Reports are coming in that five "high-level cybercriminal" suspects have been arrested for "cybercrime" related to the ZeuS1 and SpyEye2 malware programs. After eight house searches were conducted across four different European cities, the Joint Investigation Team,3 supported by Europol and Eurojust, took down this "very active criminal group" that is allegedly responsible for infecting consumer and banking computers with Trojans. By infecting target machines, harvesting bank credentials, and compromising bank account information, the unnamed members of the group were able to make off with upwards of EUR 2 million.
This case doesn't so much serve to support the old adage that "crime doesn't pay" so much as it serves to further demonstrate the overall weakness of fiat bank security, predicated as it is on mass adoption, Microsoft Winbloze, and "the customer is always right" user friendliness.
No word on whether Russian national Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev was one of the five suspects arrested and, if so, how Europol and Eurojust might split the USD$ 3 million previously offered up by the U.S. State Department.
ZeuS or Zbot is a trojan computer program that exclusively infects computers running Microsoft Windows. (Run moar winbloze!™) ZueS function by form grabbing or man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and is also used to install the CryptoLocker ransomware program that has plagued police departments, county prosecutors, municipal governments, public schools, gamers, and other private individuals since at least 2013. ZueS is spread through phishing schemes and drive-by downloads. ↩
SpyEye is still another trojan computer program that exclusively infects computers running Microsoft Windows. Are you noticing a pattern here yet ? Spyeye works quite similarly to ZueS and has been previously used to obtain personal and financial information from Verizon customers in the US as well as infecting Amazon's Simple Storage Service as a platform for launching botnet attacks from the cloud service provider. ↩
JIT member countries include Austria, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom, all of whom are also in the NATO Reich with the exception of Austria and Finland. ↩