Cybercrime
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DDoS Protection
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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
FBI Disrupted DDoS Group in March
Two Sudanese brothers are under criminal indictment in the United States for their role in distributed denial-of-service attacks launched under the moniker of Anonymous Sudan.
Federal prosecutors unsealed indictments against Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, who each face one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers.
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Younger brother Ahmed Salah faces three additional counts of damaging protected computers. An FBI agent testified that Ahmed Salah was the real person behind the Anonymous Sudan persona of “WilfordCEO,” who handled sales of its DDoS tool to private users.
Federal agents disclosed disrupting Anonymous Sudan in a March operation.
The indictments settle a long-standing mystery of whether the group truly operated from the east African country – or, as many suspected, was a façade for Russian state-aligned hacktivists (see: Expensive Proxies Underpin Anonymous Sudan DDoS Attacks).
“The group may share ideologies with, and sometimes appear to act in concert with, Killnet and similar hacktivist groups,” FBI agent Elliott Peterson wrote in an affidavit – referring to pro-Kremlin, Russian-speaking DDoS groups that emerged around the time of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “My investigation to date has indicated that Anonymous Sudan is in fact led by Sudan-based individuals.”
Among the group’s targets were a major Los Angeles hospital in an attack lasting several days starting Feb. 16 that forced it to divert emergency patients for a period of several hours. It also conducted weeks’ worth of attacks in June 2023 against Microsoft that disrupted Azure and Microsoft 365 services. Computing giant employees told the FBI the attacks resulted in millions of dollars of losses (see: DDoS Attacks Culprit of Recent Azure, Microsoft 365 Outages).
This is a breaking news story, please check back for updates.