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:
- Spain’s Alcampo Acts Quickly To Mitigate Impact Of Cyber Attack
August 29, 2024
Spanish retailer Alcampo has reportedly suffered a cyber attack, however the group told local media that it acted quickly to mitigate its effects. The retailer experienced the cyber attack between Sunday 25 August and Monday 26 August, according to media reports, and upon discovery of the incident, engaged data protection experts to implement the necessary technical, ...
- UK: Staff details stolen in poultry factory cyber attack
August 28, 2024
Staff at a poultry factory in Norfolk have had their personal details stolen in a cyber attack. Banham Poultry, based in Attleborough, said criminals had remotely accessed its system in the early hours of 18 August. In an email sent to staff, seen by the BBC, the company said information such as National Insurance numbers, copies ...
- UK: Housing register still down weeks after cyber attack
August 28, 2024
A council housing register remains suspended weeks after it fell victim to a cyber attack, leaving thousands of residents vulnerable to a phishing scam. Salford City Council’s housing register is still down after a “cyber breach” on 2 August which left 5,200 people without access. Salford Home Search users have said they have not been able ...
- Cyber attacks on law firms jumped by 77% over the past year
August 27, 2024
The number of successful cyber attacks against UK law firms rose by 77% in the past year to 954, up from 538 the year before, according to a new study of the threat. Chartered accountants Lubbock Fine said that the wave is driven by criminals seeing law firms as prime targets for ransomware attacks or blackmail. This ...
- Telegram messaging app CEO Pavel Durov arrested in France
August 25, 2024
Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, has been arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris for alleged offences related to his messaging app, French media reports. Local sources said on Sunday that Durov, 39, had been travelling on his private jet from Azerbaijan and that a French arrest warrant targeted him as ...
- Russia blames mass tech outages on DDoS attack
August 23, 2024
The Russian government has blamed the widespread outage of several popular mobile applications on a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The outage affected a number of messaging apps and online services, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, Twitch, and VKontakte – a Russian social network. However, people in Moscow reported regaining access to services ...