Argentina police have arrested a youth suspected of leading a cyber-fraud gang, and diverting $50,000 per month, by breaching security at several money transfer and gambling websites.
The hacker, who was arrested after a year-long operation, was believed to be a son of an IT engineer and his room has high-capacity computers.
In 2012, the police department started ‘Operation Zombie’ in the wake of a complaint by a hosting service provider for personal web pages on servers that his servers were remotely being used by a hacker to capture monetary transfers.
Argentina’s chief prosecutor Graciela Gils Carbo ordered the federal police to start an investigation that exposed that the same person was involved in theft from money transfer and online game sites.
"Internet users were victims of a ‘malware’ virus that the hacker hosted in a server for downloading online gaming applications," Carbo said.
The hackers have reportedly made use of malware attacks to develop a network of thousands of zombie computers, and deployed them to illicitly transfer money from accounts.
The accused has also performed a denial of service attack to complete the work and avoid alerting victims to illegal money transfer.
