Interpol against online crime: 5 months, 95 countries, 41 arrests
Online criminals breathe a sigh of relief. Police authorities from 95 countries have arrested 59 servers and 41 suspects after 5 months of coordinated work.
Scene of a coordination meeting of African police officers
(Image: Interpol)
"More than 22,000 malicious IP addresses taken offline", celebrates Interpol. The coordinating body organized cooperation between police authorities in 95 countries, who worked together for five months to combat phishing, infostealers and ransomware. In the process, they have seized 59 servers and arrested 41 people. That is approximately 0.003 arrests per day and country.
In addition to the 59 servers, 43 electronic devices, including laptops, cell phones and hard drives, were confiscated, eleven of them in Madagascar. A further 65 people are still under investigation. Interpol calls the campaign "Operation Synergia II".
Videos by heise
The number of servers taken offline (but not confiscated) is likely to be in the five-digit range. Interpol does not provide exact details; the organization only highlights five areas: According to the report, 1,037 servers were taken offline in Hong Kong, with a further 291 next door in Macau, while Estonia reported the seizure of "80 GB of server data". In Mongolia, there were 21 house searches, one confiscated server and 93 suspects. Madagascar counts eleven confiscated electronic devices and has identified the same number of people who are said to have "connections" to malware servers.
The IT security companies Group-IB, Trend Micro, Kaspersky and Team Cymru were involved in Operation Synergia II. They reported suspicious activity originating from a total of 30,000 IP addresses. Of these, the 95 participating Interpol member states shut down two thirds. Interpol has 196 members, from Afghanistan to Vietnam. The coordinating body does not say which of these have taken part.
AI optimizes phishing
According to Interpol,phishing, infostealers and ransomware are currently among the biggest IT threats, which is why they were the summer focus. The three areas form a kind of pyramid. Generative artificial intelligence is used to make phishing attacks more convincing. Phished credentials open the gates for Infostealer malware. The perpetrators then like to use the knowledge gained from this for ransomware attacks.
Synergia II builds on Operation Synergia from the fall of last year. Back then, 1,300 "suspicious IP addresses or URLs" were identified, 70 percent of which were shut down. At that time, police authorities from 55 countries took part, carrying out a total of 30 house searches and identifying70 suspects. From the German-speaking world, authorities in Switzerland and Liechtenstein took part in Operation Synergia at the time.
(ds)
