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An employee works near screens in the virus lab at the headquarters of Russian cyber security company Kaspersky Labs in Moscow July 29, 2013. If you want to hack a phone, order a cyber attack on a competitor's website or buy a Trojan programme to steal banking information, look no further than the former Soviet Union. Picture taken July 29, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

A cyber gang stole around US$1 billion from about 100 banks in two years. Moscow based security company Kaspersky Labs said it in a report on Sunday.

Kaspersky has named the gang and its malware as “Carbanak” which has been stealing directly from financial institutions in the biggest cyber heist until now. The Russian security company said that it worked with Europol, Interpol and other authorities from several countries. The combined effort revealed details of the “unprecedented robbery.” The company claimed that the cyber criminals were from countries like China, Russia, Ukraine, India, Sweden, the UK and the United States.

The gang sent emails to employees and tricked them with “spear phishing” into opening malicious software files. The cyber gang was able to intrude the internal network of the banks and track down administrators’ computers for video surveillance. Kaspersky said that the gang members had learned how the bank clerks operated and how they could transfer money.

The other tricks which Carbanak played with the bank accounts included inflating account balances for the account holders. This helped the cyber criminals transfer funds without causing any doubt to the account holders’ minds as the legitimate amount was still there in their account. Carbanak also managed to control ATMs from remote locations and order the machines to dispense cash when one of their members waited to collect the cash.

Kaspersky’s director of Interpol Digital Crime Center, Sanjay Virmani, said in a statement that such attacks had re-established the fact that cyber criminals would exploit any vulnerability in any system. “It also highlights the fact that no sector can consider itself immune to attack and must constantly address their security procedures,” he said.

According to the Kaspersky report, the cyber robbery started as early as 2013. The Russian company, on the other hand, refused to expose the name of the banks which had their systems compromised. However, it said that the most of the victims were "Russian-speaking financial institutions," USA Today reports.

According to the report, the cyber criminals seem to be "trying to expand operations to other Baltic and Central Europe countries, the Middle East, Asia and Africa." It said that the criminals might target other institutions using the malware.

Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@IBTimes.com.au