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- Recently, law enforcement agencies around the world joined forces to combat cybercrime.
- “Operation Endgame” led to four arrests and the dismantling of 100 malicious servers around the world.
- Cybersecurity experts said the sting was an important step, but only the beginning.
In what was believed to be the first operation of its kind, law enforcement agencies from around the world recently banded together to take down a massive cybercrime infrastructure that officials said targeted numerous victims and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages worldwide.
Over the course of a few days in late May, “Operation Endgame” led to the arrest of four people in Ukraine and Armenia, dismantled more than 100 malicious computer servers around the world, and seized more than 2,000 domains, according to U.S. and European law enforcement agencies.
According to Europol, the European Union law enforcement agency that carried out the operation along with other agencies including the FBI, one of the main suspects made at least $70 million in cryptocurrency by “renting out criminal infrastructure sites to deploy ransomware.”
Cybersecurity experts told Business Insider that the shutdown is an important step in the fight against cybercrime, but they said the fight can’t end there, as it remains one of the biggest threats facing humanity.
“This doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s a big step toward solving it,” said Adam Want, a cybercrime expert and public policy professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
“The largest operation against a botnet in history”
Europol called the investigation “the largest ever operation against a botnet that plays a major role in the deployment of ransomware.”
“This global operation involved law enforcement agencies from 13 countries and led to a significant disruption of criminal activity,” Europol spokesperson Inna Mikhailova told Business Insider, noting that the effort was also supported by the private sector.
Mikhailova described the scale of the operation as “unprecedented in the cyber sphere.”
“Using coordinated and coordinated actions, the FBI conducted a first-of-its-kind international operation to disrupt the criminal infrastructure of multiple malware services,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
As part of the operation, law enforcement agencies shut down at least four malware groups or “droppers” known as “IcedID,” “Smokeloader,” “Pikabot,” and “Bumblebee.”
According to the FBI, these droppers, designed to install malware on computer systems, “infected millions of computers and affected countless victims around the world and across the United States, including hospital networks, causing millions of dollars in damages and putting lives at alarming risk by compromising online intensive care systems.”
“This is taking down computer servers and it affects all of us,” Want said, explaining that the hackers behind the botnet “are after money and they don’t care who they target or how they get the money.”
“This could be my grandmother sitting at home or it could be a major bank. It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Want and other experts said taking down 100 malicious servers is a small number compared to the vast numbers of servers that run botnets around the world, but it’s still significant.
“That doesn’t mean the company was committing any less fraud,” Want said.
Ransomware is ‘wreaking havoc around the world’
Tracy Beth Mitrano, a cybersecurity policy expert and visiting professor of information sciences at Cornell University, called Operation Endgame “an important step” but said it was “insignificant in the overall scope of the problem.”
“Ransomware is wreaking havoc all over the world,” Mitrano said, “and it’s hitting the U.S. hard.”
Mitrano stressed the importance of the United States working with countries around the world to fight cybercrime, and called for international laws, treaties and agreements to “establish the rules in cyberspace.”
“Wars will not be won until we have international laws and standards that bind countries together,” Mitrano said.
Mitrano said Operation Endgame was “a very important first step, but we must continue to move forward.”
“Cybersecurity is one of the greatest threats facing us on the planet today,” she said.
Thomas Holt, a cybersecurity expert and professor at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice, said coordinated efforts by countries around the world to fight cybercrime, such as those undertaken in “Operation Endgame,” are “absolutely necessary.”
“Cybercrime is a very distributed problem,” he said, noting that cybercriminals “can target anyone, anywhere with relative ease and with a very low chance of being detected.”
So any attempt to crack down on cybercrime is a positive one, Holt said.
“It’s a net benefit in terms of complicating the network and forcing short-term behavioral changes on markets and actors,” Holt said. “It might not create a sustainable long-term downturn, but it at least provides a short-term benefit.”
Holt said he doesn’t think cybercrime will be stopped, “but I think we can make it more complicated for criminals and make it harder for them to actually carry out crimes like running a botnet.”
According to Holt, the “biggest problem” in the malware world is that different versions of malware are constantly emerging.
“We’ve been dominated by ransomware for the last 10 years, but eventually we’ll see a shift away from ransomware to something else,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what that something is yet.”
And artificial intelligence “will certainly make that process easier” for cyber attackers, Holt said.
For cybercriminals, “there is no greater difficulty or barrier to entry than there was in the ’80s, ’90s or even early 2000s,” Holt said.
“It’s now at a level where if you have money you can buy personal information, buy credit card numbers, rent out on-demand denial-of-service attacks, rent out botnets,” he said. “So you don’t even need to know what you’re doing. You just need a rough understanding and some money in your pocket.”
Last month, FBI Director Wray pledged the bureau’s continued efforts to fight cybercrime.
“The fight against transnational cybercrime is not over, and the FBI remains committed to confronting this ever-evolving threat,” he said.
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