Two Sudanese brothers are charged with conducting a cyberattack-for-hire gang

A federal grand jury released an indictment against two Sudanese brothers on Wednesday. The brothers are accused of running “Anonymous Sudan,” one of the biggest cyberattack-for-hire groups of all time, which is said to have been responsible for tens of thousands of attacks.

Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, were charged by federal prosecutors with launching 35,000 denial-of-service attacks in just one year, destroying websites and other networks as part of an ideological extortion scheme that hurt thousands of customers.

Prosecutors say the two went after a long list of famous people and organizations around the world and in the U.S. These included Microsoft, ChatGPT, PayPal, X, Yahoo, airports, the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, Alabama’s state government, and at least one hospital, Cedars-Sinai in the Los Angeles area.

The group had a “Sudanese nationalist ideology,” U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Martin Estrada said at a press conference on Wednesday. They charged people $600 or less to start big attacks.

“Anonymous Sudan sought to maximize havoc and destruction against governments and businesses around the world by perpetrating tens of thousands of cyberattacks,” said Estrada. “This group’s attacks were callous and brazen — the defendants went so far as to attack hospitals providing emergency and urgent care to patients,” he said.

The group also went after government and non-government groups in the UK, the Netherlands, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Chad, and the Netherlands.

Federal prosecutors say that Ahmed Salah set up Anonymous Sudan’s DDoS attack infrastructure and then claimed responsibility for the strikes in Telegram messages. Alaa Salah is said to have helped with programming and writing computer code.

The two were charged by a grand jury with one count of planning to damage protected computers. It was also charged against Ahmed Salah three times with ruining computers that were supposed to be safe.

The indictment says that Ahmed Salah could spend the rest of his life in prison if he is found guilty of all the charges against him connected to the attack on Cedars-Sinai hospital, which put patients’ lives in danger. If found guilty, Alaa Salah could get up to five years in prison.

According to Estrada, if the person is found guilty, it will be the first time in U.S. history that hacking has been linked to physical harm.

In February, Anonymous Sudan attacked Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The attack temporarily shut down emergency services, so patients who came in had to be sent to other hospitals for about eight hours.

Anonymous Sudan ran several Telegram channels where they posted “information about their attacks, their DDoS tools and pricing, and their victims,” and at one point they had as many as 80,000 followers. More than $10 million was lost to victims in the U.S. because of the group’s activities.

Federal officials say that the brothers have been using the group’s Distributed Cloud Attack Tool (DCAT) to launch devastating DDoS attacks that last for days at a time since early 2023. When “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks happen, websites get so much traffic that they can’t be used.

In a statement, Special Agent in Charge Rebecca Day of the FBI Anchorage Field Office said, “The FBI successfully disabled the attack platform that caused widespread damage and disruptions to critical infrastructure and networks around the world.”

The tool was a powerful DDoS attack. “With the FBI’s mix of unique authorities, capabilities, and partnerships, there is no limit to our reach when it comes to combating all forms of cybercrime and defending global cybersecurity.”

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Estrada says that both brothers were arrested abroad in March and have been in jail since then. However, the U.S. attorney wouldn’t say which country was keeping them or say anything about extradition.