UK police arrest 19 in botnet raid - Zeus operators made Ł2m a month

by Steve Ragan - Sep 29 2010, 08:15

On Tuesday, detectives from the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) conducted raids on 19 people who used the Zeus Trojan to snatch banking credentials. With access in-hand, the gang moved millions of dollars, netting almost Ł20 million GBP during their crime spree.

News of the bust, broken by the Daily Mail [link], contained little security details as to the gang’s methods and exact targets, but that is to be expected considering the case is still being worked.

The PCeU speculated that the Eastern Europeans (15 men and 4 women) arrested made nearly Ł2 million GBP per month with their scams, harvesting login information for online banking and shifting funds out of accounts with high balances.

The shifted money would be moved to drop accounts where money mules would remove the stolen funds, keeping a small cut of the take, and wire them off to the ringleaders.

Detective Chief Inspector Terry Wilson told the Mail that the Virtual Taskforce worked closely with several UK banks to gather the evidence and information needed to shut down the operation.

“We believe we have disrupted a highly organised criminal network, which has used sophisticated methods to siphon large amounts of cash from many innocent peoples’ accounts, causing immense personal anxiety and significant financial harm - which of course banks have had to repay at considerable cost to the economy,” he noted.

The 19 arrested in London during the raids are being held for violations of the Computer Misuse Act, the Proceeds of Crime Act, and Fraud Act. This string of arrests is just another step for the PCeU in their fight against cybercrime.

On 3 November 2009, officers from the PCeU, assisted by Greater Manchester Police, arrested a man and woman in Manchester for their role in using Zeus to defraud residents. The case marked the first arrests in Europe related to Zeus, according to the PCeU.

Zeus is a vile Trojan. In addition to stealing banking credentials, the Malware will link the infected system to a global network of compromised hosts, which are used send spam and conduct Denial-of-Service attacks.

Recent research into Zeus has shown the family of Malware capable infecting Symbian and BlackBerry devices. This would enable a criminal to capture SMS messages sent when a victim uses their phone as part of a two-factor authentication session with a bank for example. [More details at S21sec]

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