Ukrainian police successfully arrested one of the organizers of the massive Avalanche cybercrime network

Foreign media reported on February 26 that Ukrainian police said on Monday that one of the organizers of the massive botnet Avalanche was successfully arrested.

Andromeda is one of the largest botnets on the market and has been around since 2011. It provides the infrastructure for malware and DDoS (spam) denial of service attacks around the world. In a statement, Ukrainian Internet Police said the organizers of the international crime platform Avalanche have infected about 500,000 devices a day worldwide.

In fact, as early as November 2016, prosecutors and investigators from Europol and elsewhere conducted an international law enforcement cooperation successfully destroying Avalanche, the international crime infrastructure platform, and arrested its top employers. Europol said at the time of the operation that hundreds of servers were closed or detained and 800,000 Internet domain names were blocked, making it one of the largest dismantling operations to date.

In this operation, an Internet police spokesman confirmed to AFP that the man arrested was Gennadiy Kapkanov, a Ukrainian citizen. The police searched the man’s apartment and took a laptop and storage device for evidence. During the investigation, the police found that the man used a passport with different identities in order to hide the criminal acts.

However, Ukrainian media said Gennadiy Kapkanov appears to be missing. Because although Gennadiy Kapkanov was detained at his home in Poltava, a central city in Ukraine, no formal arrests took place in the local courts.

So later on Monday, the court will have to decide once again whether to formally arrest Gennadiy Kapkanov.

Source: SecurityWeek