Slashdot Mirror
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."
The crooks were the ones using the keyloggers, not the people who caught them!!!!!!
Man, trying to get into bank records? You know everything is logged somehow. It scares me to think about 2 things... 1, life in prison, and, 2, with that much money, it draws suspicion, so, you really can't spend it.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
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
How do you manage to get key-logging software onto a bank system without physical access?
Is this more examples of social engineering, or would this have required physical access to the computers? [ I'm assuming here that the general bank computers aren't all on the interweb ]
Scary as hell that someone (almost) managed to do this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A quick English lesson:
"BBC News is reporting that the British police National High Tech Crime Unit has foiled an attempted fraud by hackers using keylogging software." - This means the hackers are using keylogging software
Note the addition of commas: "BBC News is reporting that the British police National High Tech Crime Unit has foiled an attempted fraud, by hackers, using keylogging software." - This means the police are using keylogging software
The editor of the article is CORRECT!
The ambiguous story description could be interpreted to mean either that the crackers installed the keylogger, or that they were caught by keyloggers. Any sensible reader would know that the crackers probably weren't caught by keyloggers, because they'd already have too much access by that point. But even just reading the story shows that their attack was by keylogger, not their capture.
Now it's obvious: Slashdot submission approvers (staff "authors" who vet the submission queue, to approve stories for publication) just read the text, and decide whether the story is interesting. They don't click the links, they don't think about whether anything makes sense. It really looks like Slashdot's submitters are higher quality than the editors who decide what to publish. And even worse, the editors seem to have the quality of a lower tier of Slashdot readers: grab the most inflammatory interpretation of a post, and run with it - without regard to the facts, or even just the story itself.
For all Slashdot's championing of the "open" community, we know very little of how the editorial process works. How many editors? Do they know each other? See each other, or work remotely? Is there an editorial policy, written or by "rolling consensus"? Are their criteria? What's the process like? With the published Slashcode so old, there's no way to know details about the queue process even by looking at "the" software. So what goes on there behind the curtain?
--
make install -not war
Someone in Israel, breaking into a branch of a Japanese bank, stealking British pounds. Well, theres some multiculturism for you.
This article would've scared the crap out of me if I hadn't already sent all my money to a Nigerian Prince.
Once I get the millions in cash I've been promised, I'll be sure to keep it away from any keyboards.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I fail to understand how such thing is possible, and I would appreciate explanations.
For example, if someone gets my bank account user/pass and logs into my bank account, transferring all my money into his account. When I see this, I will sure call my bank saying that this was an unauthorized transaction, and this transaction should be void, no? Besides, the thief reveal himself by specifying the destination account, no?
perception is reality
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.
The official 4217 list of currency codes is at http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/c
The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
13.9 million GBP is about 26.7 million USD.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
without Bruce Willis? Amazing.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
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:But parentheses aren't used like that in natural language. In English the right way to do it would be more like this: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.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The article includes its own title. Unless this is changed to 'Keylogging Used By Caught Bank Crackers' it remains incorrect.
from the BBC "The investigation was started last October after it was discovered that computer hackers had gained access to Sumitomo Mitsui bank's computer system in London. They managed to infiltrate the system with keylogging software that would have enabled them to track every button pressed on computer keyboards. " Sounds like it was the criminals using the software to me! RikF ---- Life begins at 5500 rpm
In Soviet Russia you own your cat
If I type my password into a txt file surrounded by a bunch of gibberish, i.e.
diowengiw03821-13kd98password8990830209keivli
Would key-logging software be able to find my password if I cut and paste the relevant data into the appropriate field when I want to enter the password?
Basically, where does the key-logging software sniff the bits? Is it off the bus from the keyboard to the processor, or does it sniff it off the processor?
Just curious
Creative parsing on your part cannot save you.
The title "Keylogging Used To Catch Bank Crackers" is indisputably wrong, no matter how you parse it.
Furthermore, you have introduced your own parsing bias in the first non-comma sentence. The fact is the non-comma sentence does not have one difinitive meaning, and you are just telling us what it means through your assumed meaning.
The fact is you cannot indisputably say that the word "using" applies to the hackers and not the Crime Unit - the only thing supporting that interpretation is the adjacency between hackers and using, and as you illustrate with commas, the sentence can be parsed without commas such that the using applies to the Crime Unit.
It's like saying "Criminal killed her using steak knife". In that sentence you cannot know whether I meant the criminal used the steak knife, or the woman was cutting her steak using her steak knife when she was killed with, say, a bullet from the criminal's gun.
So, if you take this ambiguous sentence, and combine that with the indisputably wrong title of "Keylogging Used To Catch Bank Crackers", then you cannot come to your conclusion that the editor of the article is correct.
it's about 156 million Icelandic Kronas.
Now let's hear hear from everyone else!
My other UID is 1337
Pardon me. I just thought it was humorous that you said "Sniff the bits".
According the xe.com, the international symbol for the pound sterling is actually GBP (for Great Britain Pound), not UKP as commonly denoted.
Same for CAD for Canadian dollars, but it's frequently listed (incorrectly) as
Cdn $