Keylogging Used To Catch Bank Crackers

An anonymous reader writes "BBC News is reporting that the British police National High Tech Crime Unit has foiled an attempted fraud by hackers using keylogging software. The London branch of the Sumitomo Mitsui bank of Japan was the target, and a person has been arrested in Israel after being identified as the recipient of an attempted electronic transfer of UKP13.9m."

Comments

Slashdot story incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.. yeah, this article synopsis would be wrong.

From the article it links to:

They managed to infiltrate the system with keylogging software that would have enabled them to track every button pressed on computer keyboards.

The hackers were attempting to use keylogging software.. there's nothing in the bbc article whatsoever about how the police caught them, let alone if they were caught using keylogging software (which is what the synopsis says).

Apparantly, not even the editors read slashdot stories :)

Abbreviation correction

[justanyone]

attempted electronic transfer of UKP13.9m

Sorry if this is in any way pedantic - just FYI since I used to work in a capital markets trading environment...

The abbreviation in most currency markets is not UKP, it's GBP, for Great Britain Pounds.

To quote from a handy refernce page:
ISO 4217 (Codes for the Representation of Currencies and Funds) defines three-letter abbreviations for world currencies. The general principle used to construct these abbreviations is to take the two-letter abbreviations defined in ISO 3166 (Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries) and append the first letter of the currency name (e.g., USD for the United States Dollar).

A non-official site's list is at: http://www.jhall.demon.co.uk/currency/by_country.h tml

The official 4217 list of currency codes is at http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/cu rrencycodeslist.html

The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/ 02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html

Precedence rules.

[kahei]

It's a matter of operator precedence being poorly defined in English, leading to the ambiguity known as a 'dangling modifier'.

Parentheses could have solved the problem:

The police foiled (hackers using keyloggers).

But parentheses aren't used like that in natural language. In English the right way to do it would be more like this:

The police foiled hackers who were using keyloggers.

The 'who' strongly binds the entity before it to the entity after it, indicating that 'using keyloggers' is a predicate of 'hackers'. Thus the modifier, now tightly bound, dangles no more.

Re:Too much

[mangu]

with that much money, it draws suspicion, so, you really can't spend it.

Ever heard of "laundering" money? What you have to do is open a legit company and make it profitable with the money you have stashed somewhere. Tricky, yes. But possibly doable.

However you are right about drawing suspicion. You can never become as rich as $400 million, because being as rich as that will make you automatically famous. If you stay below a limit, which I assume to be about up to $10 million if done right, you might be able to have a comfortable life without getting caught.

But all this is theory. In practice, I can't recall any heist above $1 million where the perps got away. It may take some time, even years, but you will be caught in the end. You may be much smarter than the cops, but once the thing is done, they have all the time until you die to catch you. No, even if you manage to escape, you'll never have a quiet moment without worry. Anyone contemplating a big robbery should google ronald biggs train robbery if they think escaping to a far away country is an option.