Slashdot Mirror
Another British Bank Hit By KVM Crooks
judgecorp writes "Another British bank — Barclays — has been hit by a fraud attempt using a stealthily-planted KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) device. Unlike the previous attempt on Santander, the crooks got away with £1.3 million, but were subsequently apprehended by the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crimes Unit."
Apparently about 2/3rds of crooks get away with it. The ones who do are the ones who do a one off of $500,000 or so and the banks decide it's better to absorb the loss then to go to the police and take the PR and resources hit that goes with it. The ones who do get caught are the ones who get greedy and do it multiple times or go for too much. There was an interview on Radio 4 talking about it (may have been the catch-me-if-you-can guy, can't remember for sure).
So I see the brainwashing regarding "minor inflation is good" did work on you. Back in my day, we had a word for FALLING prices on essential goods, it was called "progress".
Yeah, I would love to see the price on my house keep falling in value while the debt keep growing.. On the business side this effect will limit investments.
When I was syadmin a few years ago, I really used to get SO bloody angry with the maintenance guys, as they used to call in photocopy machine engineers when the things went wrong. Of course, they never informed the IT department (ME!), so all of a sudden, when I was going somewhere, I saw an 'unknown' guy hooked up with a laptop on the companies network *.
No matter WHAT I told them about security, it didn't matter - a working photocopier was more important than security.
This is obviously a similar situation - some 'official looking' technical guy turns up, tells a few porkies, and the staff just let him get on with it without any checks.
* I later coded a short perl script to send me a mail when an unknown MAC connected to the LAN.