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In what’s being billed as an unprecedented global law enforcement response to cybercrime, federal investigators in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe today say they’ve dismantled a sprawling cybercrime machine known as “Avalanche” — a distributed, cloud-hosting network that for the past seven years has been rented out to fraudsters for use in launching countless malware and phishing attacks.
According to Europol, the action was the result of a four-year joint investigation between Europol, Eurojust the FBI and authorities in the U.K. and Germany that culminated on Nov. 30, 2016 with the arrest of five individuals, the seizure of 39 Web servers, and the sidelining of more than 830,000 web domains used in the scheme.
Built as a criminal cloud-hosting environment that was rented out to scammers, spammers other ne’er-do-wells, Avalanche has been a major source of cybercrime for years. In 2009, when investigators say the fraud network first opened for business, Avalanche was responsible for funneling roughly two-thirds of all phishing attacks aimed at stealing usernames and passwords for bank and e-commerce sites. By 2011, Avalanche was being heavily used by crooks to deploy banking Trojans.
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