The US Justice Department says it’ll pay anyone $5m who helps it arrest and prosecute the Russian hacker allegedly heading up something straight out of paranoid Cybersecurity fantasy ‘Mr Robot‘: the criminal head of ‘Evil Corp.’
The difference here, though, is instead of the capitalist behemoth the show’s fsociety takes down, this version of Evil Corp is a huge, international cybercrime network that lawmakers believe has so far filched at least $100 million from both businesses and consumers.
Two suspects are in Uncle Sam’s crosshairs: Russian national Maksim Yakubets and Igor Turashev, though it’s Yakubets, who goes by the hacker name of ‘AQUA,’ the $5m reward is for, so he’s presumably more of the so-say “person of interest” here.
The pair are formally indicted for bank and wire fraud and computer hacking, among other charges – and, in the confirmation of every warning you’ve had about bad places to log on in, it seems the basements of Moscow cafes were their preferred places of “work” for launching their malware campaigns.
That malware, Dridex, infected computers around the world and harvested banking credentials. Its main attack vector: automating the theft of confidential information from banking customers via phishing.
KrebsOnSecurity lists some of the group’s activities in detail, which seem to have centred on recruiting mules who then managed to gain access to small business or even charity accounts, allowing the group to blackmail them to hand over cash.
Krebs claims this led to dozens of stories over several years about small businesses battling their financial institutions to recover their losses.
A warning to us all here, friends: don’t click on that attachment!
We hope the authorities break this vicious cycle as soon as possible, and urge anyone who thinks they can help to contact the US government.
