Inside the $100M ‘Business Club’ Crime Gang
New research into a notorious Eastern European organized cybercrime gang accused of stealing more than $100 million from banks and businesses worldwide provides an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at an exclusive “business club” that dabbled in cyber espionage and worked closely with phantom Chinese firms on Russia’s far eastern border.
In the summer of 2014, the U.S. Justice Department joined multiple international law enforcement agencies and security firms in taking down the Gameover ZeuS botnet, an ultra-sophisticated, global crime machine that infected upwards of a half-million PCs.
Thousands of freelance cybercrooks have used a commercially available form of the ZeuS banking malware for years to siphon funds from Western bank accounts and small businesses. Gameover ZeuS, on the other hand, was a closely-held, customized version secretly built by the ZeuS author himself (following a staged retirement) and wielded exclusively by a cadre of hackers that used the systems in countless online extortion attacks, spam and other illicit moneymaking schemes.
