Rick’s Playground

Recently th security industry becomes more and more exciting and “cool” with various 007 style secret operations.

“Operation Dynamaphone” - Aug 3, two-day operation by UK and Ireland police to crack down a group of six individuals for pilfering funds from 10000 online banking accounts through phishing emails. 

“Operation Pin Pad” - April 16 2010 Brazil PoS (Point-of-Sale)  Hack

“Operation b49″ -  Feb 2010  A coordinated effort of taking down Waledac Botnet by Microsoft along with supporting experts from Shadowserver, the University of Washington, Symantec and others.

“Operation Aurora” - Quote from wiki

Operation Aurora is a cyber attack which began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009.The attack was first publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post. In the blog post, Google said the attack originated in China.

The attack was named “Operation Aurora” by Dmitri Alperovitch, Vice President of Threat Research at cyber security company McAfee. Research by McAfee Labs discovered that “Aurora” was part of the file path on the attacker’s machine that was included in two of the malware binaries McAfee said were associated with the attack. “We believe the name was the internal name the attacker(s) gave to this operation,” McAfee Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz said in a blog post.

“Operation Bot Roast” - June 2007 - An initiative from FBI to track down Botnet owners and subsequently a number of high profile charges are made against Botnet owners globally.