Top 7 Financial Services Hacks By The Numbers
1) 160 Million Credit Cards, 5 Hackers, Hundreds of Million Withdrawn — July 2013
5 Russians no longer using 160 million credit cards - there goes US consumer credit
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 25, 2013
Four Russian nationals and a Ukrainian are in big, big trouble. Paul Fishman, the United States attorney for the District of New Jersey, said losses sustained from their credit card hacking crime ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you were looking to epitomize financial fraud you can stop here. The men are accused of hacking into computer networks of more than a dozen financial corporations, and stealing and selling at least 160 million credit and debit card numbers. The hack had a long run, going undetected from 2005 to 2012.
Victims include Citibank, PNC Bank, Nasdaq, Heartland Payment Systems, a large credit and debit processing company, JCPenney and JetBlue, as well as other retailers.
“The attacks underscore the broader threat that hacking poses to a financial system that is almost entirely reliant on networked communications,” reports the New York Times. Security experts note the attack was very well coordinated and that it carefully singled out specific financial systems to gain access to so many personal credit and debit card accounts.
Furthermore, the attacks were well orchestrated, with various actors taking on different roles to penetrate and fetch data from the system. Others would sell the credit card data to resellers. It’s apparently a signature tactic of Russian organized crime and it highlights the high-level threat of criminal hacking gangs.
Fun fact: American credit card numbers sold for an average for $10 while European card numbers sold for $50 because of the poorer security safeguards on American cards.
This is not the first rodeo for one of the defendants, Kalinin, who is also involved in a separate case of hacking the Nasdaq stock exchange servers. In addition, Kalinin and another Russian are accused of stealing bank account information to withdrawal millions from Citibank and PNC Bank accounts between December 2005 and November 2008. Kalinin is still at large.
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