The police of the United States have finally caught 7 cyber criminals responsible for infecting over 4,000,000 machines in more than a hundred countries. The scam has generated $14 million in cash for the scammers.
Almost a million of the affected personal computers were located in the United States. Moreover, among those infected machines there were even the computers that belonged to the country’s government agencies like NASA.
The American media reported that it actually took the FBI over two years running Operation Ghost Click to finally catch 6 Estonians and a Russian. The Estonian nationals were arrested and the United States is planning to seek to extradite the scammers. Along with the arrests, American authorities managed to seized personal computers and rogue DNS servers located in different locations. Rogue DNS servers were replaced with legal ones – the FBI hoped that the Internet users that had been infected wouldn’t have their Internet access disrupted.
The scam in question has started four years ago, when the scammers began using malware called DNSChanger in order to redirect unsuspecting Internet subscribers to rogue servers. Those have been controlled by the cyber thieves, which allowed them manipulate the people’s online activity. For example, people trying to visit iTunes were redirected to a site for a business unaffiliated with Apple, which flogged dodgy cloned software. Aside from making money from such schemes, cyber thieves also deprived legal site operators and advertisers of considerable amount of revenue. The used malware had built-in defense able to block anti-virus software updates and therefore left infected machines vulnerable to other malware
Almost a million of the affected personal computers were located in the United States. Moreover, among those infected machines there were even the computers that belonged to the country’s government agencies like NASA.
The American media reported that it actually took the FBI over two years running Operation Ghost Click to finally catch 6 Estonians and a Russian. The Estonian nationals were arrested and the United States is planning to seek to extradite the scammers. Along with the arrests, American authorities managed to seized personal computers and rogue DNS servers located in different locations. Rogue DNS servers were replaced with legal ones – the FBI hoped that the Internet users that had been infected wouldn’t have their Internet access disrupted.
The scam in question has started four years ago, when the scammers began using malware called DNSChanger in order to redirect unsuspecting Internet subscribers to rogue servers. Those have been controlled by the cyber thieves, which allowed them manipulate the people’s online activity. For example, people trying to visit iTunes were redirected to a site for a business unaffiliated with Apple, which flogged dodgy cloned software. Aside from making money from such schemes, cyber thieves also deprived legal site operators and advertisers of considerable amount of revenue. The used malware had built-in defense able to block anti-virus software updates and therefore left infected machines vulnerable to other malware
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