Interpol investigators announced today they’d identified over 8,800 servers hosted across eight countries in Southeast Asia used for various cybercrime operations.
According to Interpol, these are command-and-control (C&C) servers used as malware download centers, for spreading ransomware, launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and in spam distribution.
Interpol only gathered the data, which it handed over to national authorities. Domestic law enforcement agencies will now be tasked with taking down these servers and launching legal investigations in each case.
Investigators found malware on hundreds of government sites
Information on these servers was gathered by investigators from each of the eight countries, which included China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Seven companies from the private sector also contributed with intel on cybercrime campaigns and associated servers, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, British Telecom, the Cyber Defense Institute (US), Fortinet, Kaspersky Labs, Palo Alto Networks, and Trend Micro.
Interpol officials highlighted some of the most significant findings of this operation, such as 270 websites compromised with malware thanks to a vulnerability in the underlying website hosting platform, hundreds of compromised government websites, an Indonesian criminal advertising a phishing kit via YouTube videos, and a large collection of phishing websites that linked back to a group of suspects in Nigeria.
Europol arrested five suspects behind RAT operation
Last week, Europol also took a big bite out of cybercrime operations when it announced the arrest of three suspects in Spain and two in the UK for their role in the creation and distribution of (currently unnamed) keyloggers and Remote Acess Trojans.
On Friday, the UK National Crime Agency published a 17-page report called “Pathways Into Cyber Crime,” revealing that most of today’s teen cybercriminals are motivated by peer respect, rather than money. Furthermore, the report revealed that most teenagers enter the world of cybercrime and malware development after they first start tinkering with game cheats and game mods.
Source:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/interpol-identifies-8-800-candc-servers-used-for-malware-ransomware-others/
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
