An action day performed in Latvia on 10 October 2025 led to the arrest of five cybercriminals of Latvian nationality and the seizure of infrastructure used to enable crimes against thousands of victims across Europe.
During the operation codenamed ‘SIMCARTEL’, law enforcement arrested two further suspects, took down five servers and seized 1 200 SIM box devices alongside 40 000 active SIM cards. Investigators from Austria, Estonia and Latvia, together with their colleagues at Europol und Eurojust, were able to attribute to the criminal network more than 1 700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1 500 in Latvia, with a total loss of several million euros. The financial loss in Austria alone amounts to around EUR 4.5 million, as well as EUR 420 000 in Latvia.
Read more…
Source: Europol
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- IOCTA 2023: forget hackers in a hoodie, cybercrime has become a big business
July 17, 2023
Forget the cliché of a solitary figure in a hoodie hunched over a keyboard in a dark room crunching lines of codes. It is an image that no longer accurately reflects today’s cybercrime landscape, where criminals operate as business-like syndicates across borders. Europol’s ninth Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA), whose first module is published today, ...
- Malicious campaigns target government, military and civilian entities in Ukraine, Poland
July 13, 2023
Cisco Talos has discovered a threat actor conducting several campaigns against government entities, military organizations and civilian users in Ukraine and Poland. Cisco Talos judge that these operations are very likely aimed at stealing information and gaining persistent remote access. The activity Cisco Talos analyzed occurred as early as April 2022 and as recently as earlier ...
- Privacy activists slam EU-US pact on data sharing
July 11, 2023
The European Commission has announced a pact with the US to allow easier legal transfer of personal data across the Atlantic. Data privacy activists vowed to challenge the agreement in court. President Joe Biden and EU officials welcomed the deal, which overcame objections about US intelligence agencies’ access to European data. The deal ensures Meta, Google ...
- Storm-0978 attacks reveal financial and espionage motives
July 11, 2023
Microsoft has identified a phishing campaign conducted by the threat actor tracked as Storm-0978 targeting defense and government entities in Europe and North America. The campaign involved the abuse of CVE-2023-36884, which included a remote code execution vulnerability exploited before disclosure to Microsoft via Word documents, using lures related to the Ukrainian World Congress. Read more… Source: Microsoft
- Attackers Exploit Unpatched Windows Zero-Day Vulnerability
July 11, 2023
A zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-36884) affecting Microsoft Windows and Office products is being exploited by attackers in the wild. To date, the exploit has been used in highly targeted attacks against organizations in the government and defense sectors in Europe and North America. The vulnerability was disclosed yesterday (July 11) by Microsoft, which said that an attacker ...
- France set to allow police to spy on suspects through remote phone access
July 6, 2023
Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only “dozens of cases a year”. Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow geolocation of ...

