A coordinated legislation enforcement operation throughout 25 African nations has led to the arrest of 14 suspected cybercriminals, INTERPOL introduced Friday.
The train, carried out in partnership with AFRIPOL, enabled investigators to establish 20,674 cyber networks that had been linked to monetary losses of greater than $40 million.
“The four-month Africa Cyber Surge II operation was launched in April 2023 and targeted on figuring out cybercriminals and compromised infrastructure,” the company mentioned.
As a part of the operation, three suspects had been arrested in Cameroon in reference to a web based rip-off involving the fraudulent sale of artistic endeavors value $850,000. One other suspect was arrested in Nigeria for defrauding a Gambian sufferer.
Additionally arrested had been two cash mules linked to scams initiated by messaging platforms.
The cyber networks comprised 3,786 command-and-control (C2) servers, 14,134 sufferer IP addresses tied to knowledge stealer infections, 1,415 phishing hyperlinks and domains, 939 rip-off IP addresses, and over 400 malicious URLs, IPs, and botnets. Two darknet websites had been additionally taken down.
Group-IB, which was one among the many non-public sector companions concerned, mentioned it recognized domains, URLs, and server IP addresses utilized in phishing and malware assaults.
This newest growth comes within the wake of Africa Cyber Surge operation, which was launched in July 2022 to fight cybercrime and establish compromised infrastructure within the continent.
The primary iteration resulted within the arrests of 11 people and the dismantling of a darkish net market that specialised in promoting hacking instruments and cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) choices, in addition to greater than 200,000 items of malicious infrastructure.
