The head of CyberInt within the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), General Anton Rog, revealed on Tuesday that together with DIICOT they recently foiled a cyber attack planned by a Romanian on the website of the European Political Community Summit, in which 47 heads of state and government from Europe and EU leaders met in Bulboaca, in the Republic of Moldova, a few tens of kilometers from Ukraine, to convey a message of support for the two countries in Russia’s sights.
“Together with DIICOT, in the country, we had a case recently, in which we took a gentleman from home, a kind of lone wolf, who had decided to attack the website related to a demonstration where all the European leaders were present .
Yes, it’s about the event at the Mimi castle, but it didn’t happen, because DIICOT took it from home, we gave the information,” said General Anton Rog, head of CyberInt within the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), on Tuesday, during an event on cyber security.
The SRI general also said that together with the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (DIICOT) and other partners, he managed to disable Genesis, which sold millions of compromised credentials.
Genesis Market, a platform that sold stolen account information to hackers around the world, was taken down following an operation coordinated by the FBI that involved 17 countries, the Romanian Police announced on April 5. Simultaneous actions took place globally against users of this platform, as a result of which 119 people were arrested, 208 search warrants were implemented and 97 other checks were carried out.
In Romania, the Police and DIICOT carried out seven searches and executed four arrest warrants issued in the name of four suspects. One suspect was placed under judicial control, and another was detained and will be taken to the Bucharest Court, with a proposal for preventive arrest for 30 days. This international operation was led by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.). and by the National Police of the Netherlands, with a command post set up at Europol headquarters. Following the searches, numerous computer systems, 883,600 lei and 18,600 euros, as well as 9,150 kilograms of pure gold in ingots were seized.
The targeted persons would have purchased from the Genesis Market platform, in order to commit other crimes of a computer nature, packages with login data to various computer accounts from 513 victims, including Romanian citizens. Genesis Market’s main object of criminal activity would have been digital identities.
This platform allegedly offered for sale what its owners called “bots” that infected victims’ devices through malware or account takeover attacks. Thus, upon purchasing such a “bot”, the suspected persons would have had access to all the data collected by it, such as fingerprints, cookies, saved logins and auto-fill data. This information would have been collected in real time and buyers would have been notified of any password changes.
The price per “bot” would have ranged from $0.70 to several hundred dollars, depending on the amount and nature of the data stolen. The most expensive would contain financial information that would allow access to online bank accounts.