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:
- Swedish citizen and organization data exposed online
July 24, 2025
An enormous database, containing millions of highly sensitive information on Swedish citizens, was sitting on the open internet, available for anyone who knew where to look. Cybernews researchers recently uncovered a misconfigured Elasticsearch server which they described as a “goldmine of business intelligence data”, containing hundreds of millions of highly detailed records belonging to Swedish individuals ...
- Key figure behind XSS.IS forum arrested in Ukraine
July 23, 2025
A long-running investigation led by the French Police and Paris Prosecutor, in close cooperation with their Ukrainian counterpart and Europol, has led to the arrest of the suspected administrator of xss.is, one of the world’s most influential Russian-speaking cybercrime platforms. The forum, which had more than 50 000 registered users, served as a key marketplace for ...
- #StopRansomware: Interlock
July 22, 2025
Since September 2024, Interlock ransomware actors have impacted a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure sectors in North America and Europe. These actors are opportunistic and financially motivated in nature and employ tactics to infiltrate and disrupt the victim’s ability to provide their essential services. Interlock actors leverage a double extortion model, in which they ...
- Weak password allowed hackers to sink a 158-year-old company
July 21, 2025
One password is believed to have been all it took for a ransomware gang to destroy a 158-year-old company and put 700 people out of work. KNP – a Northamptonshire transport company – is just one of tens of thousands of UK businesses that have been hit by such attacks. Big names such as M&S, Co-op ...
- British spies and SAS named in Afghan data breach
July 17, 2025
The identities of more than 100 British officials, including members of the special forces and MI6, were compromised in a data breach that also put thousands of Afghans at risk of reprisal, it can be reported. The latest fallout from the breach was kept secret by an injunction until Thursday, when the order was lifted in ...
- Global operation targets NoName057(16) pro-Russian cybercrime network
July 16, 2025
Between 14 and 17 July, a joint international operation, known as Eastwood and coordinated by Europol and Eurojust, targeted the cybercrime network NoName057(16). Law enforcement and judicial authorities from Czechia, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States took simultaneous actions against offenders and infrastructure belonging to the pro-Russian ...