Dutch firm, FBI targeted $100m cybercriminal gang

Dutch IT security firm Fox-IT worked with the FBI and American security company Crowdstrike to investigate a group of cybercriminals who have stolen at least 100 million dollars in banking funds over the past year, investigators revealed at the global cybersecurity conference Black Hat in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Globe Newswire reports. The group calls itself Business Club. They used a variant of the infamous Zeus-malware, called Game Over Zeus to take over companies bank accounts and siphon away their money. The damage they did may be higher. As they operate in several countries, the investigation may not have the complete picture. The investigation also revealed that the group broke into computers and stole about 20 to 30 gigabytes of data. The data was stolen from, among others, intelligence services in Turkey, Georgia and Turkey. The investigators managed to take a vital part of the group's botnet off the air last year, thereby rendering the cybercriminals ineffective. The botnet used about 200 thousand nodes in total. The group consists of more than 50 criminals with Evgeniy Bogachev, known as Slavik online, ase one of the main leaders. The FBI has promised a 3 million dollar reward for a tip that leads to Bogachev's arrest, but the chance of actually catching him is small. The investigators believe that he is currently in Russia and likely under the Russian government's protection.