Russian Officials Arrest 16 Members of Notorious Cron Cybercrime Gang

It seems as if government officials made a few major arrests related to a notorious Russian cyber gang. The group, known as “Cron”, successfully managed to raid bank accounts. Authorities have apparently arrested 16 individuals with close ties to this cybercrime group. Attacking banks in one’s native country may not be the best course of action to remain undetected, that much is evident.

Cron Cybercrime Gang Is On The Radar

Cybercrime in Russia has become a very serious problem over the past few years. Most people are well aware of how a lot of cybercriminals live in Russia and often use Russian underground message boards to communicate with one another. It also appears a few of these criminals have formed their own cybercrime groups. One of the most notorious groups goes by the name of Cron.

What made this particular group of criminals of such great interest to Russian authorities is how they mainly attacked local banks. These attacks culminated in the form of malware attacks, mostly deployed across mobile devices. It is unclear how many people make up the Cron gang, although we do know 16  individuals have been arrested this week.  That is a major blow to any crime syndicate, regardless of their official size.

These particular hackers seized close to $800,000 worth of Russian Rubles from multiple Russian financial institutions. By loading the malware onto customers’ Android devices, they were able to capture login information and execute transactions on the user’s behalf without their permission. It is unclear how many consumers have been affected by this crime gang, although it will easily be in the double digits.

The name “Cron” was not chosen randomly either. It is the name of the malware deployed by this gang of cybercriminals to infect Android devices all over Russia. Downloading this malware onto a mobile device was done by tricking customers into doing so through fake banking applications. Moreover, some users were actively redirected to platforms hosting banking trojans. It is evident the group has taken a very sophisticated approach to do as much damage as possible.

What is is even more disconcerting is how the gang has access to over 6,000 bank accounts. More specifically, they control this many bank accounts to launder the proceeds from their criminal actions. It is unclear how one group is able to get so many bank accounts, especially when none of them are linked to any of the member’s real life identities. The group was quite successful over a long period of time, but their greed eventually became their downfall as well.

Once major Russian banks – including Sberbank and Alfa Bank – received reports of this crime gang, they took the investigation to the next level. At that time, it also became clear the Cron group was looking to aggressively expand to other countries across Europe, the US, and Asia. It was due time to put an end to this reign of terror, and it looks like major progress has been made, resulting in these 16 arrests.

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