Europol, the agency which fights against organized crime across the EU, wants to hire cyber-cops, including from Romania and other Eastern European countries, as young people in these countries “fit some of the profile of the hackers that we’re trying to defeat,” said Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, according to the Financial Times.

A new breed of cyber criminals have appeared: gangs combining computer hackers and financial services experts who exploit weaknesses in the financial system, who have been nicknamed 'bands of brothers'.

The corps of cyber police is being put together by Europol in the Hague to fight most sophisticated groups of cyber criminals. “This is almost like a co-operative of people who each bring perhaps a particular specialization to that criminal activity whether or not it’s a development of a particular form of botnet or a particular understanding of a vulnerability in the financial sector,” said Wainwright. “Then they assimilate their respective capabilities in a joint enterprise to carry out a sophisticated attack on financial institutions,” he further explained.

Romania ranks seventh in the world as a source of attack traffic on the internet, according to news organization Bloomberg. With 2.8 percent of global cyber-attacks coming from Romania in the last quarter of 2012, the country sat between India in eighth place and Brazil in sixth. Bloomberg used information from Akamai Technologies, which supports businesses in providing high-speed content. Romania's Ramnicu Valcea seems to be “a haven for cyber criminals,” reads the Bloomberg article, referring to what are described as “several news reports.” The town, which is also the capital of Valcea County, lies about 200km north-west of Bucharest, south of the Carpathian mountains. No reason is given why the small Romanian town in the foothills of the Carpathians is a favorite spot for hackers.

The cybercrime task force has already tackled a large scale network of hackers in Spain, which made EUR 1 million a year by introducing malware into computers, asking for a ransom for its removal and hacking into the credit cards used as payment in order to get more money. Then 11 people were arrested, including a 27-year-old Russian, who had created, developed and distributed the malware. Russian – speaking groups proved to be sophisticated enough to put the agency into difficulty, hence the need for a cooperation across EU to fight such groups. Earlier in June, Europol supported the arrest of 18 suspects, 13 of them ‘thieves in law’ (vor v zakone), from the Georgian Kutaisi clan. This was one of the most significant blows against clans controlled by this high-ranking, elite of the world of Russian-speaking organized crime. The operation was developed in Italy where the Central Operational Service of the Italian National Police and the Squadra mobile of Bari led the case and arrested 7 people. Other arrests took place simultaneously in the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Lithuania and Portugal.

editor@romania-insider.com

(photo source: sxc.hu)