Ukraine arrests ‘Avalanche’ cybercrime organiser

KIEV: Ukrainian has detained one of the organisers of the massive Avalanche cybercrime network, police said on Monday, over a year after the global ring was busted in an international raid.

"An organiser of the international crime platform known as ‘Avalanche’ which infected up to half a million computers in the world daily was detained in Kiev Sunday," Ukraine’s cyber police said in a statement.

Avalanche was a criminal network providing infrastructure for malware and DDoS (distributed denial of service) spam attacks across the world before it was busted in an unprecedented global sting operation.

Speaking to AFP, a cyber police spokeswoman confirmed the arrested man was Gennadiy Kapkanov, a Ukrainian citizen who was using a passport with a different identity.

Police also searched his rented flat, seizing a laptop and memory storage devices, it said. In November 2016, police from more than 25 countries smashed the network and arrested its top bosses following a four-year operation. Hundreds of servers were shut down or seized and 800,000 internet domains were blocked, Europol said at the time, in one of the biggest takedowns to date.