Wireless Cybercriminals Target Clueless Vacationers
July 11, 2009 by national
Filed under Emergency Preparedness
The newest trend in Internet fraud is “vacation hacking,” a sinister sort of tourist trap.
Cybercriminals are targeting travelers by creating phony Wi-Fi hot spots in airports, in hotels, and even aboard airliners.
Vacationers on their way to fun in the sun, or already there, think they’re using designated Wi-Fi access points. But instead, they’re signing on to fraudulent networks and hand-delivering everything on their laptops to the crooks.
“More and more people are traveling with Wi-Fi devices like smartphones and laptops,” says Marian Merritt, Internet safety advocate at the computer-security giant Symantec. “Airports and airlines and hotels are responding. They’re setting up free Wi-Fi networks to lure in customers. Now they’re luring in hackers as
Cybercriminals Steal $415,000 From Bullitt County Kentucky
July 6, 2009 by national
Filed under Incident Reports
Sophisticated international cybercriminals stole $415,000 from a bank account belonging to Bullitt County, Ky. last month — and got two dozen regular citizens to help them.
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A gang based in the former Soviet Union used viruses to secretly take control of computers used by county officials, including the country treasurer and a local judge, according to the Washington Post.
Then they secretly re-routed e-mails containing one-time passwords that both the treasurer and the judge would have to use to authorize wire transfers from the account, which belonged to Bullitt County Fiscal Court in Shepherdsville and was used to make payroll.
Beginning on June 22, the hackers began sending transfers, each under $10,000 so as not to alert federal watchdogs, to the bank accounts of 25 different Americans who’d been unwittingly recruited as “mules” by the Eastern European criminals.
The mules, who’d responded to ads for temporary at-home editing work on the job-placement Web site CareerBuilder.com, were instructed to keep 5 percent of the transfers as “commissions” and wire the rest of the money to accounts in Ukraine and Russia.
One mule found herself out thousands of dollars once Bullitt County got wise to what was happening and its bank started recalling the transfers.
