Fifty hackers arrested in Russia on suspicion of attacks on banks

Arrests not linked to SWIFT payments cyber heists

Police in Russia have arrested as many as 50 alleged members of a cyber crime ring on suspicion of hacking banks across the country and stealing money from client accounts.

The suspects were arrested in a joint operation with the Federal Security Service or FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB. The news was released in a statement on the website of Russia's Interior Ministry.

The arrests were made following raids at addresses in 15 regions and, according to the Interior Ministry statement, vital evidence was uncovered in the process.

The hackers, it claims, ran botnets of PCs infected with Trojan horse malware, which were used to conduct the attacks on banks and state organisations to transfer money to front accounts.

"As far as I know, this is the largest ever arrest of hackers in Russia," Ruslan Stoyanov, head of computer incidents investigation at Kaspersky Lab, which helped to identify the hackers and collect evidence, told the Bloomberg newswire. "Russia is tightening its grip on financial hacking," he added.

While the finger of suspicion in global cyber attacks is often pointed at Russia, the country is also targeted by attackers. According to Bloomberg, banks in Russia have been the target of 18 attacks over the past year, losing at least three billion rubles (£31.1m) in the process.

The attackers are clearly unrelated to the gang behind recent cyber attacks targeting banks' SWIFT payments systems, which saw as much as $81m spirited out of Bangladesh Bank, the central bank of Bangladesh. That used sophisticated malware both to gain entry, as well as to perpetrate the attacks and to tidy up afterwards.

Those attacks have been linked with North Korea by security researchers.