US disrupts $100M GameOver Zeus malware cybercrime ring

The US department of Justice announced yesterday that it has disrupted two major online crime sprees that are thought to have netted hundreds of millions of dollars since they began in 2011. Both viruses were the work of an overseas criminal gang allegedly run by Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev, who is now among the FBI's most-wanted cyber criminals. GameOver Zeus, also known as P2PZeuS, was designed by Russia and Ukrainian gangs to find and harness computer files that give access to banking and financial information, while Cryptolocker encrypts all files on a target's computer and demands the user pays around $300 to unlock the file. Almost 250,000 computers worldwide have been infected with CryptoLocker since it emerged in April and it has so far been used to extort payments of more than $27m ($16m), according to the FBI.

"Evgeniy Bogachev and the members of his criminal network devised and implemented the kind of cyber-crimes that you might not believe if you saw them in a science fiction movie," the head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, Leslie Caldwell, told reporters in Washington. "By secretly implanting viruses on computers around the world, they built a network of infected machines - or 'bots' - that they could infiltrate, spy on, and even control, from anywhere they wished."

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