Six customers of a malware crypter service were arrested in throughout Europe Tuesday following a year-long initiative called Operation Neuland, Europol said in a release.
The six, nabbed by authorities in the U.K., Norway, Italy, the Netherlands and Cyprus, were customers of an unidentified German man arrested in Koblenz, Germany in April 2016 and who created the crypter service as well as a counter anti-virus platform, tools that Europol explained are used by cybercriminals “for testing and clouding of malware samples to prevent security software solutions from recognizing them as malicious.”
The German man's arrested prompted the Neuland operation led by the Kriminalinspektion Mayen (DE) and supported by Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT).