Sylvie Claire / June 1, 2024
Four people were arrested and over 100 servers taken offline in "the largest operation ever carried out" against particularly aggressive malware playing a major role in the deployment of ransomware, Europol announced on Thursday.
Dubbed "Endgame", this vast international operation had "a global impact on the +dropper ecosystem", said Europol, referring to a type of software used to insert other malware into a target system.
In addition to the four arrests, eight fugitives linked to these criminal activities will be added to Europe's most wanted list.
Operation Endgame is continuing and further arrests are expected, Europol said.
Coordinated between May 27 and 29 from the European police agency's headquarters in The Hague, the raid led to arrests in Armenia and Ukraine, with nearly twenty searches in four countries.
The targeted servers were located in various European countries, as well as in the USA and Canada.
The investigation, which had been opened in 2022, showed that one of the main suspects earned at least €69 million in crypto-currency by renting a criminal infrastructure for the deployment of ransomware, the European judicial agency Eurojust said.