Avalanche Gang: The Ultimate Bank Robbers?

This time last year it was being reported that the Avalanche Gang was responsible for around a two thirds of all phishing attacks on the Internet. But Avalanche, described at the time as being "one of the most sophisticated and damaging on the Internet" by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) was only responsible for a paltry four conventional phishing attacks during the month of July 2010. Which you might think is good news, and it would be were it not for the fact that the Avalanche Gang has not hung up its spurs and given up cyber crime.

At the tail end of last year ZDNet UK reported that the Avalanche Gang, named after the botnet it employs, was collaborating with the people behind the Zeus botnet. Back then, in December 2009, Vincent Hanna who was employed as an investigator for the Spamhaus Project told ZDNet UK that the gangs behind Avalanche and Zeus were using each other's infrastructure on a purely commercial basis: "We see that the same viruses are emitting mails that benefit [the] different groups, either through spammed URLs or attached malware."

Fast forward to now, and it looks like the Avalanche Gang has completed its transition from conventional phishing and spam outfit to the world's biggest bank robbers. According to the latest APWG research, Avalanche has "moved from using conventional phishing to massively propagating stealthy password-stealing crimeware that does not require user cooperation to surrender financial account credentials."

The Avalanche Gang has been slowly ramping up a concerted campaign of crimeware propagation in order to con victims into getting infected by Zeus. Well, I say slowly, but everything is relative: according to the APWG research Avalanche has been sending billions of faked messages from tax authorities, false alerts/updates purporting to be from popular social networking sites, and other scams designed to deliver marks to drive-by download sites.

I have heard nothing to suggest that there is any evidence that Operation Trident Breach, an international effort involving the FBI and the Metropolitan Police as well as other law enforcement agencies around the world and which has so far led to the arrest of 150 people involved with the Zeus operation, has actually led to any arrests of Avalanche Gang members.

As Rod Rasmussen, co-author of the APWG research report, says: "Their spamming and other activities to target victims continues at high levels, implying they are finding malware distribution a more effective and profitable tactic than traditional phishing." With Zeus being responsible for hundreds of millions of pounds worth of theft to date, and no Avalanche arrests making the headlines, that would make the Avalanche Gang the most successful bank robbers in history.