Silence

Security researchers discovered a hacker group that attacked and managed to breach a multitude of banks in more than 25 countries around the world, such as India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and more recently. The hacker group is dubbed Silence, and it is likely the one behind the attack on the Dutch Bangla Bank Limited located in Bangladesh. The attackers made away with more than 3 million dollars in an attack on an ATM during May 2019.

The Silence group has been active since 2016, involved in attacks on banks located in Russia, Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet states. It also is believed that this hacker group released the Silence malware, on the bank networks connected to the attack to run harmful commands and access the system to fund withdrawals from banks, according to security researcher Rustam Mirkasymov working for Group-IB.

According to the researcher, Group-IB has the capability of tracking the infrastructure used by the criminals and criminal groups, giving them the ability to confirm an infected machine in the bank's network communicating with the Silence infrastructure. In this particular case, the security team discovered the Dutch Bangla Bank's hosts were getting in touch with the Silence's Command and Control server ever since February 2019.

Dmitry Volkov, the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Threat Intelligence working at Group-IB, also mentioned that the cybercriminals that worked on these crimes were active in the security community at some point. He believes they acted as reverse engineers or penetration testers, studying the attacks made by cybercriminal groups and analyzing threat intelligence reports. Many of the tools used by Silence are legitimate, with others developed by the attackers by learning from other threat actors. According to Mr. Volkov, it is now far more affordable to become a cybercriminal than a few years ago.