The Biggest Digital Heist in History Isn’t Over Yet
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I suspect this is actually a Bitcoin mining farm:
In goes dirty money, to buy mining hardware in bulk.
Out comes fresh, never-transacted-with Bitcoin block rewards.
It is fairly hard for authorities to trace the wash: in Bitcoin land, block rewards are the least-tainted kind of coins.
Also, the most anonymous.
I am betting these guys have some connections.
From the p.o.v of the seller of mining hardware, he's just selling hardware in exchange for money, and he has no KYC/AML requirement, he's not a bank, he's just a regular business.
And any other company involved in building the mining operation are the same way.
> “This guy is in another league, he’s like Rafa Nadal
> playing tennis,” Yuste says. “There are few people in
> the world capable of doing what he did.”
Then you find out later it's just a python script probing for default passwords, or someone who learned some of nmap's command-line switches.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who briefly worked at a company which exclusively makes software for financial institutions. Their product was a web app that only worked in a version of Internet Explorer so old, it didn't support Ajax. Asynchronous requests were made by changing the src attribute of a 1px <iframe>.
This was in 2015.
Yes it is not state of the art. They need a compliance regime in order to be secure, and they meet that and that only. But I think you're missing an aspect, things like passwords that change daily and require collusion, advanced social engineering, physical access, etc.
Further, being easy to get caught is the definition of good security. It's super easy to physically enter a bank and take all available cash at gunpoint. Nearly impossible to get away with it. That's good security. Extend that to the digital realm.
PS: 100k in 20's is ~11 pounds. Some people might leave the bank with more than that, but not that much as most branches don't much have cash and simply simply moving it becomes difficult.
Imagine you're an new employee at a big old company with a lot of legacy tech that's had mediocre maintenance and documentation over the years as is typical. You are going to leave footprints everywhere just learning to do your job. Imagine how many footprints you leave when you're an outsider who has to learn it all from scratch without documentation or assistance from other employees with historical knowledge. Now try getting anything done in that system without leaving tracks or triggering alerts when you hit some API that even the employees don't knows exists. The reason nobody ever gets caught is because insurance doesn't usually require a conviction before paying out and the effort required to determine who broke in is much higher than figuring out the exact sequence of events because you'd have to do the same investigation on every compromised system they used along the way.
> Integrated Lights-Out, or iLO, is a proprietary embedded server management technology by Hewlett-Packard which provides out-of-band management facilities. The physical connection is an Ethernet port that can be found on most Proliant servers and microservers[1] of the 300 and above series.
The problem is that in the end the money has to go somewhere or be spent (why else steal it?). Also to live a legal life (house,car,boat) you have to have a source of income/spending that does not set off red flags. If you are a high paid bank employee why even bother? Many (most?) financial type crimes have no statue of limitations so to get away you literally have to get away with it for the rest of your life. The other side is even if you get away you will spend the rest of your life wondering if today is the day you get caught. To be honest I think that is why so many white collar crimes are so brazen looking. I think they would rather go to jail for a few years be done with it and live the rest of their lives with the money they have "lost".
Unless you live in a country like Russia where stealing money from the US is basically legal. Then go for it.
At least in the US, this is inaccurate. Most financial/fraud crimes have a statute of limitations of 3-5 years, both at the state and federal level. Some federal crimes specifically against financial institutions have a SOL of 10 years. Generally the only crimes that have no statute of limitations are punishable by life/death (such as first degree murder). See https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-650-le...
In GA, fleeing stops the clock, and in WA, "John Doe" can be indicted, subject to some restrictions.
https://tollefsenlaw.com/statute-limitations-tolled-against-...
If the prosecutor can claim conspiracy and they almost always can. they can reset the clock essentially forever on the limitation statute. As I stated in my post you are essentally commited to variations on money laundering for the rest of your life unless you can make a "Retirement Level" lump sum of money usable for legal purposes.
I've also heard that about China. Just be sure not to target fellow nationals. I recall reading that Zeus botnet software did not include any Russian templates, for example.
But wasn't there a time when Russia cooperated more with the USA and EU? During the 00s, maybe?
Sounds like Jack Henry. My bank uses them for their client web portal. Up until last year, they had an 8 character max limit on your password, and you couldn't use any special characters or spaces.
But at least they make you verify your "personal photo" every time you log in. Which is more than useless since I assume they are trying to protect you from phishing and any decent phishing attempt would just skip that step and no one would notice. Or, if they wanted, they could just port your username to the real site and pass the photo along to you through the phishing site UI.
You can have a 6 (not less or more) alphanumeric password, but any letters get mapped to numerical digits.
And you're posting on a site that still does it that way - voting on HN works by creating an <img> and setting the src attribute to the vote url.
I've always been surprised/charmed by how old-school this site is. In some ways it's nice - it's blazingly lightweight - but it seems ironic that a tech incubator wouldn't have updated their website in ~12 years.
I'm sure even a random sample would cause a huge reduction in these inflated "master hacker" claims.
It seems that if you can have a few people rationally explain to a jury what the accused did, the crimes would seem much less diabolical.
And finally, I don't think stackoverflow cover ATM maintenance procedures yet. These guys weren't kiddies
I'm just saying I don't believe sensationalizing journalists or law enforcement. Pretty much every time when I've known anything about the case, there have been wild exaggerations.
Microsoft Windows + Outlook Email + Attached word document = the Drake equation for internet security. No matter how secure each of these things are individually, when added together infection becomes inevitable.
Why does outlook have to pass such documents to Word? Why does Word have to open and run macros so willingly? Why does Windows allow word to talk to the internet so easily? I just don't understand the use case these links are meant to address. Are there really so people out there installing software via links inside word documents? That this has to be a seamless user experience? There are so many opportunities to limit such such infections. Why do we still tolerate this?
We want Outlook to open our attachments without having to explicitly choosing the program.
We want Word to have those advanced macro features.
We want Word to have hyperlinks to things on the internet.
We want to be able to install things downloaded from the internet.
In isolation, each of those things are desirable to some segment of the userbase. It just so happens that the chain basically allows you to install a program from an email attachment.
This is the real question. The thieves are just a symptom of the real infection: terrible, insecure client software. I'm not sure what the solution is but I am pretty sure it involves Microsoft having skin in the game somehow.
My mom worked at a car dealership and realized that you could steal a car from them and it would be upwards of a year before they figured it out, since that's when they did inventory. Back then, the keys were all kept in an marginally secured cases.
What's the bank card for if they just stood there and it spit money out in a timed fashion?
Either it's a misstatement from the author, or law enforcement don't want to reveal how they actually caught them.
It's not illegal to tell tall tales to the press. Maybe they want to protect an informant. Or, maybe they just want to protect some technical dragnet they've set up, for the time being.
Like the Silk Road guy, "how could he possibly ask on stack overflow using his real name".
And so on.
There are ten thousands different mistakes that you can make, you need to guard against all of them. And against whatever unknown tech exists.
In this story, that dropped bank card turns out to not be that significant. The real breakthrough was identifying another mule through the video surveillance videos, following him to the airport and putting surveillance on the lockers used to store the cash.
He was also emptying ATMs apparently with witnesses behind him. This is like a bad movie. One of those witnesses might as well be an off-duty cop who could just pull out his gun right there.
People make stupid mistakes.
I always had the impression that Ross suffered from the fatal flaw that he didn't think what he was doing was wrong. He was an evangelical libertarian, and I think he didn't see "not getting caught" as the #1 priority the way a profit oriented criminal would.
- You have to be lucky every time to continue free... I only have to be lucky once to catch you.
https://books.google.fr/books/about/Stealing_the_Network.htm...
Have any examples?
It’s even worse when the service we’re talking about goes beyond social networking and becomes a must-have like a cell phone (referring to major US carriers secretly selling location data to a marketing company).