Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

DOJ charges seven in massive clickjacking scheme

The Justice Department is indicting seven individuals with hijacking more than 4 million computers across 100 countries

The U.S. Department of Justice is charging seven individuals with 27 counts of wire fraud and other computer-related crimes, alleging that the group hijacked four million computers across 100 countries in a sophisticated clickjacking scheme.

The DOJ is holding a press conference in New York at 1 p.m. to reveal further details of the indictment, which has been filed in the U.S. District Court of New York.

According to the indictment, the defendants had set up a phony Internet advertising agency, entering into agreements with online ad providers that would pay the group whenever its ads where clicked on by users. The group's malware, which they had planted on millions of user computers, would redirect the computers' browsers to its advertisements, thereby generating illicit revenue.

The malware worked by capturing and altering the results of a user's search engine query. A user would search for a popular site, such as ones for Netflix, the Wall Street Journal, Amazon, Apple iTunes and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Whenever the user would click on the provided link, however, the browser would be redirected to another Website, one that the group was paid to generate traffic for.

The malware they used also blocked antivirus software updates, which left users vulnerable to other attacks as well, according to the DOJ.

Six of the defandants resided in Estonia during the operation, which took place from 2007 to 2011. They were Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorow, Valeri Aleksejev, Konstantin Poltev and Anton Ivanov The seventh defendant, Andrey Taame, resided in Russia.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Amazon, Apple, Department of Justice, DOJ, IDG, Internal Revenue Service, Netflix, Wall Street
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: Criminal, cybercrime, legal, malware, security, U.S. Department of Justice
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Collaborative software delivery: Managing today’s complex environment to improve software quality
    IBM Rational Team Concert software can help simplify, automate and govern the delivery process. Based on the open standards Jazz platform, it offers a lean collaborative application life cycle management (ALM) solution with integrated planning, work-item tracking, version control, build management and reporting.
    Learn more »
  • Top 10 Mistakes in Data Centre Operations: Operating Efficient and Effective Data Centers
    For years, the data centre industry has accepted that human operational error, not poor data centre design or engineering, is the number one cause of data centre downtime. Now is the time for companies to evaluate their data centre operations programs. They must be able to clearly articulate operational requirements and design an operations program based on the risk profile of the data centre. However, the road to creating an industry-best operations program will not be easy, especially for those companies whose core expertise is not in business critical facilities. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Automating Your Processes to Outperform Your Competition
    Welcome to Volume Three of the “Intelligent Guide to Enterprise BPM.” Get ready for an education in automation—Process Automation, that is. This white paper goes into detail about the Process Automation entry point into an Enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) program. Read on to learn how Process Automation opens up new ways to help your business do things faster—like open up a new sales channel or deliver customer orders. Discover how Process Automation enables your business to run smoother and consistently in an orchestrated way. With a true Enterprise BPM solution, you can automate newly designed processes far easier than starting from scratch.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.