Feds smash international cybercrime ring with Power of Facebook
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The FBI have said that with the help of Facebook, they've taken down an international crime gang who went on an $850m botnet spree.
The ten suspects are allegedly responsible for multiple variants of the Yahos malware, which is linked to more than 11 million computer takeovers and over $850m in losses using the Butterfly botnet, which steals credit card and bank account details along with other personal data.
The feds said they'd nabbed folks from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, the UK and the US after an investigation that was aided by Facebook's security team.
Yahos targeted Facebook users between 2010 and October 2012, according to the Feds, and the social network's security systems detected the affected accounts and gave out tools to remove the threats.
The creator of the Butterfly botnet was already caught and one of that botnet's customers was the now arrested group of crooks behind the infamous Mariposa botnet. Luis Corrons Granel, a researcher at Panda Security, suggested to The Reg that it's possible that those arrests led to the cybercriminals behind Yahos.
Granel said he hadn't heard of Yahos before, but it was likely that the Butterfly botnet was being used to distribute the malware. ®
COMMENTS
And it's cop press release dollars. The only thing more inflated is Hollywood download losses.
$850 meeeeeelion!!!!
F*ck me. Who said crime didn't pay.
And I bet they only recover a teeny weeny proportion of the cash. Someone, somewhere, probably on a private island with a volcano and a diminutive manservant, is very happy indeed.
Re: $850 meeeeeelion!!!!
"Who said crime didn't pay."
Here's that statement again: The ten suspects are allegedly responsible for multiple variants of the Yahos malware, which is linked to more than 11 million computer takeovers and over $850m in losses using the Butterfly botnet"
Note that it does not say that the the gang made $850 million; it says that the losses were $850 million. Now it's possible that the gang did make that much but it is also possible that this astronomical figure includes the cost of securing computer systems and networks, lost productivity, money spent on investigations and consultants, time and effort spent by both affected customers and banks putting matters to right, and certainly quite a lot of expenses like that - in addition to the money that was actually gotten by the criminals.
It would have been nice if the article were more precise.
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