Moscow, April 25 (IANS): Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has joined the world's largest police organisation Interpol in a cybercrime operation involving public and private sectors across the Asean region, the company said on Tuesday.

So far, Kaspersky Lab has identified nearly 9,000 botnet command and control servers and hundreds of compromised websites, including government portals.

In the operation, cybercrime investigators from Asean countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam exchanged information on specific cybercrime situations in their respective countries. China also contributed with an additional cyber intelligence report.

"Public-private sharing is a critical step in fighting cybercrime in the region. But for this operation, access to intelligence and technology has been as important as the experience of learning from each other throughout the process, resulting in better understanding and collaboration between private partners and law enforcement agencies," said Anton Shingarev, Vice-President Public Affairs of Kaspersky Lab. 

The operation was carried out from the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) in Singapore, the research and development facility of the organisation.

Kaspersky Lab provided the Interpol team with an exclusive report on a WordPress plugin vulnerability that has affected thousands of websites in the region, including those belonging to government agencies, universities, NGOs and private businesses.

Through these vulnerabilities, cyber criminals injected malicious codes to over 5,000 legitimate webpages around the globe and redirected the users to advertising pages of counterfeit goods. 

"Sharing intelligence was the basis of the success of this operation, and such cooperation is vital for long term effectiveness in managing cooperation networks for both future operations and day-to-day activity in combating cybercrime," added Noboru Nakatani, IGCI Executive Director.