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The hunt for the Carbanak group

Tomorrow Unlocked, the online magazine for digital culture created by Kaspersky, has released a new, free four-part documentary that tells the story of the notorious Carbanak APT (advanced persistent threat) group and its $1 billion bank heist. This film launches a new real-cybercrime series named ‘hacker:HUNTER’.

The four episodes (with a total running time of 31 minutes) tell the story of how, as part of an international investigation, four members of the group were arrested in Taiwan and Spain. As part of this crime story, it outlines the history of the Carbanak gang, how they stole the money and why it was so difficult to stop them. The film has brought together experts including different security vendors, as well as regulators, and the media.

The Carbanak gang is an infamous cybercrime group responsible for financial theft on an immense scale. It was the first group to apply to common financial crime the kind of highly sophisticated tools, techniques and processes usually associated with nation-state backed threat actors. It learned from these advanced groups how to stay under the radar while monetising a fortune.

Over time, Carbanak turned into an umbrella for a range of cybercriminal activities all sharing the same purpose of illegal financial gain. In 2018, this active international cooperation led to the arrests of suspected members of the gang.

The newly-released movie is the first in a series of documentaries into major cyber incidents across the globe. Audiences can already look forward to the second in the hacker:HUNTER series, which stages the Wannacry epidemic of 2017 on the screen, followed by further exciting documentaries on the most incredible cybercrimes in history.

“When we initially discovered Carbanak, we were impressed with its sophistication. The way they moved through networks and were finally able to extract money from a financial institution was something we hadn’t seen before. At the same time we also knew we had to stop this threat, which copied its tactics, techniques and procedures from nation-state APT campaigns. We hope that with this documentary we can provide insight on the inner workings of this criminal group and that potential criminals will realise that cybercrime doesn’t pay,” notes Jornt van der Wiel, security expert at Kaspersky.

See the hacker:HUNTER documentary series on TomorrowUnlocked.com ( https://www.tomorrowunlocked.com/guardians/hacker_hunter/)

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