Crooks Arrested Over KVM-Based Bank Heist Attempt

judgecorp writes "Twelve men have been arrested over an attempt to take control of computers at a Santander bank branch in London using a stealthily planted KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) switch installed by a bogus maintenance engineer. The men were caught by the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crimes Unit."

Foolish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows if you want to rip off a bank. You need to BE the banker.

That way you get the money. And then the goverment comes and gives you MORE money. Win. Win. No jailtime.

He got physical access to the machine!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

So this bogus "maintenance engineer" was able to get access to the physical machine and install a KVM switch and snake cables out of the bank to another location controlled by the crooks. It is not clear how this was detected and how he was tracked.

Well, he could have easily slipped in an unobstrusive thumbdrive with a key logger in to a back usb port, and collected it back in the next "maintenance" visit! One could imagine a usb device based KVM without cables transmitting data wirelessly. Such devices are very useful, I could stash my tower in a sound proofed cooling enclosure far away and keep my KVM on my desk. So they will be in the market, if they are not already in the market. At that point all the bogus engineer had to do was to slip in an unobstrusive usb device in a back port.

Once the crooks have physical access to the machine, it becomes very difficult to protect against. Once a crook and an insider cooperate it becomes very very difficult to guard against.