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The Biggest Digital Heist in History Isn’t Over Yet
- adiack 8y agoNowadays everything runs on SAAS, why are banks and other institutions letting key people use MS windows and outlook in the first place. Don't you reduce your risk by like 90% by using Linux clients instead?
- ur-whale 8y agoOne interesting bit is the "laundering through a bitcoin warehouse he bought in China". I suspect this is actually a Bitcoin mining farm: In goes dirty money, to buy mining hardware in bulk. Out comes fresh, never-transacted-with Bitcoin block rewards. It is fairly hard for authorities to trace the wash: in Bitcoin land, block rewards are the least-tainted kind of coins.
- freeloop10 8y ago> It is fairly hard for authorities to trace the wash: in Bitcoin land, block rewards are the least-tainted kind of coins. Also, the most anonymous.
- SilasX 8y agoBut I thought Bitcoin mining hardware was all online-only sales?
- ur-whale 8y agoWe're not talking about buying a couple of miner machines here, but financing a whole warehouse filled with them.
- SilasX 8y agoWhich would make it harder to conceal the dubious origin of the money.
- RIMR 8y agoUnless you're buying crates of stolen GPUs off the black market with heaps of cash. I am betting these guys have some connections.
- ur-whale 8y agoNot really. From the p.o.v of the seller of mining hardware, he's just selling hardware in exchange for money, and he has no KYC/AML requirement, he's not a bank, he's just a regular business. And any other company involved in building the mining operation are the same way.
- SilasX 8y agoRight but the point of laundering is that you have cash you want to legitimize, so it must "re-enter" as cash. But hardware mining sales are all online, not cash, hence my original comment!
- adreamingsoul 8y agoAm I the only one that finds it suspicious that one of these guys would drop a debit card at a heist?
- eumoria 8y agoEspecially in the sentence prior to it where it says "the ATM started disgorging cash without either man touching it" What's the bank card for if they just stood there and it spit money out in a timed fashion?
- huac 8y agothe ATM was a Taiwanese ATM, and they were Russian, so they could have had their own Russian debit card.
- adreamingsoul 8y agoYeah, maybe the author of that article was having a bit of leeway with the story or the facts being presented to us are questionable. Either way, it doesn't give me a lot of trust or confidence in the truth of that article.
- neilk 8y agoGood catch. Either it's a misstatement from the author, or law enforcement don't want to reveal how they actually caught them.
- gaius 8y agoWhich implies parallel construction
- neilk 8y agoI think it's parallel construction iff they submit a false line of evidence to a judge. It's not illegal to tell tall tales to the press. Maybe they want to protect an informant. Or, maybe they just want to protect some technical dragnet they've set up, for the time being.
- dmvinson 8y agoThe article doesn't really go into the thieves' backgrounds at all strangely enough. How did Katana end up in the bank heist business? How did he acquire the skills to turn making fake bank transactions into an "art"? I always wonder about the kind of person who ends up in these criminal dealings and where they come from.
- mywittyname 8y agoHe probably worked for a bank. Lots of smart people learn the "loopholes" of their trades. My mom worked at a car dealership and realized that you could steal a car from them and it would be upwards of a year before they figured it out, since that's when they did inventory. Back then, the keys were all kept in an marginally secured cases.
- kolpa 8y agoJohnny Cash figured how to steal them from the factory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18cW_yHo3PY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18cW_yHo3PY
- _bxg1 8y agoFrom the headline alone I assumed it was going to be about the tech industry's theft of the world's data
- mikro2nd 8y agoAnd I thought they were going to talk about cryptocurrencies... :)
- pphysch 8y agoTether, more specifically
- ealexhudson 8y agoThey do say a lot of theft cash ended up converted to Bitcoin. So, at least a measurable chunk of the liquidity in the market is down to this...
- neilk 8y agoI've learned to be skeptical when I see law enforcement praising the l337 skillz of their targets. > “This guy is in another league, he’s like Rafa Nadal > playing tennis,” Yuste says. “There are few people in > the world capable of doing what he did.” It sounds really cool (and budget-justifying) to be chasing some mastermind, and a journalist is likely to pump up that aspect of the story too. Because they know we're reading it to be entertained, for there to be suspense, to enjoy the frisson of a "victimless" crime requiring ingenuity, like Ocean's 11. Then you find out later it's just a python script probing for default passwords, or someone who learned some of nmap's command-line switches.
- jtms 8y agoThe fact they supposedly recovered 15k Bitcoins tells me he wasn't sophisticated enough to secure his private key sufficiently. If he had memorized a BIP39 mnemonic for his private key we wouldn't be reading about $162 million dollars worth getting seized. Brain wallets are pretty tough to crack.
- magnetic 8y agoA wrench is all you need apparently. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- _bxg1 8y agoYeah; I also have the general impression (admittedly without much data to support it) that IT security at banks and other gargantuan, long-lived institutions is pretty crappy? I would think it's easy to get in, and hard to not get caught. Anecdotally, I have a friend who briefly worked at a company which exclusively makes software for financial institutions. Their product was a web app that only worked in a version of Internet Explorer so old, it didn't support Ajax. Asynchronous requests were made by changing the src attribute of a 1px <iframe>. This was in 2015.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>I would think it's easy to get in, and hard to not get caught. Imagine you're an new employee at a big old company with a lot of legacy tech that's had mediocre maintenance and documentation over the years as is typical. You are going to leave footprints everywhere just learning to do your job. Imagine how many footprints you leave when you're an outsider who has to learn it all from scratch without documentation or assistance from other employees with historical knowledge. Now try getting anything done in that system without leaving tracks or triggering alerts when you hit some API that even the employees don't knows exists. The reason nobody ever gets caught is because insurance doesn't usually require a conviction before paying out and the effort required to determine who broke in is much higher than figuring out the exact sequence of events because you'd have to do the same investigation on every compromised system they used along the way.
- sandworm101 8y ago>> Someone had sent emails to the bank’s employees with Microsoft Word attachments, purporting to be from suppliers such as ATM manufacturers. It was a classic spear-phishing gambit. Microsoft Windows + Outlook Email + Attached word document = the Drake equation for internet security. No matter how secure each of these things are individually, when added together infection becomes inevitable. Why does outlook have to pass such documents to Word? Why does Word have to open and run macros so willingly? Why does Windows allow word to talk to the internet so easily? I just don't understand the use case these links are meant to address. Are there really so people out there installing software via links inside word documents? That this has to be a seamless user experience? There are so many opportunities to limit such such infections. Why do we still tolerate this?
- bena 8y agoEvery piece is desired in some fashion. We want Outlook to open our attachments without having to explicitly choosing the program. We want Word to have those advanced macro features. We want Word to have hyperlinks to things on the internet. We want to be able to install things downloaded from the internet. In isolation, each of those things are desirable to some segment of the userbase. It just so happens that the chain basically allows you to install a program from an email attachment.
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- cgh 8y ago>> Why do we still tolerate this? This is the real question. The thieves are just a symptom of the real infection: terrible, insecure client software. I'm not sure what the solution is but I am pretty sure it involves Microsoft having skin in the game somehow.
- r00fus 8y agoI'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft's willingness to roll over to the US government (PRISM, NSAKEY).
- 8y ago
- wazoox 8y agoReminds me of the book "Stealing the network - how to own a continent", it was a fun read back then... https://books.google.fr/books/about/Stealing_the_Network.html?id=TIVArzStPGAC&redir_esc=y https://books.google.fr/books/about/Stealing_the_Network.htm...
- alanfranzoni 8y agoI thought it was an article about Bitcoin.