An international effort, coordinated by the FBI, has successfully nabbed two scareware cyber-crime organizations. The groups are believed to be responsible for infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, with one of the groups costing users a total of $72 million. 

A second group was believed to have made $2 million from placing malicious advertisements on legitimate websites, also called malvertisements. A common malvertisement strategy is to submit legitimate ads through a shell company and then switch the code with malware only after they have been tested and approved by the advertiser.

As part of the sting, called Operation Trident Tribunal, police raids were conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Latvia, Germany, France, Lithuania and Sweden. 

Two suspects were arrested in Rezekne, Latvia, in connection with the malvertisement scam, and more than 40 computers and servers were seized in all. It is understood that three racks of servers were seized by the FBI at a DigitalOne data center in Reston, Va., which caused websites such as Instrapaper and Pinboard to go offline. I did a quick check and Instrapaper appears to be running fine now. A message on Pinboard informed me that it is currently running from a backup server and that "some pages have been turned off."

In a statement, Gordon Snow, assistant director of FBI's Cyber Division said: "Scareware is just another tactic that cyber criminals are using to take money from citizens and businesses around the world." Have you ever paid good money for a fake antivirus product, or have come across a scareware attempt?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at BBC News

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