most active underground web forums known as Darkode . Darkode , also used by notorious Lizard Squad , was an online bazaar for cyber criminals looking to buy and sell hacking tools, botnet tools, zero-day exploits, ransomware programs, stolen credit cards, spam services and many illicit products and services. Darkode had been in operation since 2007 before law enforcement authorities seized it this week as part of an investigation carried out in 20 different countries. "We have dismantled a cyber-hornet's' nest...which was believed by many, including the hackers themselves, to be impenetrable," said U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton . The crackdown, which the FBI dubbed Operation Shrouded Horizon , was initiated two years ago by its counterparts in Europe, Brazil and law enforcement agencies in more

The Law enforcement agencies from six different European countries have taken down a major Ukrainian-based cyber criminals gang suspected of developing, distributing and deploying Zeus and SpyEye banking malware . According to the report on the official website of Europol, authorities have arrested five suspects between June 18 and 19. All the five suspects are the members of an alleged gang that has been accused of infecting tens of thousands of computers worldwide with malware and banking Trojans. The alleged cybercriminal group distributed and used Zeus and SpyEye malware to steal money from several major banks in Europe and outside. The gang constantly modified its malware Trojans to defeat the security protocols of banks and used " mule networks " to launder money. "On the underground digital forums, they actively traded stolen credentials, compromised bank account information and malware," Europol said in a statement on Thursday, "

It seems like the world has declared war against the Cyber Criminals. In a recent update, we reported that FBI is offering $3 Million in Reward for the arrest of GameOver Zeus botnet mastermind, and meanwhile British cyber-police has taken down widely-spread RAMNIT botnet . The National Crime Agency (NCA) in a joint operation with Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and law enforcement agencies from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom has taken down the Ramnit "botnet", which has infected over 3.2 million computers worldwide, including 33,000 in the UK. Alike GameOver Zeus, RAMNIT is also a ' botnet ' - a network of zombie computers which operate under criminal control for malicious purposes like spreading viruses, sending out spam containing malicious links, and carrying out distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) in order to bring down target websites. RAMNIT believes to spread malware via trustworthy links se

On Friday, we reported about the large-scale operation of International raids launched by the FBI and other law enforcement officials in countries around the world to arrest the targeted customers of a popular Remote Administration Tool (RAT) called ' Blackshades ,' which is designed to take over the remote control of the infected computers and steal information. The news broke when various announcements on underground forums by hacking group members claimed that FBI especially going after all of them who purchased the hacking tool using PayPal as payment option. Today, the UK's National Crime Agency announced that the raids took place in more than 100 of countries and they have arrested more than 100 people worldwide involved in the purchasing, selling or using the Blackshades malware. More than half million computers in more than dozens of countries were infected by this sophisticated malware that has been sold on underground forums since at least 2010 to seve