German investigators have managed a strike against internationally active suspected cybercriminals: As part of a large-scale operation in which several hundred forces were involved, the State Office of Criminal Investigation Rhineland-Palatinate arrested seven suspects on Thursday evening. Among them is also the operator of an illegal data center, as the authority announced.
A LKA spokesman said that those arrested were being investigated for arms trafficking, child pornography and drug trafficking. "Everything you can imagine in the Darknet," said a spokesman for the police headquarters Trier. The arrests were preceded by several years of investigation. A server operated in the northern Rhineland-Palatinate was taken off the grid and secured.
From the data center in a former Natobunker in Traben-Trarbach from among others, the world's second largest darknet marketplace "Wall Street Market" was operated, the investigators had smashed in the spring. In addition to drugs, the online platform also traded scanned data, forged documents and malicious software, as it was then called.
Starting point for telecom hack
An attack on Telekom router three years ago was based on the data center. The devices of about one million telecom customers had been paralyzed at one go. A 29-year-old Briton had tried to infect the routers with malicious software in order to integrate them into a botnet.
Such botnets consist of thousands, sometimes millions of devices whose computing power and network connectivity use criminals, for example, for sending spam emails, but also for cyber attacks. Normally this happens inconspicuously in the background, so that the owners of the devices notice nothing of it.
In the case of the telecom hack but there was a programming error in the malicious software used by the culprit. This had the consequence that the attacked routers precipitated in rows, whereby the attack was only recognized. The telecom put the damage estimated at around two million euros. The district court of Cologne sentenced the perpetrator to a suspended sentence of one year and eight months, after which he was transferred to Great Britain, where he had to face further charges for attacks on banks.
Further information on the current case has been announced by the authorities for Friday noon. The responsible Attorney General Dr. Jürgen Brauer and LKA President Johannes Kunz described the investigation as "outstanding international criminal proceedings in the field of cybercrime" whose investigations have "reached new dimensions in the fight against crime."
