Security News
The Dutch police announced on Friday that they dismantled the Exclu encrypted communications platform after hacking into the service to monitor the activities of criminal organizations. In the Netherlands alone, the police searched 22 locations and arrested 11 individuals believed to be connected with the Exclu platform.
Multiple call centers across Europe controlled by a criminal organization involved in online investment fraud were taken down this week following a cross-border investigation started in June 2022. Law enforcement from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, and Serbia found that suspects operating out of these call centers tricked victims into investing large amounts of money in fake cryptocurrency schemes, also known as 'Pig Butchering' cryptocurrency scams.
The Spanish National Police have arrested 55 members of the 'Black Panthers' cybercrime group, including one of the organization's leaders based in Barcelona. The gang was operating four specialized activity cells dedicated to social engineering, vishing, phishing, and carding, having a very organized structure.
Spanish National Police have dismantled a cybercrime organization that used fake investment sites to defraud over €12.3 million from 300 victims across Europe. The threat actors then laundered money stolen from victims by moving it from Spanish banks to foreign financial entities where the criminals hoped it was away from the authorities' scrutiny or tracing ability.
The Ragnar Locker ransomware gang has published stolen data from what they thought was the municipality of Zwijndrecht, but turned out to be stolen from Zwijndrecht police, a local police unit in Antwerp, Belgium. Belgian media outlets call this data leak one of the biggest of this kind that has impacted a public service in the country, exposing all data kept by Zwijndrecht police from 2006 until September 2022.
A coordinated law enforcement effort has dismantled an online phone number spoofing service called iSpoof and arrested 142 individuals linked to the operation. Worldwide losses exceeded €115 million, with over 200,000 potential victims believed to have been directly targeted through iSpoof in the U.K. alone, the Metropolitan Police noted.
Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov, also known as Tank and one of the leaders of the notorious JabberZeus cybercrime gang, was arrested in Geneva last month. The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said Penchukov was arrested last month and is waiting to be extradited to the United States, although he can still appeal FOJ's decision.
The Spanish police have dismantled a network of pirated streaming sites that illegally distributed content from 2,600 TV channels and 23,000 movies and series to roughly 500,000 users. The pirated TV network used numerous websites to advertise and promote subscription-based streaming services, listing unlimited access to channels from different platforms.
The Dutch police have arrested a 19-year-old man in western Netherlands, suspected of breaching the systems of a healthcare software vendor in the country, and stealing tens of thousands of documents. These documents might contain sensitive personal and medical data of patients of healthcare providers using the company's systems.
You paste the hexadecimal code from the BTC transaction into the ransomware "Login page", and the process fires up a decryption program left behind by the crooks that unscrambles all your data. Loosely speaking, once Bitcoin miners see that a not-yet-processed transaction involves funds that someone else has already "Mined", they simply stop working on the unfinished transaction, on the grounds that it's now worthless to them.