Russian-Speaking Cybercrime Mafia Shutdown By International Authorities

An Eastern European cybercrime network was disrupted by U.S. and European law enforcement this week.

Eleven cybercriminals, led by Georgian national Alexander Konovolov, oversaw an operation to infect computers across the world with a form of malware called GozNym in order to steal more than $100 million from their bank accounts. Tens of thousands of businesses around the world had been targeted by the organization. The organization's members came from not only Georgia, but other Eastern European countries such as Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

The 11 conspirators were indicted last Thursday by the Western District of Pennsylvania. The organization had targeted 41,000 victims across the world, carrying out a myriad of cybercrime operations between October 2015 and December 2016, according to reports.

The operation would send phishing emails to victims that had a link inside. If the user clicked on the link, the GozNym malware would be deployed, leaving personal information such as bank account numbers and passwords at risk to be stolen by the cybercriminals.

"International law enforcement has recognized that the only way to truly disrupt and defeat transnational, anonymized networks is to do so in partnership," Scott W. Brady, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania told reporters at The Hague in the Netherlands. "The collaborative and simultaneous prosecution of the members of the GozNym criminal conspiracy in four countries represents a paradigm shift in how we investigate and prosecute cybercrime."

Security Today reported that 4.3 percent of all global cyber-attack traffic in 2017 originated in Russia.