The accused are alleged to have operated Anonymous Sudan, a prodigious outfit with 80,000 subscribers on Telegram that managed to knock offline key pages at the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI and PayPal since January 2023, the Washington Post reported.
Altaghyeer: Agencies
A United States grand jury on Wednesday charged two Sudanese brothers with running one of the most prolific cyberattack-for-hire gangs of all time, the Washington Post reported.
The gang is responsible for 35,000 denial-of-service attacks in a single year, the newspaper said.
The brothers, Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer (22) and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer (27), were charged with conspiracy and impairing computers in the United States; crimes that could lead to life sentences, the newspaper said
“The pair are alleged to have operated Anonymous Sudan, a prodigious outfit with 80,000 subscribers on Telegram that managed to knock offline key pages at the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI and PayPal since January 2023. The indictment says they did all that with just three unindicted accomplices from their war-torn home country”, the Washington Post said.
The group charged $600 or less for major denial-of-service attacks, and the majority of their actions were driven by a Sudanese nationalist ideology, said Martin Estrada, U.S. attorney for the Los Angeles region.
“What’s unusual is the predominance of the ideological motive, with financial sprinkled in. They were both prolific and expansive in the targets they attacked”, Estrada told the newspaper.
The brothers were arrested abroad in March and have been in custody since then, Estrada said.
The programs and computers they used have been seized, and there have been no more attacks from that network, he added.
The Washington Post indicated that besides many major U.S. companies, the group took down government sites in the United States, Dubai, Chad, Bahrain and other nations, according to the indictment. It also allegedly handicapped Israel’s Red Alert system for warning citizens about incoming rocket fire on Oct. 7, 2023.
