*Suppose you're a criminal. And suppose you hear of a group of bank robbers who have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in 180 countries with impunity. Finally, five of them get arrested.
*Would you be intimidated by that? Or would you drop whatever you're doing and bend everything to get into their line of work?
The scale of Avalanche is overwhelming, etc etc
Author: Lily Hay Newman.
Criminals have been using the platform since 2009 to mount phishing attacks, distribute malware, shuffle stolen money across borders, and even act as a botnet in denial of service attacks. It specialized in targeting both financial institutions and people’s personal financial data, to great success. The Department of Justice pegs the monetary losses associated with Avalanche’s malware attacks as “in the hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.”
Taking down an operation of that magnitude required globe-spanning coordination. Officials from agencies in 30 countries—including the US Justice Department, Europol, and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency—collaborated with private cybersecurity companies and academics. The final tally for the operation was five people arrested, 221 servers taken offline, another 37 seized, and more than 800,000 domains seized, blocked, or otherwise disrupted….
