The US Department of State and FBI on Tuesday announced a US$3 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Russian national Evgeniy Bogachev, the highest bounty US authorities have ever offered in a cybercase.
The FBI also issued a “Wanted” poster for Bogachev, who is charged in the US with running a computer attack network called GameOver Zeus that allegedly stole more than US$100 million from online bank accounts.
Bogachev has been charged by federal authorities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with conspiracy, computer hacking, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering in connection with his alleged role as administrator of GameOver Zeus.
He also faces federal bank fraud conspiracy charges in Omaha, Nebraska, related to his alleged involvement in an earlier variant of Zeus malware known as “Jabber Zeus.”
FBI officials said they believed Bogachev was still in Russia. He could not be reached for comment.
Joseph Demarest, head of the FBI’s cybercrime division, said the agency is aware of 60 different cyber threat groups linked to nation-states. He did not identify which countries were believed to be behind these groups.
Demarest said that Russia’s internal security agency, the FSB, had recently expressed tentative interest in working with US authorities on investigating cybercrimes. He did not link the offer of cooperation to the Bogachev case.
China has not expressed any interest in cooperating with the US on cybercrimes, he said. The US in November last year indicted five Chinese military officers and accused them of hacking into US nuclear power, metals and solar products industries.
Demarest said that the FBI learned within a month of Sony Pictures’ first report of a large-scale cyberattack that North Korea was behind it.
“We were absolutely positive in a very short period of time” that the North Korean government was behind the attack, he said.
Despite assertions from some security experts that the Sony Pictures hackers might have had help from one or more insiders at the studio, Demarest said investigators had found no evidence to back up such claims.
The FBI had learned of “over 100 major” cyberattacks last year, Demarest said, adding that evidence of insider collusion had turned up in “less than a handful” of those cases.
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