€75m hackers set to strike in two weeks

Homes and businesses have been warned they have just two weeks to secure personal and vital business information on their computers before a gang of international cybercriminals begins another campaign of hacking which has so far netted them €75m.

ESET Ireland said its cybersecurity experts have received numerous reports in the past few months of companies and households around Ireland being stung by the hackers.

ESET said the reports had mainly been from small and medium-sized businesses with an average of 15 computers which had been hit by “ransomware”.

A group of criminals in Russia, Ukraine, and the UK, masterminded by 30-year-old Russian Evgeniy Bogachev, have used two viruses, dubbed Gameover Zeus and Cryptolocker, to net hundreds of thousands of victims, including a number in Ireland.

Gameover Zeus infects computers with malicious software that captures bank account numbers and passwords, and then uses that information to divert millions from victims’ bank accounts.

Cryptolocker locks users out of their computers, secretly encrypts personal files on the machines, and returns control only when ransom payments of several hundred dollars are made.

One of the victims of Cryptolocker was Eunice Power, owner of a catering company in Dungarvan, Co Waterford. She told RTÉ radio how, last October, a message came on her computer screen saying that her anti-virus software had been disabled and her personal files encrypted. She was given 100 hours to pay $500 (€360) in bitcoin to get an encryption key.

She said her files looked like “gobbledegook” and she eventually lost payroll and accounts software, as well as personal material such as photographs. She had to pay out up to €4,000 to fix her system and replace the lost software.

ESET Ireland said: “What most of the affected companies [it had encountered] had in common was that they had poor security and partial or no anti-virus software in place, which is all the cybercriminals need to infect a single computer, which then spreads the infection across the network, locking all the company’s files until a ransom is paid.

“What is clear from these accounts is something we at ESET have been saying for a long time: Cybercrime is evolving on an industrial scale with the intent to make money off people who rely on computers in their business and daily lives, with no regard to the pain and suffering these crimes inflict.”

Working with officials in more than 10 countries, the FBI and other agencies recently seized computer servers central to the crimes. However, the gang is still at large, and the National Crime Agency in Britain has said people probably have “two weeks” before the criminals will get the viruses functioning again.

The FBI said Bogachev was one of the most prolific cybercriminals in the world and issued a “wanted” poster that lists his online monikers (lucky12345) and describes him as a boating enthusiast. He is listed as living in Anapa, 250 miles northwest of Sochi. The command and control servers authorities seized were located in Kiev and Donetsk, Ukraine. Microsoft, Dell, McAfee, Symantec, and Trand Micro assisted the international agencies in taking down the threat.