Over a year after the arrest of eight of its members in Russia, the alleged leader of the original Carberp botnet ring that stole millions from bank accounts worldwide has been arrested, along with about 20 other members of the ring who served as its malware development team. The arrests, reported by the news site Kommersant Ukraine, were a collaboration between Russian and Ukrainian security forces. The alleged ringleader, an unnamed 28-year-old Russian citizen, and the others were living throughout Ukraine.
Initially launched in 2010, Carberp primarily targeted the customers of Russian and Ukrainian banks and was novel in the way it doctored Java code used in banking apps to commit its fraud. Spread by the ring through malware planted on popular Russian websites, the Carberp trojan was used to distribute targeted malware that modifies the bytecode in BIFIT's iBank 2 e-banking application, a popular online banking tool used by over 800 Russian banks, according to Aleksandr Matrosov, senior malware researcher at ESET. The botnet that spread the malware, which was a variant of the Zeus botnet framework, also was used to launch distributed denial of service attacks.
In February of 2011 the group put its malware on the market, selling it to would-be cybercriminals for $10,000 per kit—but it pulled the kit a few months later.
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