Nigerian hackers and cyber criminals are being accused of masterminding a grand theft of information and money running into billions of dollars worldwide, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.
According to experts, the Nigerians are able to carry out the heist by sending phishing emails to commercial organizations and industrial enterprises, which they later steal dry.
The FBI estimates that these phishing attacks have cost companies over $3 billion. The number of affected companies exceeds 22,143.
Kaspersky Labs, an internet security company said it has found over 500 companies that are under attack in at least 50 countries.
Those under attack are mostly industrial enterprises and large transportation and logistics corporations, based in Germany, UAE, Russia and India.
In a blog post, Kaspersky said the cyber-criminals managed to steal technical drawings, floor plans and diagrams showing the structure of electrical and information networks.
Researchers said that all indications are that these were business email compromise (BEC) attacks that have come to be associated with Nigerian cyber-criminals.
Emails received by victims looked authentic enough to fool people.
Kaspersky discovered that the malicious files are intended to steal confidential data and install stealthy remote administration tools on infected systems.
Using Whois services, Kaspersky found that the domains used to host the malware were registered to residents of Nigeria.
Once in, the hackers compromise a legitimate email and change the banking account details.
They added that most domains used for malware C&C servers were registered to residents of Nigeria.