Interpol, in collaboration with Nigeria Police Force, has arrested 11 members of a Nigerian cybercrime gang, potentially responsible for targeting as many as 50,000 victims in various scams in recent years.
At least, six of the suspects belong to “SilverTerrier,” a syndicate accused of employing a range of malware variants in tens of thousands of financial scams dating back to, at least, 2014.
Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence arm, Unit 42, which helped in the investigation, said the six Silver Terrier members have “successfully avoided prosecution for the past half a decade.
This, it said, was due to the complexities of mapping global victims beyond the flow of stolen funds back to the source of malicious network activity.
Unit 42, reports cyberscoop.com, also noted that rather than targeting “easily identifiable money mules or flashy Instagram influencers,” the operation focused instead on the “technical backbone of BEC operations”.
It focused on individuals who have the skills and knowledge to build and deploy the malware and domain infrastructure used in the schemes.
The announcement, last Wednesday, comes two months after three members of the same group were arrested in Operation Falcon.
The arrest of the three followed a year-long Interpol-led investigation into the prolific business email compromise (BEC) scams the group’s members are alleged to have pulled off over the years.
Authorities called this latest roundup Operation Falcon II.
The arrests…
