Hackers Steal $6.7M In Bank Cyber Heist

Orome1 writes "A perfectly planned and coordinated bank robbery was executed during the first three days of the new year in Johannesburg, and left the targeted South African Postbank — part of the nation's Post Office service — with a loss of some $6.7 million. The cyber gang behind the heist was obviously very well informed about the post office's IT systems, and began preparing the ground for the heist a few months before, by opening accounts in post offices across the country and compromising an employee computer in the Rustenburg Post Office."

Comments

Summary is wrong

[Smallpond]

42m Rand is not 6.7m USD, it is more like 5.2m.

Re:Summary is wrong

[Formalin]

That's Zimbabwe. SA, while experiencing considerable inflation in the 90's, is reasonably stable now, and no where near the level of inflation in zimbabwe.

1 rand used to be worth around 1 USD, IIRC (apartheid era). inflation went up with political change, and by around 2000? it was 10 or so to a dollar, and is something like 6-7 these days. So 50-100% some years, less overall, which is bad... but not hyperinflation, where prices double in days or hours, instead of years (like in zimbabwe).

Re:Summary is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

and is something like 6-7 these days

1 U.S. dollar = 8.03322542 South African rands

42 million South African rands = 5.228286 million U.S. dollars

Good thing we're not on the internet, or it would look a little stupid to be making up numbers when there are perfectly good sources available.

Re:Summary is wrong

[gstoddart]

Seriously though, for currency, other than USD?
    Not if they want people to know what the hell they're talking about.

Have you ever been outside of the US? Or are you just talking out of your ass?

In Canada we have a dollar ... the symbol is the standard '$' used by most places that have currency they call dollars. There is no other symbol on the keyboard, the way you differentiate is something like "$100 CDN" -- and within Canada, we don't even do that.

If it wasn't SOPA protest blackout day, you could read a list of places, but this will pretty much show you what is used. Almost 30 countries besides the US express their currency with the $ sign.

I'm afraid if you're claiming that only the US dollar is described using the $ sign you're completely mistaken ... because it's a pretty widespread symbol.

Re:Surprised it took so long for somebody to do th

[NeutronCowboy]

I'm much more surprised by the fact that they managed to take about 1% of the entire assets of the wanna-be bank. That's pretty disturbing - because that means that nothing was working right. Not their security, not their required privileges, not their fraud detection, nothing. Note to self: don't do business in SA.

Re:And terrorists thank you for running windows

[WindBourne]

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.postbank.co.za
And to back it up

....$telnet www.postbank.co.za 80
Trying 165.8.13.24...
Connected to www.postbank.co.za.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Length: 1635
Content-Type: text/html
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:35:38 GMT
Connection: close


The page cannot be found
....

Anybody running windows on their website is highly likely running it inside.

Re:Surprised it took so long for somebody to do th

[b0bby]

It didn't:
http://inaudit.com/audit/it-audit/online-theft-that-sucked-13m-from-financial-firm-in-florida-unmasked-9888/
This was in Florida last year.