Through Operation Magnus, led by the Dutch police, popular data theft programs have been taken offline.
Operation Magnus is a collaboration between Belgian federal police, Dutch police and the U.S. FBI. TechCrunch reports that authorities gained access to the servers of “info stealers” Redline and Meta and then took them offline. That type of malware is specifically designed to steal data such as passwords, credit card data, search history and crypto wallets.
Major players
Redline is one of the most widely used data theft program among hackers. It has been around since 2020 and was used in the 2022 hack of Uber, among others. Cybercriminals allegedly penetrated Uber’s internal systems through an employee account. They then went after explicit data. Meta is fairly recent software, and while both prey on people’s data, to be clear, the malware has nothing to do with the parent company behind Facebook.
Police gained access to all the hackers’ data through the servers, including usernames, passwords, IP addresses and software source codes. Those users were given an appropriate “VIP status”: Very Important to the Police.
For now, it is not known whether arrests have already taken place, but according to the Operation Magnus website, all affected parties have been notified and legal action is being taken.
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