Operation Serengeti 2.0: Dismantling massive cybercrime and fraud network | Paul Pajares

Interpol's operating model

Paul Baharez of Interpol's Singapore cyber fusion center explains aggregating member-country and private-partner data into actionable intelligence: activity reports, advisories, and annual threat assessments scoped to relevant jurisdictions.

Operation Serengeti 2.0

The second iteration targets massive cybercrime infrastructure across Africa, guided by threat priorities such as online scams, BEC, ransomware, and digital extortion. Preparation ran April–July with a June kickoff involving members and partners including Kaspersky as a threat-report contributor.

Investigation and disruption

Teams normalize disparate partner datasets with clear requirements on timestamps, hash confidence, crypto-wallet KYC follow-ups, and ISP/server takedown coordination. One botnet case abused compromised hosts' SMTP to send sextortion mail globally—about 34,000 detections and 4,000 unique African IPs across 18 countries.