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

Even the submitter didn't read the article!!

[REBloomfield]

The crooks were the ones using the keyloggers, not the people who caught them!!!!!!

Re:Even the submitter didn't read the article!!

[Trolling4Columbine]

You're new here, aren't you...

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 :)

Blinks behind the mask

[Doc Ruby]

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?

They managed all of this

[tezza]

without Bruce Willis? Amazing.

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.