European police have targeted an Irish family thought to have laundered as much as €4m ($4.9m) from elsewhere in the region.

The Criminal Asset Bureau of the Irish National Police ordered raids across four residential properties and one business premises in Tipperary and Kilkenny, resulting in the seizure of €100,000 in cash and a car worth €75,000, according to Europol.

Some 16 bank accounts linked to members of the organized crime group were also frozen, along with funds in them amounting to €540,000.

Europol claimed the seizures were possible because the Irish police operate a model of “non-conviction-based forfeiture” whereby assets can be seized without the need for a prior criminal conviction.

This means assets and funds believed to have been obtained illegally or generated by criminality can be captured before they are laundered by organized criminals.

The family-based gang itself, while unnamed, is believed to have made its money from illegal activities across Europe.

“In this case, Europol’s European Financial and Economic Crime Center (EFECC) pieced together the intelligence provided by different countries on this one same criminal network and put all the involved countries around one table,” said Europol.

“The partners have since worked closely together on this case to uncover the actual magnitude of the criminal activity of this gang and to establish a joint strategy for the final phase of the investigation.”

However, in general, seizures like this are just a drop in the ocean. A leak of Over 2000 suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed with the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) between 2000 and 2017 revealed $2tn of money laundering activity.

Even this amounted to only a small proportion of SARs filed by banks over the 17-year period.

A study from BAE Systems Applied Intelligence last year revealed that most banking customers want their financial institution to do more to stop money laundering and related offenses, but that a lack of resources, outdated technology, poor international cooperation and a broken regulatory system are all barriers.

Judging by UN estimates, as much as $4.5tn may have been laundered last year.

Over two-thirds of British adults are unaware how to report cybercrime, with many admitting they feel uninformed about attacks, according to a new study.

Digital agency Reboot Online analyzed European Commission data from across the region, to better understand the general public’s cyber-preparedness.

Although 68% of Brits said they didn’t know how to report cybercrime or illegal online behavior, this was lower than the European average (77%). Spain and Denmark (both 86%) topped the EU list, followed by Romania (84%), France (82%) and Sweden (81%).

This puts the UK 13^th on the list of 17 countries, with Malta (46%) and Greece (58%) home to the most clued-up citizens.

This is concerning given cybercrime levels continue to rise: offenses reported by businesses and individuals in the 12 months to March 2020 surged 23%, according to the ONS. Experts have also criticized process failures at Action Fraud which meant that many reports of fraud were not being investigated.

Reboot Online managing director, Shai Aharony, argued that consumers needed to become more vigilant in the face of rising cybercrime levels.

“Taking small actions such as familiarizing yourself with government-backed cybercrime agencies/bodies and applying their recommended best practices to your online actions can play a monumental role in reducing the risk of you becoming a victim of cybercrime,” he added.

“However, this research also goes to show that these governmental cybercrime agencies/bodies need to better promote themselves to the public to make them aware of their role, operations and support services when it comes to cybercrime.”

In another sign that public awareness on what to do following a cybercrime incident is still too low, a new report has revealed that millions of Brits are unlikely to take any further action following a breach.

The study from law firm Simpson Millar reportedly claimed that more than half (56%) of respondents were unsure what they should do after their personal information is lost or stolen. Only two-fifths (39%) said they even know what to do to secure their data in the first place.

The Russian state-backed operatives responsible for the SolarWinds attack may have numbered more than 1000, Microsoft president Brad Smith has claimed.

Speaking to the CBS 60 Minutes program over the weekend, Smith argued that the campaign, which targeted multiple US government departments and private cybersecurity companies, was “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen.”

Only around 4000 of the millions of lines of code in the SolarWinds Orion update were rewritten to help the attackers achieve their ends, but this took a tremendous amount of manpower, he added.

“Microsoft has assigned 500 engineers to dig in to the attack. One compared it to a Rembrandt painting, the closer they looked, the more details emerged,” Smith continued.

“When we analyzed everything that we saw at Microsoft, we asked ourselves how many engineers have probably worked on these attacks, and the answer we came to was, well, certainly more than 1000.”

When asked how, with all the resources Microsoft had to hand, the tech giant still managed to miss the presence of these attackers, Smith claimed that attackers usually have an “asymmetric advantage” at this level.

The program also shed some further light on how security vendor FireEye first discovered it was compromised.

“Just like everybody working from home, we have two-factor authentication. A code pops up on our phone. We have to type in that code. Then we can log in. A FireEye employee was logging in, but the difference was our security staff looked at the login and we noticed that individual had two phones registered to their name,” explained CEO Kevin Mandia.

“So our security employee called that person up and we asked, ‘Hey, did you actually register a second device on our network?’ Our employee said, ‘No. It wasn’t, it wasn’t me.’”

This effectively lifted the lid on the whole operation, as FireEye engineers started to dig into the attack and unearthed what turned out to be a widespread state-backed cyber-espionage campaign.