Australian hacker charged for Creating, Selling Spyware to Cyber Criminals
An Australian national has been charged for his purported role in the creation and sale of spyware for use by domestic violence perpetrators and child sex offenders. The defendant has been charged with six counts of committing a computer offense by developing and supplying the malware, in addition to profiting off its illegal sale.
The accused currently resides at Frankston, Melbourne, and is said to have created the remote access trojan when he was a teen, while also administering the tool from 2013 until its shutdown in 2019 as part of a coordinated Europol-led exercise.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) alleged in a press release, “The Frankston man engaged with a network of individuals and sold the spyware, named Imminent Monitor (IM), to more than 14,500 individuals across 128 countries.”
The Imminent Monitor is distributed via emails and text messages, coming with capabilities to secretly log keystrokes as well as record the devices’ webcams and microphones, making it an effective tool for users to keep tabs on their targets.
The AFP said the investigation, codenamed Cepheus, was set in motion in 2017 when it received information about a “suspicious RAT” from cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), leading to the seizure of 434 devices and the arrest of 13 people for using the malware for pernicious purposes.
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