Police break up cyber gang that stole over $15 million
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 04/29/2015 05:00 AM
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A cyber gang, made up of Romanian and other nationalities, has been broken up by the Romanian authorities.
Detained were 52 members of the gang who are suspected of hacking into banks, cloning payment cards and using them to steal over $15 million.
Payment card data, associated with the accounts of large corporations, was then used to create cloned cards and use them at ATM's. The withdraws were done on non-banking days; Feb. 20, 2013, for example, members of the gang withdrew $9 million from ATMs in Japan. On Dec. 2 that same year, the gang made around 4,200 withdrawals from ATMs across 15 Romanian cities, totaling $5 million.
Forty two search warrants were served in six cities as laptops and mobile phones were seized. Some of the loot was recovered which included $163,000 in cash, gold bars weighing 2 kilograms and paintings. Real estate was also found and restricted pending further investigation.
Security researchers are reporting a trend for cybercriminals to go directly after financial institutions instead of their customers. The preferred method of infection is spear phishing (targeted emails containing malicious attachments).
Kaspersky reported that a gang called Carbanak stole up to $1 billion from banks and other financial institutions in 25 countries after infecting their systems with malware and carefully learning their internal procedures.
Source: PCWorld
Detained were 52 members of the gang who are suspected of hacking into banks, cloning payment cards and using them to steal over $15 million. Payment card data, associated with the accounts of large corporations, was then used to create cloned cards and use them at ATM's. The withdraws were done on non-banking days; Feb. 20, 2013, for example, members of the gang withdrew $9 million from ATMs in Japan. On Dec. 2 that same year, the gang made around 4,200 withdrawals from ATMs across 15 Romanian cities, totaling $5 million.
Forty two search warrants were served in six cities as laptops and mobile phones were seized. Some of the loot was recovered which included $163,000 in cash, gold bars weighing 2 kilograms and paintings. Real estate was also found and restricted pending further investigation.
Security researchers are reporting a trend for cybercriminals to go directly after financial institutions instead of their customers. The preferred method of infection is spear phishing (targeted emails containing malicious attachments).
Kaspersky reported that a gang called Carbanak stole up to $1 billion from banks and other financial institutions in 25 countries after infecting their systems with malware and carefully learning their internal procedures.
Source: PCWorld
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