Law enforcement operation takes aim at an often

Countries participating in Operation Endgame include Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. Private partners included Bitdefender, Cryptolaemus, Sekoia, Shadowserver, Team Cymru, Prodaft, Proofpoint, NFIR, Computest, Northwave, Fox-IT, HaveIBeenPwned, Spamhaus, DIVD, abuse.ch, and Zscaler.

Wednesday’s Europol notice stated:

Europol facilitated the information exchange and provided analytical, crypto-tracing and forensic support to the investigation. To support the coordination of the operation, Europol organized more than 50 coordination calls with all the countries as well as an operational sprint at its headquarters.

Over 20 law enforcement officers from Denmark, France, Germany and the United States supported the coordination of the operational actions from the command post at Europol and hundreds of other officers from the different countries involved in the actions. In addition, a virtual command post allowed real-time coordination between the Armenian, French, Portuguese and Ukrainian officers deployed on the spot during the field activities.

The command post at Europol facilitated the exchange of intelligence on seized servers, suspects and the transfer of seized data. Local command posts were also set up in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United States and Ukraine. Eurojust supported the action by setting up a coordination center at its headquarters to facilitate the judicial cooperation between all authorities involved. Eurojust also assisted with the execution of European Arrest Warrants and European Investigation Orders.

The officials also added the names, pictures, and descriptions of eight men to Europol’s most wanted list:

The officials further announced operation-endgame.com, a site dedicated to the continued crackdown on droppers. It adopts much of the same swagger and smack talk ransomware name-and-shame sites direct at victims and targets. FBI officials similarly trolled members of the LockBit ransomware syndicate in February when they set up a site following a separate disruption operation.

“International law enforcement and partners have joined forces,” Operation Endgame investigators wrote. “We have been investigating you and your criminal undertakings for a long time and we will not stop here.”