UPDATE3: Russia detects in 2015 cyber gang threatening banking system

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MOSCOW, Feb 4 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Interior Ministry detected a criminal gang that tried to steal money from all banks and put the banking system in jeopardy in November 2015, Alexei Moshkov, head of the cyber police department, known under the “K” name, said Thursday at a forum.

“Last year, the K department revealed an international criminal community, which threatened security of the whole banking system of the Russian Federation,” Moshkov said.

“At the moment of detention, perpetrators were preparing a global operation to steal money almost from all banks of the country.”

Spokesman Alexander Vurasko said that the gang was uncovered “a moment before a cyberattack took place,” when the perpetrators decided that everything was ready for the heist.

“They plotted a large-scale operation which would have busted inter-banking communications and would have allowed them to steal money from dozenz of banks quickly. At the moment when the group’s members were detained, they had an almost ready operation. They planned to do everything within a day and everything was ready. They thought they would need only to ‘press the button’,” Vurasko said.

The department had been tracing the gang before receiving information on the attack. “It’s a very complicated issue that could take years with such groups,” he said.

“For legal reasons we cannot disclose the targeted banks, but if we speak about the large-scale attack, they planned to rob almost all banks of the top 100. It’s evident: the bigger and more popular banks are, the higher the level of threat is,” Vurasko said.

The hackers aimed primarily at the banks’ processing centers. Foreign banks were not on the list, according to the information available at the moment.

Artyom Sychyov, deputy director of the main security department at the central bank, said that banks lost more than 1.5 billion rubles in hacker attacks in October–December 2015.

In 2015, the regulator founded FinCERT, a center for monitoring and response to computer attacks in the financial sphere. The entity collects information on hacker attacks from banks and gives recommendations.

More than 190 banks cooperate with FinCERT, and teamwork of the central bank with the police made “activities to prevent thefts, reduce the amounts that crooks tried to steal from banks” possible, Sychyov said.

(79.2593 rubles – U.S. $1)

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