The FBI partnered with Indonesian law enforcement to take down what the bureau on Friday called “a sophisticated global phishing operation.”
U.S. authorities seized computer infrastructure powering the W3LL phishing kit, the FBI said in a statement, while the Indonesian National Police arrested the kit’s alleged developer, an individual whom the FBI identified only as G.L.
W3LL was a popular cybercrime tool that, for roughly $500 per session, made it easy for hackers to quickly create login portals that mimicked the websites of popular online services. The tool then captured not only login credentials, but also “session data that allowed criminals to bypass multi-factor authentication and maintain access to accounts,” the FBI said.
Hackers used the access that W3LL gave them to attempt more than $20 million in fraud, according to the bureau.
In addition to directly committing fraud, W3LL users also resold stolen credentials and other forms of access — including remote desktop connections — on a marketplace called W3LLSTORE that operated between 2019 and 2023.
“This wasn’t just phishing,” FBI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Marlo Graham said in a statement. “It was a full-service cybercrime platform.”
After W3LLSTORE disappeared, criminals kept the W3LL service alive through encrypted chat platforms. Cybercriminals used the tool in attacks on more than 17,000 victims worldwide between 2023 and 2024.
Pattern of takedowns
The W3LL takedown was the first time that American and Indonesian law enforcement authorities had cooperated to dismantle a hacking platform. But it was far from the first time that the U.S. has seized infrastructure used for malicious cyber activity.
In the past two months alone, U.S. authorities have partially neutralized the Russian government’s global network of hacked routers, taken over Iran-linked hackers’ web domains, seized servers that powered massive distributed denial-of-service attacks and commandeered domain names used for residential proxy networks. Several of those operations involved international partnerships, a strategy that FBI leaders have said they plan to emphasize in the coming years.
