Massive Hacking Ring Stole Data From 100 Million Bank Customers (bloomberg.com) 38
An anonymous reader writes: Court documents unsealed yesterday tie together cybersecurity breaches at several different banks and financial institutions as being caused by the same group of criminals. "Hackers and conspirators in more than a dozen countries generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds on pump-and-dump stock schemes and particularly lucrative online gambling, prosecutors said. From 2012 to mid-2015, the suspects and their co-conspirators successfully manipulated dozens of publicly traded stocks, sent misleading pitches to clients of banks and brokerages whose e-mail addresses they'd stolen, and profited by using trading accounts set up under fake names, prosecutors said." The attacks were spread across 75 different companies in nations across the globe, and included collusion with corrupt government officials who ignored the problem. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said, "By any measure, the data breaches at these firms were breathtaking in scope and in size."
Mobile phones (Score:2)
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Maybe all these hacks weren't related to mobile devices, but I'm really surprised anyone would use their mobile phone for banking until there are none of these kinds of issues.
Why, People use their mobile devices while they have sex.
We have to face it, humanity is welded to those little gaddamned things.
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I tried phone sex one time, but my phone just wants to be friends.
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No. It's just really into backdooring you, and you won't let it.
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People were saying this about banking apps back in the 1990's, especially the ones where the bank provided you with their own dial-in service, and password information was communicated non-encrypted or stored in plain text on the users PC.
Bitcoin? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are they also responsible for the sudden surge and fall of the Bitcoin value in the last week or so? It went up to USD$475 before falling down to USD$325.
Fight for your bitcoins! [coinbrawl.com]
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Of course, with Bitcoins anyone can follow the price and buy/sell at the right times. You can even bypass the exchange to fiat currency and exchange your gains for a more stable coin, like EarthCoin.
Fight for your bitcoins! [coinbrawl.com]
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Its a good thing we have regulations in place to keep banks from getting too big.
Otherwise you could hack hundreds of millions of accounts all at once.
Rather its a good thing we have banking and stock trading on the internet. What could ever go wrong? P Oh... wait.
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You know you can apply that stupid 'what could ever go wrong' meme to absolutely everything, right? People with actual brains know there are risks and benefits to everything, and it just becomes a matter of risk vs reward. And if you don't think there is any reward to banking and stock trading on the internet, clearly you have not thought about it at all.
Do you have a point?
Of course there are rewards. You can do things really really quickly and with software game the system very well indeed. When the software calls, you dump it all make a few cents or millions and move on. Or buy, whatever the software tells you
And you can use your smartphone to do your banking, and leave you more time to read facebook. That's priceless.
Of course, the bad guys might end up bringing the banks down that way, or you might get taxed on mysterious gains and transactions
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Same group? (Score:2)
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This isn't about 'a bunch of guys chatting', it is about actual crimes. And if there is more than one person involved then, by definition, it is a conspiracy.
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This isn't about 'a bunch of guys chatting', it is about actual crimes. And if there is more than one person involved then, by definition, it is a conspiracy.
I'm not implying the suspects shouldn't be prosecuted. All I'm saying is that prosecuting the case the wrong way, even if it leads to the correct result, might have serious implications for us all. Not all crimes are felonies, and not all felonies are punishable by jail time that exceeds the election cycle. Conspiracies are prosecuted as felonies and also lead to longer jail times than when a crime is committed by an individual.
A more concrete example, the TPP [slashdot.org] has vague provisions for "commercial scale" in
âoeItâ(TM)s like drinking freaking vodka (Score:2, Insightful)
Greed gets you every time.
I'm a Chase customer, but haven't lost any money. Why? I don't speculate, nor gamble, nor invest in schemes with guaranteed high rates of investment.
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A bit of stupidity combined with that greed.
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No one has (yet) successfully stolen from my CC nor PayPal account.
Chase is really on the ball with fraud detection, with a tiny rate of false positives (which only happened when we traveled out of state w/o telling them). A quick phone call cleared it right up.
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if hackers steal your money, does Chase reimburse you?
They've never (tried to AFAICT) gotten into my bank accounts, and CC fraud has (so far) always been caught early enough that I've not lost anything. Vendors might have taken a hit, though.
I live in rural Thailand. I don't even trust the Internet cables here.
Can't help you with that part...
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Chase is good in my experience. They let you set up your own alerts, for example they'll send you a text message anytime a purchase is made over a certain dollar amount. You can set it to $1 and receive a text every single time the card is used, which is nice both for fraud detection and for remembering how much money you're spending on recurring subscriptions. I think other card issuers offer this feature now but Chase was the first of my cards to implement that. They were also the first to send me a chip-
Sounds like someone was non-union... (Score:1)
Sounds like they didn't pay their criminal financier union dues. Otherwise it reads like any other bank exec resume.
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Came here to say the same thing.
successfully manipulated dozens of publicly traded stocks
No different from normal bankers.
sent misleading pitches to clients of banks and brokerages
Hahahahaha. Misleading pitches?! WTF. This is how Capitalism is run.
profited by using trading accounts set up under fake names
Again, how is this different from Wall Street?
The fact that this went on for so long... (Score:2)
...within the stock markets tends to explain why we should perhaps not give a shit about crooks stealing from crooks.
Sadly, the criminals we put in charge of the banking system make this kind of corrupt activity look like amateur night at the local karaoke bar.
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Hacking Ring, is that like a Smart Watch? (Score:1)
group of criminals... (Score:1)
This is quite a cover up for all the Wall Street swindling and price and interest rate (See Libor) manipulation that's going on. It should keep the prosecutors away from the real criminals, the banks themselves.
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Hacking ring stole data from bank computers .. (Score:2)
Double Standard (Score:2)
You just have to be the right kind of thief (one with an MBA).
"Because any man with a brief case can steal more money than any man with a gun." -- Don Henley