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The Mob's IT Department
An anonymous reader writes: An article at Bloomberg relates the story of two IT professionals who reluctantly teamed up with an organized criminal network in building a sophisticated drug smuggling operation. "[The criminals were] clever, recruiting Van De Moere and Maertens the way a spymaster develops a double agent. By the time they understood what they were involved in, they were already implicated." The pair were threatened, and afraid to go to the police. They were asked to help with deploying malware and building "pwnies" — small computers capable of intercepting network traffic that could be disguised as power strips and routers. In 2012, authorities lucked into some evidence that led them to investigate the operation. "Technicians found a bunch of surveillance devices on [the network of large shipping company MSC]. There were two pwnies and a number of Wi-Fi keyloggers—small devices installed in USB ports of computers to record keystrokes—that the hackers were using as backups to the pwnies. MSC hired a private investigator, who called PricewaterhouseCoopers' digital forensics team, which learned that computer hackers were intercepting network traffic to steal PIN codes and hijack MSC's containers."
"Pwnies" are probably PWN Plugs from Pwnie Express. The original models were basically Sheeva Plugs, a raspberry-pi esque computer inside a wall wart form factor.
It would be interesting to see if these guys received products or training from Pwnie Express, a well known infosec vendor.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Dude, that's the second time. There is no "h" in "were". "Were" as in "they were walking around." "Where" as in "Where are you?" And for good measure, let's contract "we are" to make "we're" as in "We're going to learn English today."