Tech
Hacker who infected over 2,000 users with Trojan malware arrested
Ukrainian police have arrested a 42-old-man on charges of infecting over 2,000 users across 50 countries with the DarkComet remote access trojan (RAT).
The man was arrested this week after police executed a search warrant at his residence in the city of Lviv, in Western Ukraine.
In a press release published today, Ukrainian police said they found a modified administrator panel for the DarkCommet RAT on the man’s computer, along with the malware’s installation files, and screenshots of infected victims’ computers.
DarkComet was first released in 2008 and was initially advertised as a legitimate remote administration toolkit. Because of its intrusive spying capabilities, the tool was quickly adopted by malware developers, becoming a popular RAT within months.
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The tool’s author, French software developer Jean-Pierre Lesueur, stopped developing the tool in 2012 after it became evident that most of the tool’s use cases were for cybercrime and after reports surfaced that Syrian authorities had been using it to crack-down on dissidents.
Despite this, DarkComet development was picked up by other unofficial developers, and the RAT continued to plague users even to this day, being recently spotted even in the arsenal and operations of North Korean government-backed hackers.
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