Microsoft has taken its cybercrime fight to the UK in its first major civil action outside the US, moving to shut down RedVDS, a virtual desktop service used to power phishing and fraud at global scale. Redmond says it has filed parallel civil actions in the US and the UK, yanking RedVDS's marketplace and customer portal offline and seizing chunks of its infrastructure as part of a wider cross-border operation involving Europol and German law enforcement.
Europol on Friday announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its customers to carry out a broad spectrum of crimes ranging from phishing to investment fraud. The coordinated law enforcement effort, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL, saw 26 searches carried out, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices, which contained 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of those detained are Latvian nationals.