A group of five alleged hackers purported use Nazi imagery as their trademark were detained in Russia for the theft of more than $1 million.
The group, based in Siberia, created a cyberattack program called “The Fifth Reich” and decorated it with eagles and swastikas before launching it against Russian and Ukrainian banks, authorities said.
{mosads}The program allegedly harvested credit card numbers and intercepted messages between banks and their customers, allowing the hackers to seize funds from private accounts.
The five hackers were detained on March 24. Law enforcement announced the arrests over the weekend, and they were reported in English-language media late Monday.
Dubbed “cyberfascists” in headlines, the group targeted Android mobile device users with malware that was first detected in July 2013.
“The software evolved since then and new functionality allowed it to commit theft more efficiently,” cybersecurity company Group-IB, which helped with the investigation, wrote in a blog post Monday.
“One of the first ways to steal money involved using SMS-banking — a procedure of money transfer with a help of specific SMS that is being sent to the bank. Later on the fraudsters began to collect credit cards data and were using phishing web-sites for that.”