A Cyber gang has stolen from 100 institutions in an unprecedented robbery
A criminal cyber gang has stolen as much as $1 billion (£650 million) from up to 100 financial institutions over a period of about two years, a computer security company said yesterday.
The gang – dubbed “Carbanak” by Russian security company Kaspersky – has been stealing directly from banks rather than posing as customers to withdraw money in the biggest cyber heist to date.
Kaspersky said it was working with Interpol, Europol and authorities from different countries to uncover details on what is described as “an unprecedented robbery” on banks around the world.
How it works
The cyber criminals come from Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as China, emails were sent by the gang to select employees to trick them into opening malicious software files in a technique known as spear phishing.
They were then able to get into the internal network and track down administrators’ computers for video surveillance. With this method, Kaspersky said, the criminals learned through spying how the bank clerks worked and how money could be transferred. Carbanak sometimes inflated account balances before taking the extra money. The account holder would not suspect a problem because the legitimate funds were still there, nothing had changed to alert them
The gang also remotely controlled ATMs and ordered them to dispense cash when a member would be waiting to collect the money.
Cash machines were ordered by the gang to withdraw money although it would take a lot of gang members to do this with out drawing attention
“These attacks again underline the fact that criminals will exploit any vulnerability in any system,” Sanjay Virmani, director of Interpol Digital Crime Center, said in a statement prepared by Kaspersky.
In the past various virus have been spread for example the Anna Kournikova virus, circulated in 2001
Named after the tennis star, this worm showed up in inboxes with the message “Hi: Check This!” and an attachment labelled AnnaKournikova.jpg. Once opened the worm downloaded the users’ email contact list and sent itself to the first 50 contacts. It was more of a nuisance than a scourge and even appeared it an episode of Friends, where it was much more corruptive, deleting Ross’ speech on paleontology from his hard drive.