Authorities in Ukraine this week detained five individuals believed to be the masterminds behind sophisticated cyber thefts that stole $70 million – out of an attempted $220 million — from hundreds of U.S.-based small to mid-sized businesses over the last several years, the FBI said Friday.
Troy Owen never thought he’d see the day when the cyber thieves who robbed his company of $800,000 would ever be charged with any crime. Owens said that investigators told him that the perpetrators were mostly overseas in places like Ukraine and Moldova, and that it might be tough to catch those responsible.
But on Thursday afternoon, authorities in New York announced they had charged more than 60 individuals — and arrested 20 — in connection with international cyber heists perpetrated against dozens of companies in the United States, including Owen’s.
Authorities in the United Kingdom on Wednesday charged 11 individuals with running an international cyber crime syndicate that laundered millions of dollars stolen from consumers and businesses with the help of the help of the ultra-sophisticated ZeuS banking Trojan.
Authorities in the United Kingdom on Tuesday arrested 19 Eastern Europeans alleged to be connected to a massive fraud ring that has stolen tens of millions of dollars from hundreds of consumers and small to mid-sized businesses in the U.K. and the United States.
A major new malware spam campaign mimicking invites sent via business networking site LinkedIn.com leverages user trust and a kitchen sink of browser exploits in a bid to install the password-stealing ZeuS Trojan.
Criminals have launched an major e-mail campaign to deploy the infamous ZeuS Trojan, blasting out spam messages variously disguised as fraud alerts from the Internal Revenue Service, Twitter account hijack warnings, and salacious Youtube.com videos.
Oracle Corp. has shipped a new version of its Java software that nixes a feature in Java that hackers have been using to foist malicious software. Java 6 Update 20 was released sometime in the last 24 hours, and includes some security fixes, although Oracle’s documentation on that front is somewhat opaque. Most significantly, the update removes a feature that hackers have started using to install malware.
A rash of home foreclosures and abandoned dwellings had already taken its toll on the tax revenue for the Village of Summit, a town of 10,000 just outside Chicago. Then, in March, computer crooks broke into the town’s online bank account, making off with nearly $100,000.
It’s common for malware writers to taunt one another with petty insults nested within their respective creations. Competing crime groups also often seek to wrest infected machines from one another. A very public turf war between those responsible for maintaining… Read More »
Organized computer criminals yanked more than $200,000 out of the online bank accounts of a Missouri dental practice this month, in yet another attack that exposes the risks that small- to mid-sized organizations face in banking online.
