A Surrey resident has been arrested as a result of an international cybercrime investigation but police have not revealed the person's gender nor their name, as charges have not been sworn.
Sgt. Tammy Lobb, spokeswoman for RCMP Federal Policing – Pacific Region, said police in March arrested an individual for allegedly "operating a network of thousands of infected computers capable of delivering malware. The investigation is ongoing.
"This arrest was conducted as a part of Operation Endgame," Lobb said. "Operation Endgame is an international joint force targeting online malware loaders."
Cybercrime Investigative Team-Vancouver, she added, is supported in Operation Endgame by the National Cybercrime Coordination Centre (NC3) and by Europol and is one of five national-level RCMP cybercrime teams "working together to combat online crime in Canada. There are CIT located in Edmonton, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver."
Superintendent Adam MacIntosh, in charge of the Cyber and Financial Investigation Teams in the Pacific Region, said the operation was coordinated with authorities from Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Czech Republic and the U.S.
"We are working together to make the internet safer for Canadians," he said.
MacIntosh told the Now-Leader it's "a possibility" more arrests are pending, "however, the focus for charges would be on this individual."
He provided an analogy on how the process works. Somebody in the world writes computer code to take advantage of systems, finding ways to get into businesses or private people's information then sell that, he explained, "or they'll exploit it themselves."
"So that's essentially what's occurring in this particular case, is that we have somebody, somewhere who has sold this malware to others and so we're following that and we're identifying those individuals and of course we're trying to disrupt them, sometimes through criminal charges, sometimes through other mechanisms to be able to prevent them from continually using the malware."
Police are trying to determine from where "the infection" occurred, he said. Asked if a bad actor needs to be a super computer whiz or just someone operating out of their parents' basement, MacIntosh replied that "the answer to that would be yes and yes. You need some level of capabilities, however imagine if somebody outside who has the technical capabilities develops the ability to create a malware and exploit it, and then they sell it to you and in selling it to you they tell you how to use it. A person with not much sophistication can do that."
"It could be a person in a basement, it could be a person doing anything for that matter."
Essentially what malicious software does is sneaks into your computer and enables the crooks to go back in as many times as they want, looking for things of value to exploit. They might try to extort victims. "They might sell that access to somebody else."
MacIntosh said 99 per cent of it is done for financial gain. "We need to understand that that's what's occurring in the online world. So we protect our house from intruders – we want to take steps to protect our online world from the same thing.
"It's the digital world of extortion, and the digital world of theft is what is occurring and it is everywhere and we need to be able to support the ability to disrupt it as mush as possible."
