Media Coverage

The US Treasury Department announced new sanctions Thursday on a Russian-based cybercriminal organization called “Evil Corp” for using malware to steal more than $100 million from hundreds of banks and financial institutions. Specifically, Evil Corp used the malware known as Dridex to “infect computers and harvest login credentials from hundreds of banks and financial institutions in over 40 countries, causing more than $100 million in theft,” according to the Treasury Department.

US prosecutors have charged two members of a Russia-based hacking group that calls itself Evil Corp with masterminding a global banking fraud scheme that netted the unsubtly named gang more than $100m. In a statement, US treasury officials called Evil Corp “one of the biggest hacking groups ever”.

US authorities have filed charges against two Russian nationals alleged to be running a global cyber crime organisation named Evil Corp. An indictment named Maksim Yakubets and Igor Turashev – who remain at large – as figures in a group which used malware to steal millions of dollars in more than 40 countries.

A Russian national who runs Evil Corp – the world’s most harmful cyber crime group that created and deployed malware causing financial losses totalling hundreds of millions of pounds in the UK alone – has been indicted in the United States following unprecedented collaboration between the NCA, the FBI and the National Cyber Security Centre.

The United States of America, through its Departments of Justice and State, and the United Kingdom, through its National Crime Agency (NCA), today announced the unsealing of criminal charges in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lincoln, Nebraska, against Maksim V. Yakubets, aka online moniker, “aqua,” 32, of Moscow, Russia, related to two separate international computer hacking and bank fraud schemes spanning from May 2009 to the present.  A second individual, Igor Turashev, 38, from Yoshkar-Ola, Russia, was also indicted in Pittsburgh for his role related to the “Bugat” malware conspiracy. The State Department, in partnership with the FBI, announced today a reward of up to $5 million under the Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Yakubets.  This represents the largest such reward offer for a cyber criminal to date.

The NASK National Research Institute has started the implementation of an innovative project, which assumes, among others, more efficient response to threats related to cybersecurity at the national and European level, improvement of operational cooperation in Europe in this field and increase of the scope of CERT Polska’s activity. The “Advance threat Monitoring and Cooperation on the European and national levels” ( AMCE) project received funding of almost EUR 1 million under the Connecting Europe Facility program. NASK will maintain the system together with the non-profit organization Shadowserver. ” In cooperation with our knowledge partner from the SISSDEN project – the Shadowserver organization – we are starting this threat monitoring system again, based on previously created software and experience gained”.

The Leaseweb Community Outreach Program provides servers and network bandwidth to qualifying nonprofits that identify instances of technical Internet abuse including spam, malware, botnets, phishing, and more. The Shadowserver Foundation gathers intelligence on the dark web to understand and stop high stakes cybercrime.

CERT.at receives threat intelligence for Austrian IP networks from a variety of sources. As we receive data in different formats we harmonize and deduplicate it before forwarding it. The NGO Shadowserver (https://www.shadowserver.org) is our biggest threat intel source

“Augment Spoofer Project to Improve Remediation Efforts (ASPIRE)” – a collaborative project co-led by Professor Matthew Luckie of the University of Waikato‘s Computing & Mathematical Sciences Department. Reaching out to security risk management companies, e.g., FICO, BitSight, Security Scorecard, Shadowserver, and Redseal, to discuss the potential for commercial use of Spoofer data or other technology transition relationships.

Researchers have long bemoaned the insecurity of certain “security” cameras. Ostensibly installed to deter and thwart intruders, many actually can be transformed into an arsenal that hackers use for Web warfare. The latest cause for concern: A vulnerability that enables hackers to summon a firehose of network traffic from hundreds of thousands of such devices for “distributed denial of service” attacks. Scanning the Internet for devices vulnerable to “LDAP” hacking using Shadowserver, a search tool provided by a nonprofit security group of the same name, reveals nearly 15,000 devices ready for abuse. For WS-Discovery, the newly discovered attack method, more than 800,000 vulnerable devices appear to be open to abuse.