Cyber Hackers Steal $45 Million in just 10 hours With a haul of $45 million, its being billed as possibly the biggest cyber-heist in history. But in reality, experts and authorities say, it was thousands of small but highly coordinated thefts. Among the items seized from the seven men arrested in the U.S. Thursday were shopping bags from Gucci, a Porsche Panamera and a dozen fake credit cards. The scheme, according to prosecutors, involved basically two parts: First, hackers gained access to bank computers and downloaded prepaid debit card data while erasing their withdrawal limits. Second, they passed the data to numerous cashers who cloned the cards and got to work withdrawing millions of dollars from ATMs. For instance, little more than a year ago, , compromising up to 3 million accounts, Somers points out. According to the federal indictment, on one occasion the eight individuals in the New York cell siphoned at least $2.8 million from more than 750 ATMs in 2.5 hours. So If all eight were working together, they would have had to hit at least one ATM every 96 seconds, averaging $2,333 per withdrawal. In an even larger tranche of the master theft, cashers elsewhere used 12 card accounts with the withdrawal limits deactivated and got $40 million in 36,000 transactions over a 10-hour period. Thats one withdrawal averaging $1,111 every 10 seconds. In this second case, it seems fair to assume that many duplicate cards might have been used to speed up the process. the keys to the crime were inadequate cybersecurity that allowed hackers to penetrate the back-end systems at banks. Better security protocols and more secure networks could solve that problem, experts agree. The second issue is the venerable magnetic stripe, a technology that Jim Pettitt, director of ATM security strategy and planning at Diebold, says has been around since the 1960s. Encrypted chip technology is more secure. Europe has largely adopted it and the U.S. is on the on-ramp, he says. But dont expect that transition to come quickly; Pettitt says it could take a decade.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 00:45:43 +0000
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