US charges hackers who made millions after targeting financial services giants in biggest ever cyber-attack
Cyber criminals have taken it up a gear. The US has charged three men accused of a major hacking scheme that targeted mainly financial services giants such as JPMorgan and generated hundreds of millions of dollars.
"By any measure, the data breaches at these firms were breathtaking in scope and in size," and signal a "brave new world of hacking for profit", US Attorney Preet Bharara said.
Prosecutors said the scheme, which began in 2007, resulted in the exposure of the personal information of over 100m people. The hackers were able to manipulate stock prices and ran online casinos and an illegal bitcoin exchange. They also laundered money through a number of shell companies.
Gary Shalon, Joshua Samuel Aaron and Ziv Orenstein were charged in a 23-count indictment with alleged crimes that targeted 12 companies including nine financial services firms and media outlets including The Wall Street Journal.
Adam Kujawa, head of malware intelligence at Malwarebytes, puts the crimes into context:
After learning about the breaches from JP Morgan and other organisations and the kind of customer information stolen, most of the security community assumed one of a few different scenarios in which the information would be used. These possibilities included users having their identity stolen, accessing personal accounts and then the most likely outcome of the information being used in phishing and scam attacks against the customers.
Finding out that the criminals were not only using the information in the kind of attack we all expected, but the fact they went a step further and used it to steal money from a larger source by manipulating stocks is very surprising. It certainly reflects the kinds of minds involved in modern day cyber crime. We aren’t just dealing with casual criminals stealing a little money from individual users, but rather intricate minds utilising both modern technology and traditional psychological attacks to create a new kind of crime.