Director, Threat Research
In the past weeks, information-stealing malware EyePyramid made headlines after it was used to steal 87GB of sensitive data from government offices, private companies and public organizations. More than 100 email domains and 18,000 email accounts were targeted, including those of high-profile victims in Italy, the U.S., Japan and Europe.
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As everyone knows by now, recently there have been some attacks in Germany that have people worried about their security. One question that comes up is – how were the attackers able to obtain their weapons?
In the recent Munich shooting, the attacker obtained his gun (a Glock 17 pistol) from an underground market. I was recently interviewed by the Handelblatt newspaper about underground markets.
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April 2016 was a great month for putting cybercriminals in prison. On April 12 Paunch, the creator of the infamous Blackhole exploit kit, was sentenced to seven years in a Russian prison. This was soon followed by Aleksandr Panin, the creator of SpyEye: he was sentenced by a United States federal court to nine and a half years in prison for his role in creating SpyEye. One of his partners, Hamza Bendelladj, was sentenced to fifteen years.
The most recent case involved Esthost, a company we know very well from our research. Vladimir Tsastsin became the latest member of the Esthost gang to be sentenced to jail; he will spend more than 7 years in prison. He was also ordered to forfeit more than $2.5 million in property.
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The reported hacking of the Bangladesh central bank’s accounts with the U.S. Federal Reserve once again shows how bad the impact of cyberattacks to organizations, enterprises or even nation-states can be. Peel off all the other layers in this narrative for a moment—the amount of money stolen, the alleged players, the politics—and at its core, we have the same tactics and procedures any enterprising criminal will carry out against his or her intended target.
Read MoreThe Deep Web is back in the news. Agora, one of the biggest darknet marketplaces, announced two weeks ago that it will go offline to bolster its defenses against law enforcement agencies who want to take them down. Meanwhile, a Deep Web user was indicted on federal charges of drug trafficking and money laundering. These…
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