‘Avalanche’ Global Fraud Ring Dismantled
Summary: Europol, Eurojust, the FBI and authorities in the U.K. and Germany dismantled the Avalanche cloud-hosting network on Nov. 30, 2016, arresting five people, seizing 39 web servers and sidelining more than 830,000 web domains after a four-year joint investigation. The network, which opened in 2009 and at its peak hosted 17 types of malware including goznym, urlzone, pandabanker and loosemailsniffer, relied on double fast-flux hosting and spanned more than 180 countries, with at least 500,000 computers infected and controlled on any given day.
Why it matters: Avalanche was funneling roughly two-thirds of all phishing attacks in 2009 and later hosted banking Trojans used to drain accounts at small and mid-sized businesses, so a single takedown touched an estimated half-million infected machines a day - a reminder of how much fraud infrastructure sits behind one rented hosting layer.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Cybercrime & Law Enforcement
- Related
- Gootloader Malware Disrupted After Infecting 25,000 Computers Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026354 dark web vendors and buyers arrested in Operation Tor Nado Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026Law Enforcement Disrupts Gootloader, CastleRAT, and StealC Infrastructure Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026