In response to the news that U.S. federal prosecutors in Atlanta have unsealed indictments against two Vietnamese men and a Canadian citizen in connection with what’s being called one of the largest reported data breaches in U.S. history, I have the below comments from security experts at Imperva and ESET:
Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva writes: “I think that the most important lesson here is that law enforcement agencies are able to point out specific individuals involved in specific acts of cyber-crime, even when those are operation from distant locations around the globe. It should bring up the question – why do we need to wait for a massive data breach to blow up in public in order for that to happen. My personal belief is that if enough resources are put up against small breaches as well as large breaches in what symbolizes a “zero tolerance” policy against cyber violation we’d see the number of attacks decrease significantly over a short period of time.”
Mark James, security specialist at ESET, says: “This case involves a massive amount of data and the individuals involved not only stole what is thought to be the largest haul of names and email address in the history of the internet but then went on to utilise the infrastructure of the targeted companies distribution platforms to send out bulk emails. All of this was thought to be untraceable by the perpetrators but as we see here this was not the case, with the large companies having the tastiest fruits for plunder it’s no surprise that these cyber hacking rings are becoming harder to find and prosecute. Hopefully this will turn out to be a success and will go on to many more successful cases showing that the fight against cybercrime is not always a losing battle. With over 1 billion email addresses stolen and making more than $2 million from this particular operation there was certainly some big fish involved. Without doubt one of the parties involved was indeed Epsilon from 2011, spam email can deliver malware to the unsuspecting victim and with that much being sent around it’s no surprise it generates so much money.”