Bloodless $45M bank heist impressed cybercrime experts
Sabtu, 11 Mei 2013
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May 10, 4:41 PM (ET)
By COLLEEN LONG and MARTHA MENDOZA
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NEW YORK (AP) - A bloodless bank heist that netted more than $45 million has left even cybercrime experts impressed by the technical sophistication, if not the virtue, of the con artists who pulled off a remarkable internationally organized attack.
"It was pretty ingenious," Pace University computer science professor Darren Hayes said Friday.
"It was pretty ingenious," Pace University computer science professor Darren Hayes said Friday.
On the creative side of the heist, a small team of highly skilled hackers penetrated bank systems, erased withdrawal limits on prepaid debit cards and stole account numbers. On the crude end, criminals used handheld devices to change the information on the magnetic strips of old hotel key cards, used credit cards and depleted debit cards.
Seven people were arrested in the U.S., accused of operating the New York cell of what prosecutors said was a network that carried out thefts at ATMs in 27 countries from Canada to Russia. Law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen nations were involved in the investigation, which was being led by the Secret Service.
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"It's pretty scary if you think about it. They changed the account balances. That's like the holy grail for a thief," said Chris Wysopal, co-founder of security company Veracode.
The next step was technically simpler, almost an arts-and-crafts activity.
Crime ring members in 27 countries ran used plastic cards, just about anything with a standard magnetic strip, through handheld magnetic stripe encoders, widely available online for less than $300. Those devices allow users to change information on magnetic stripes or to write new cards with a simple swipe.
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On two pre-arranged days - once in December and again in February - criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800.
In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
The New York money runners made off with $2.8 million, according to the indictment, a fraction of the total amount yielded by the heist.
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Authorities said they seized his iPhone and found a photo of him and another suspect posing with a stack of cash between them in a car.
"There were obviously a lot of great minds behind this exploit, and then there were the pawns, the mules. They are entirely exploitable," said Phyllis Scheck, vice president at the security firm McAfee who has testified to Congress about how banks and small businesses need to prepare for cyber thieves.
Scheck couldn't help be impressed by the choreography.
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More investigations continue and other arrests have been made in other countries, but New York prosecutors did not have details. More arrests in the U.S. were possible, they said.
Police in Duesseldorf, Germany, said a 56-year-old woman and her 34-year-old son were linked to the case earlier this year and are still in investigative detention after having been arrested in February. They have refused to speak to police.
In New York, the cell was led by Alberto Lajud Pena, 23, who was found dead in the Dominican Republic with $100,000 in cash on him, prosecutors said. A man arrested in his death told authorities it was a botched robbery, and two other suspects were on the lam.
According to court documents, Lajud Pena communicated via email with a Russian criminal organization that specializes in laundering money and wrote to his shadowy bosses in charge of the operation. He wired money and deposited cash into several accounts.
"I sent scanned deposit slips," Lajud Pena writes in one.
"Deposit has cleared. Order paid. Good job," the sender replies.
Prosecutors said Lajud Pena recruited men he knew from Yonkers, some of whom worked as bus drivers for a company that provided services to special-needs students.
All but one of the surviving suspects were in jail, and it wasn't clear who was representing them. In Yonkers Friday, neighbors at the basement apartment where authorities said they seized $3,740 of the stolen money said police had visited two days in a row last month.
About $2 million is still missing, officials said.
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Associated Press writers Peter Svensson and James Fitzgerald in New York, Frank Jordans in Berlin and writer Ezequiel Abiú López in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, contributed to this report.
From the New York Times=
By MARC SANTORA
It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault.
In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours.
In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million.
The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating financial information with the stroke of a few keys, as well as common street criminals, who used that information to loot the automated teller machines.
The first to be caught was a street crew operating in New York, their pictures captured as, prosecutors said, they traveled the city withdrawing money and stuffing backpacks with cash.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment charging eight men — including their suspected ringleader, who was found dead in the Dominican Republic last month. The indictment and criminal complaints in the case offer a glimpse into what the authorities said was one of the most sophisticated and effective cybercrime attacks ever uncovered.
It was, prosecutors said, one of the largest heists in New York City history, rivaling the 1978 Lufthansa robbery, which inspired a scene in the movie “Goodfellas.”
Beyond the sheer amount of money involved, law enforcement officials said, the thefts underscored the vulnerability of financial institutions around the world to clever criminals working to stay a step ahead of the latest technologies designed to thwart them.
“In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet,” said Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in Brooklyn. “Moving as swiftly as data over the Internet, the organization worked its way from the computer systems of international corporations to the streets of New York City, with the defendants fanning out across Manhattan to steal millions of dollars from hundreds of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours.”
The indictment outlined how the criminals were able to steal data from banks, relay that information to a far-flung network of so-called cashing crews, and then have the stolen money laundered in purchases of luxury items like Rolex watches and expensive cars.
In the first operation, hackers infiltrated the system of an unnamed Indian credit-card processing company that handles Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. Such companies are attractive to cybercriminals because they are considered less secure than financial institutions, computer security experts say.
The hackers, who are not named in the indictment, then raised the withdrawal limits on prepaid MasterCard debit accounts issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah, also known as RakBank, which is in United Arab Emirates.
Once the withdrawal limits have been eliminated, “even a few compromised bank account numbers can result in tremendous financial loss to the victim financial institution,” the indictment states. And by using prepaid cards, the thieves were able to take money without draining the bank accounts of individuals, which might have set off alarms more quickly.
With five account numbers in hand, the hackers distributed the information to individuals in 20 countries who then encoded the information on magnetic-stripe cards. On Dec. 21, the cashing crews made 4,500 A.T.M. transactions worldwide, stealing $5 million, according to the indictment.
While the street crews were taking money out of bank machines, the computer experts were watching the financial transactions from afar, ensuring that they would not be shortchanged on their cut, according to court documents.
MasterCard alerted the Secret Service to the activity soon after the transactions were completed, said a law enforcement official, who declined to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.
Robert D. Rodriguez, a special agent with the Secret Service for 22 years and now the chairman of Security Innovation Network, said that in some ways the crime was as old as money itself: bad guys trying to find weaknesses in a system and exploiting that weakness.
“The difference today is that the dynamics of the Internet and cyberspace are so fast that we have a hard time staying ahead of the adversary,” he said. And because these crimes are global, he said, even when the authorities figure out who is behind them they might not be able to arrest them or persuade another law enforcement agency to take action.
After pulling off the December theft, the organization grew more bold, and two months later it struck again — this time nabbing $40 million.
On Feb. 19, cashing crews were in place at A.T.M.'s across Manhattan and in two dozen other countries waiting for word to spring into action.
This time, the hackers had infiltrated a credit-card processing company based in the United States that also handles Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. Prosecutors did not disclose the company’s name.
After securing 12 account numbers for cards issued by the Bank of Muscat in Oman and raising the withdrawal limits, the cashing crews were set in motion. Starting at 3 p.m., the crews made 36,000 transactions and withdrew about $40 million from machines in the various countries in about 10 hours. In New York City, a team of eight people made 2,904 withdrawals, stealing $2.4 million.
Surveillance photos of one suspect at various A.T.M.'s showed the man’s backpack getting heavier and heavier, Ms. Lynch said, comparing the series of thefts to the caper at the center of the movie “Ocean’s Eleven.”
While the New York crew had a productive spree, the crews in Japan seem to have been the most successful, stealing around $10 million, probably because some banks in Japan allow withdrawals of as much as $10,000 from a single bank machine.
“The significance here is they are manipulating the financial system to be able to change these balance limits and withdrawal limits,” said Kim Peretti, a former prosecutor in the computer crime division of the Justice Department who is now a partner in the law firm Alston & Bird. “When you have a scheme like this, where the system can be manipulated to quickly get access to millions of dollars that in some sense did not exist before, it could be a systemic risk to our financial system.”
It was unclear to whom the hacked accounts belonged, and who might ultimately be responsible for the losses.
The indictment suggests a far-reaching operation, but there were few details about the people responsible for conducting the hacking or who might be leading the global operation. Law enforcement agencies in more than a dozen countries are still investigating, according to federal prosecutors. The authorities said the leader of the New York cashing crew was Alberto Lajud-Peña, 23, whose body was found in the Dominican Republic late last month. Seven other people were charged with conspiracy to commit “access device fraud” and money laundering.
The prosecutors said they were all American citizens and were based in Yonkers. The age of one defendant was given as 35; the others were all said to be 22 to 24. Mr. Lajud-Peña fled the United States just as the authorities were starting to make arrests of members of his crew, the law enforcement official said.
On April 27, according to news reports from the Dominican Republic, two hooded gunmen stormed a house where he was playing dominoes and began shooting. A manila envelope containing about $100,000 in cash remained untouched.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: May 11, 2013
An article on Friday about a sophisticated hacking crime in which $45 million was stolen from bank A.T.M.’s within hours misspelled, in some editions, the surname of a former prosecutor in the computer crime division of the Justice Department who commented on the case. She is Kim Peretti, not Paretti. The article also overstated the connection between the movie “Goodfellas” and the Lufthansa robbery in 1978, to which the A.T.M. case was compared. The Lufthansa robbery was only a plotline in the film; the movie itself was based on the book “Wise Guy,” written by Nicholas Pileggi, about the mobster Henry Hill.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/eight-charged-in-45-million-global-cyber-bank-thefts.html?src=me&ref=general
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