Fighting malware and spam

Bonnie and Clyde: the crazy lives of the Brazilian bad guys

Fabio Assolini Kaspersky Lab

Igor Soares da Silva and his wife Emily, both 25 years old, together stole more than US$300,000 from one Brazilian bank in a single year. But their crazy days of living like Bonnie and Clyde came to an end when the Brazilian Federal Police arrested them after a difficult year-long investigation. Igor and his wife stayed one step ahead of the law by moving from city to city each month, recruiting money mules and using their stolen cash to live the high life, buying luxury cars and staying in the most expensive hotels.

Brazil has achieved worldwide notoriety as a place where many Bonnie and Clyde types are living crazy lives, stealing around US$900 million per year from financial institutions. The cybercrime scene in Brazil is both profitable and favourable: the country has 40.7 million Internet users, 76 million citizens eligible to use Brazil's e-voting system, and 30 million that use Internet banking services daily. The lack of any real legislation dedicated to combating cybercrime, in addition to high levels of police corruption, provide the icing on the cake.

With a very active cybercriminal community producing around 36% of all the banking trojans in the world, Brazil's bad guys have developed some original and creative attacks, using locally developed malicious techniques designed to bypass protection, infect users' computers and steal their money.

In this presentation we will show how the bad guys go about their business and will offer our analyses of the latest attacks and trends used by cybercriminals in the land of samba, soccer and carnivals.