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:
- ‘Two-factor authentication may have stopped Synnovis cyber attack’
September 25, 2024
The cyber attack on pathology provider Synnovis could have been prevented by two-factor authentication, according to Beverley Bryant, strategic advisor in the frontline digitisation team at NHS England. Speaking at the Health Excellence Through Technology (HETT) conference on 24 September 2024, in a session titled ‘Best practice in cyber security: Achieving excellence in the health and ...
- UK: Cyber incident ‘was an accident – not an attack’
September 23, 2024
A cyber incident which forced a council to shut down its IT systems was not an “attack, it was an accident”, it is understood. Tewkesbury Borough Council declared a major incident on 4 September after the incident, which a source said was its “own systems testing its own security”. People selling or buying homes in the ...
- Telegram CEO Durov Says App to Provide More Data to Governments
September 23, 2024
Messaging app Telegram will provide users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests, according to Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov. The platform changed its terms of service to deter criminals from abusing it, Durov said in a post on Telegram Monday. The move comes less than a month after ...
- UK: Customer data exposed in Harvey Nichols data breach
September 22, 2024
Luxury British department store has announced that it has been the victim of a data breach, in a notification sent to affected customers. The incident, which the store discovered on 16th September, involved the compromise of sensitive data such as names, email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. Read more… Source: Computing News Sign up for our Newsletter Related:
- Sunken superyacht believed to contain watertight safes with sensitive intelligence data
September 21, 2024
Specialist divers surveying the wreckage of the $40 million superyacht that sank off Sicily in August, killing seven people including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, have asked for heightened security to guard the vessel, over concerns that sensitive data locked in its safes may interest foreign governments, multiple sources told CNN. Italian Prosecutors who have opened ...
- -=TWELVE=- is back
September 20, 2024
In the spring of 2024, posts with real people’s personal data began appearing on the -=TWELVE=- Telegram channel. Soon it was blocked for falling foul of the Telegram terms of service. The group stayed off the radar for several months, but as Kaspersky researchers investigated a late June 2024 attack, they found that it employed techniques ...

