‘Mariposa’ Online Banking Fraudsters Busted: Trio Controlled 13 Million Infected Computers

Posted by Staff on March 2nd, 2010 at 10:35pm Comments

While these are good news, these are also some rather alarming news at the same time.

The good news are that Spanish authorities report that they’ve busted three online banking fraudsters that were in control of over 12.7 million infected computers worldwide.

The bad news are that according to Spanish authorities these infected computers included more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies, along with more than 40 major banking institutions.

The suspects, who were apparently after financial and personal data stored on infected computers, which they used to gain access and clean out online financial accounts and possibly sold to other criminal groups, were busted after a long investigation into the botnet dubbed ‘Mariposa’. Further arrests are expected in additional countries.

According to Cesar Lorenza, the Spanish investigator in charge of this case “They’re not like these people from the Russian mafia or Eastern European mafia who like to have sports cars and good watches and good suits — the most frightening thing is they are normal people who are earning a lot of money with cybercrime.”

Lastly, according to the Spanish authorities, the software used to operate the ‘Mariposa’ botnet is much more sophisticated than the one used in recent Google hack attack (read our original news story here).

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