NEWS FLASH…Cyber crime ring caught!

Cyber Crime

While we went about our daily routines last Tuesday, the FBI was playing Superhero and shutting down an enormous cyber crime ring. More than two million computers, mainly in the U.S. had been infected and used to retrieve delicate information, such as; account information and password information.

The suspected criminals behind this operation were suspected to be a Russian crime group. The virus nicknamed “Coreflood” could be responsible for more than 100 million dollars stolen from business accounts and individuals. The Justice Department is continuing their investigation against the group for bank and wire fraud.

The Coreflood software, five control servers and 29 domain names were shut down and seized to prevent the criminals from using them again. The software was used to infect other computers with a key logging virus that would steal personal and financial information and passwords.

Coreflood was used to infect computers running the Windows operating system and authorities believe it may have been operating since around 2002. They estimated about 1.8 million computers in the U.S. were infected with the virus and the remaining 500 thousand infected computers located in other countries around the world.

Last month Microsoft brought charges against a server called Rustock, they think has been operating for around five years. The Rustock botnet had been responsible for some of the largest productions of spam mail that internet users received.

Shutting down Coreflood was one of the largest undertakings we’ve seen in the U.S., government programmers had to intercept messages to the infected servers and send commands to shut it down. They also sent commands to infected computers to stop running the software. Microsoft will also be releasing an update to its virus removal tools.   

The Justice Department has filed charges against 13 foreign nationals believed to be involved.

Leave a Comment


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.