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:
- Ninth day of pro-Russia cyber attacks on Italian sites
February 25, 2025
A pro-Russian hacker group, Noname057(16), staged for the ninth consecutive morning on Tuesday a new wave of cyberattacks against Italian websites, specifically targeting local administrations. The provinces of Trapani, Ragusa, Caltanissetta, Enna, the municipality of Catania and the Puglia region were among those affected by the attacks. The Agency for National Cybersecurity is providing help to ...
- Apple pulls data protection feature in UK amid government demands
February 21, 2025
Apple is scrapping its most advanced security encryption feature for cloud data in Britain, the company said on Friday, an unprecedented response to government demands for access to user data. The change affects a feature called Advanced Data Protection (ADP), which extends end-to-end encryption across a wide range of cloud data. Apple said it is no ...
- Finastra Notifies Customers of Data Breach
February 19, 2025
British financial technology firm Finastra has notified customers impacted by a data breach that occurred over three months ago. Between October 31 and November 8, 2024, an unauthorized third party accessed the company’s secure file transfer platform (SFTP), used to share files with customers. Although the breach was detected on November 7, and the company acknowledged ...
- UK: Man jailed for abusive emails to politicians
February 18, 2025
A 39-year-old man has been jailed for sending malicious communications to a government minister, the mayor of London and a senior Met Police officer. Jack Bennett, of Newlands Park, Seaton, Devon, pleaded guilty to four counts of sending malicious emails; one to Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, one to Metropolitan police officer Matt Twist, and two counts ...
- Posting hateful speech online could lead to police raiding your home in this European country
February 16, 2025
If you’ve ever dared to read the comments on a social media post, you might start to wonder if civilized discourse is just a myth. Aggressive threats, lies, and harassment have unfortunately become the norm online, where anonymity has emboldened some users to push the limits of civility. In the United States, most of what ...
- Spyware maker caught distributing malicious Android apps for years
February 13, 2025
Italian spyware maker SIO, known to sell its products to government customers, is behind a series of malicious Android apps that masquerade as WhatsApp and other popular apps but steal private data from a target’s device, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Late last year, a security researcher shared three Android apps with TechCrunch, claiming they were likely ...