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The cyber thieves were smart. Instead of targeting corporations and large banks that had state-of-the-art online security, they went after the accounts of medium-sized companies, towns, and even churches. Before they were caught, members of the theft ring managed to steal $70 million. Today, with our law enforcement partners in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the Netherlands, announced the execution of numerous arrests and search warrants in multiple countries in one of the largest cyber criminal cases we ever investigated.
“This was a major theft ring,” said Gordon Snow, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Global criminal activity on this scale is a threat to our financial infrastructure, and it can only be effectively countered through the kind of international cooperation we have seen in this case.” Using a Trojan horse virus known as Zeus, hackers in Eastern Europe infected computers around the world. The virus was carried in an e-mail, and when targeted individuals at businesses and municipalities opened the e-mail, the malicious software installed itself on the victimized computer, secretly capturing passwords, account numbers, and other data used to log into online banking accounts. The hackers used this information to take over the victims’ bank accounts and make unauthorized transfers of thousands of dollars at a time, often routing the funds to other accounts controlled by a network of “money mules.” Many of the U.S. money mules were recruited from overseas. They created bank accounts using fake documents and phony names. Once the money was in their accounts, the mules could either wire it back to their bosses in Eastern Europe, or turn it into cash and smuggle it out of the country. For their work, they were paid a commission. Yesterday, the New York office arrested 10 subjects related to the case, and is seeking 17 others. Those arrested are charged with using hundreds of false-name bank accounts to receive more than $3 million from victimized accounts. In all, the global theft ring attempted to steal some $220 million, and was actively involved in using Zeus to infect more computers. But beyond the actual and potential monetary loss, this case is significant because of the extraordinary level of cooperation among international law enforcement to stop the group. And it also sends a message to hackers around the world that there are fewer safe havens from which they can operate. “There are many challenges in a complicated global case like this one,” said Weysan Dun, special agent in charge of our Omaha office, where the investigation began in May 2009 when agents discovered a pattern of suspicious banking transactions. “With multiple countries involved, there are differences in times zones, geography, and culture, not to mention that all our cyber laws are not the same. “But those differences were overcome,” Dun said, “and the results speak for themselves.” He added, “The international tolerance for this kind of criminal activity is decreasing. Our partners overseas are dealing more aggressively and effectively with cybercrime than ever before. The number of nations that collaborated and worked in partnership with the Bureau on this case represents a very significant step forward in the way we investigate these cases.” Criminology Research Project, Inc., congratulates the FBI’s Cyber Division for a job well done. Dr. Edward Blackwelder Executive Director Criminology Research Project, Inc. |
Archive for the ‘Cybercrime’ Category
Cyber Bust
Saturday, October 9th, 2010
UPDATE: INTERNET CRIMES -Internet Crimes Complaint Center & Federal Bureau of Investigation Report
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
On January 1, 2009, IC3 implemented a new complaint classification system based on a redesigned questionnaire that generates an automatic classification of the complaint into one of 79 offense-based categories. This redesign also resulted in a number of changes to the way the system gathers and classifies complaint data. Further information about these changes can be found in Appendix I of this report. Significant findings related to an analysis of the complaint data include:
Email scams that used the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) name (schemes in which the scammer pretended • to be affiliated with the FBI in an effort to gain information from the target) represented 16.6% of all complaints submitted to IC3. Non-delivered merchandise and/or payment (in which either a seller did not ship the promised item or a buyer did not pay for an item) accounted for 11.9% of complaints. Advance fee fraud (a scam wherein the target is asked to give money upfront- often times- for some reward that never materializes) made up 9.8% of complaints. Identity theft and overpayment fraud (scams in which the target is given a fraudulent monetary instrument in excess of the agreed-upon amount for the transaction, and asked to send back the overpayment using a legitimate monetary instrument) round out the top five categories of all complaints submitted to IC3 during the year.
Of the top five categories of offenses reported to law enforcement during 2009, non-delivered merchandise and/or • payment ranked 19.9%; identity thieft, 14.1%; credit card fraud, 10.4%; auction fraud, 10.3%; and computer fraud (destruction/damage/vandalism of property), 7.9%.
Of the complaints involving financial harm that were referred to law enforcement, the highest median dollar losses were • found among investment fraud ($3,200), overpayment fraud ($2,500), and advance fee fraud ($1,500) complainants.
In those complaints in which perpetrator information is provided, 76.6% were male and half resided in one of the • following states: California, Florida, New York, the District of Columbia, Texas, and Washington. The majority of reported perpetrators (65.4%) were from the United States. A number of perpetrators were also in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Malaysia, and Ghana.
Among complainants, 54% were male, nearly two-thirds were between the ages of 30 and 50, and a little over one-• third resided in one of the following states: California, Florida, Texas, or New York. The majority of complainants were from the United States (92%). However, IC3 received a number of complaints originating in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Puerto Rico.
Male complainants lost more money than female complainants (ratio of $1.51 lost per male to every $1.00 lost per • female). Individuals 40-49 years of age reported, on average, higher amounts of loss than other age groups.
In addition to FBI scams, popular scam trends for 2009 included hitman scams, astrological reading frauds, • economic scams, job site scams, and fake pop-up ads for antivirus software.
IC3 2009 Internet Crime Report is the ninth annual compilation of information on complaints received by IC3 and referred to law enforcement or regulatory agencies for appropriate action. The results provide an examination of key characteristics of: (1) complaints; (2) perpetrators; (3) complainants; (4) interaction between perpetrators and complainants; (5) popular scams of 2009; and (6) success stories involving complaints referred by IC3. The results in this report are intended to enhance general knowledge about the scope and prevalence of cybercrime in the United States. This report does not represent all victims of Internet crime, or crime in general because it is derived solely from the people who filed a report with IC3.
The number of complaints referred to law enforcement has increased from 72,940 in 2008 to 146,663 in 2009 (see Figure 3). All complaints not directly referred are still accessible by law enforcement, used for trend analysis, intelligence gathering and consumer education. Typically, these non-referred complaints do not involve a documented case of financial or physical harm or involve a situation in which neither the complainant nor perpetrator reside within the United States. In a minority of cases, there is no designated agency to refer a complaint, based on jurisdictional factors or agency-defined thresholds for referral.
During 2009, IC3 implemented a new complaint classification system. This complainant-driven system is based on a logic-driven questionnaire that generates an automatic classification of the complaint into one of 79 offense-based categories. This redesign has also resulted in a number of changes to the way IC3 system gathers and classifies complaint data. The new classification system improves upon the previous system by making clearer distinctions between complaint elements and by reducing the number of categories used to classify complaints.
The results contained in this report were based on information that was provided to IC3 through the complaint forms submitted at
For a more detailed explanation of complaint categories used by IC3, refer to Appendix I at the end of this report.
Complaint category statistics may not always produce an accurate picture of what is occurring. They are based on the perception of consumers, and are thus influenced by how the complainant characterizes their victimization. Two different people may describe the same victimization in very different ways.
A key area of interest regarding Internet fraud is the average monetary loss incurred by complainants contacting IC3. Such information is valuable because it provides a foundation for estimating average Internet fraud losses in the general population. To present information on average losses, two forms of averages are offered: the mean and the median. The mean represents a form of averaging familiar to the public: the total dollar amount divided by the number of complaints. Because the mean can be sensitive to a small number of extremely high or extremely low loss complaints, the median is also provided. The median represents the 50
th percentile, or midpoint, of all loss amounts for all complaints referred to law enforcement. The median is less susceptible to extreme cases, whether high or low amounts lost.
| Rank | State | Per 100,000 People |
| 1 | District of Columbia | 116.00 |
| 2 | Nevada | 106.73 |
| 3 | Washington | 81.33 |
| 4 | Montana | 68.20 |
| 5 | Utah | 60.22 |
| 6 | Florida | 57.28 |
| 7 | Georgia | 56.99 |
| 8 | Wyoming | 56.40 |
| 9 | North Dakota | 51.01 |
| 10 | New York | 48.10 |
Cyber Crime-The Internet-Your Computer and You
Saturday, January 30th, 2010The Internet has thrown wide the windows of the world, allowing us to learn and communicate and conduct business in ways that were unimaginable 20 years ago. This is the upside of globalization, as author Tom Friedman has noted in best-sellers such as The World is Flat. The downside of our increasingly flat world is that the Internet is not just a conduit for commerce, but also a conduit for crime.
The Internet has created virtual doors into our lives, our finances, our businesses, and our national security. Criminals, spies, and terrorists are testing our doorknobs every day, looking for a way in.
Cyber crime is a nebulous concept. It is difficult to grasp intangible threats, and easy to dismiss them as unlikely to happen to you. So far, too little attention has been paid to cyber threats—and their consequences.
Have you ever though of strangers walking through your offices, homes, and dorm rooms? What if they were opening drawers, reading your files, accessing your bank accounts, or stealing your company’s research and development?
Friends, this is happening at this very moment! Intruders are reading our mail and hacking into our networks every day, looking for valuable information,. Unfortunately, they are finding all of this because many of us are not aware of the threat these people pose to our privacy, our economic stability, and even our national security.
Most of us, including myself, assume that we will not be targets of cyber crime. We, as a result, are not as careful as we know we should be. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller,III tells this true story; Not long ago, the head of one of our nation’s domestic agencies received an e-mail purporting to be from his bank. It looked perfectly legitimate, and asked him to verify some information. He started to follow the instructions, but realized this might not be such a good idea. It turned out that he was just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet “phishing” scam. This is someone who spends a good deal of his professional life warning others about the perils of cyber crime! He, however, barely caught himself in time. Director Mueller knows this is a true story as this person!
In July of 2008, a California oil and gas company called Pacific Energy Resources contacted the FBI and the Long Beach Police Department to report a computer attack. Six computer servers had been rendered inoperable, disabling the critical leak-detection systems of three off-shore oil platforms. This was the last in a series of network attacks which cost the company over $100,000 in losses.’’ An investigation led the FBI to a former IT contractor. After he had been dismissed from his job, he retaliated by remotely accessing the computer system. His actions could potentially have resulted in significant environmental damage. He pled guilty to a federal computer intrusion charge and faces up to 10 years in prison.
This past April, someone hacked into the database of the Virginia Department of Health Professionals. The intruder blocked over 8 million patient records—records that hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies depend on in order to accurately prescribe and dispense medication. Those records are no longer blocked and the FBI continues to investigate.
In the book, The Cuckoo’s Egg, the author chronicles the electronic adventure of Cliff Stoll, a systems manager at a Berkeley laboratory. In the mid-1980s, he noticed an accounting disparity of 75 cents. This was before the Internet as we know it today. He tracked it to an unauthorized user who had repeatedly broken into the system and then used the lab’s computers to tap into military networks. He eventually traced the attacks to a German hacker who was part of an espionage ring. The book was prescient. Twenty years later the entire world is online. Because the web offers near-total anonymity it is much more difficult to discern the identity, motives, and location of an intruder.
In an early stage investigation it is not known if the problem is the dealing with a spy, a company insider, or an organized criminal group. Something that looks like an ordinary phishing scam may be an attempt by a terrorist group to raise funding for an operation. An intrusion into a corporate network could be the work of a high school hacker across the street or it could be a hostile foreign power across the globe.
Cyber threats present a unique challenge to law enforcement because so little is known and, equally, there is a tendency for investigators to compartmentalize an early investigation. Criminal cases are usually separate from espionage cases, which in turn are separate from counterterrorism cases. When it come to cyber threats, however, there is almost always some overlap.
It is the job of the FBI to serve both as a law enforcement and national security agency. This is critical because what may start as a criminal investigation may lead to a national security threat.
Part 2 of this series continues tomorrow. (CRP wishes to recognize the research efforts of the FBI in making this article possible)
Criminal Justice System Fighting Internet Crime
Thursday, September 24th, 2009They were crimes born of the Internet age — romantic solicitations on popular Web site Craigslist that police say led to the fatal shooting of one woman and the robbery of another in Boston hotels this past spring.
Internet forensic expert Mark Rasch used high-tech sleuthing to help police in Boston’s Craigslist crime.
And it was high-tech, 21st-century sleuthing, along with some old-fashioned gumshoe detective work, that put police on the trail toward a suspect and eventually an arrest.
CNN’s Randi Kaye recently took a behind-the-scenes look at how technology was used to lead police to 23-year-old medical student Philip Markoff, who has been indicted on seven counts, including first-degree murder.
Prosecutors said Julissa Brisman, a model from New York who advertised as a masseuse on Craigslist, was shot three times at close range and suffered blunt head trauma at the Marriott Copley Place hotel on April 14. And a 29-year-old Las Vegas, Nevada, woman was robbed of $800 in cash and $250 in American Express gift cards at the Westin Copley Place hotel, police reports said.
Investigators knew they had crimes born of the Internet on their hands, but how were they able to use that same technology to help them find a suspect who went to great lengths to hide his tracks?
“The figures involved communicated with each other [via] text and e-mail, and they only met at the very last minute,” said special correspondent Maureen Orth, who investigated the story for Vanity Fair magazine. “And then the way the police were able to solve the crime was going back, using the clicks and the Internet addresses.”
In Brisman’s case, police knew she had communicated on Craigslist with a person calling himself “Andy.”
Mark Rasch once headed the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. Now an Internet forensic expert, he helped Boston police track the alleged killer.
“The first thing you start with was the e-mail address. In this case, it’s an e-mail address from Live.com, which is Microsoft,” Rasch explained to CNN’s Kaye.
Rasch showed Kaye the tracer program he used to help follow the e-mails from “Andy.”
“Trace Back does what it says — traces the route that the e-mail took on its way from its origin to the destination,” Rasch said.
Rasch says police got the Internet protocol address for the e-mailer’s computer. From there, investigators tracked down the company providing Internet service to the suspect, which told them that the subscriber lived in a Quincy apartment building, outside Boston.
Even though police had what they believed was the killer’s real name and home address, that still was not enough, Kaye reports.
“They have to validate and actually get this guy’s fingers on the keyboard,” Rasch said. “So in the end, they reverted to the old gumshoe thing of a stakeout.”
Police zeroed in on Markoff. They’d seen a tall, blond male they believed was the killer on the hotel surveillance cameras. And they did what many people do on a daily basis — they Googled him.
Police learned their prime suspect was a medical student at Boston University. He was engaged to be married.
Again, the Internet helped. They got a better look at him through pictures with his fiancee online. It’s a piece of a digital trail criminals rarely think about, Kaye reported.
“As one of the law enforcement people told me, if you can see it, they can see it,” Orth said.
Markoff’s cyber footprint was growing more clear to authorities every day. On April 20, six days after Brisman’s slaying, detectives arrested him.
They said he was carrying on him a New York driver’s license with a photo of someone named Andrew or Andy Miller. Police say Markoff used that driver’s license to purchase the gun that killed Brisman and that his fingerprints were on the paperwork.
In June, Markoff pleaded not guilty to Brisman’s death and the other charges against him. He remains in jail.
E-mail Hackers-Urgent Notice for Criminology Research Project Readers
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009For only $100, YourHackerz.com will provide anyone with the password of any e-mail account! There is no way of detecting this invasion. Also provided is a “spoofing service” to disguise a woman’s voice as a man’s, vice-versa.
Services like YourHackerz.com are active and plentiful, with clever names like piratecrackers.com and hackmail.net. They boast of having little trouble hacking into such Web-based e-mail systems as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail and they advertise openly. Experts said, there doesn’t appear to be much anyone can do about it.
Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electric Frontier Foundation in San Francisco said, “This is an important point that people haven’t grasp. According to Professor Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University,” Federal law probibits prohibits hacking but any hacker that is competent and spends the time and targets you, he’s going to get you.” Professor Kerr was a trial attorney in the United States Justice Department’s computer crime section before his move to academics. Kerr says, “The feds usually don’t have the resources to investigate and prosecute misdemeanors and part of the reason isi that normally it’s hard to know when an account has been compromised, because e-mail snooping doesn’t leave a trace.”
“Web Based e-mail password hacking or cracking is one of our all time favorite and unique hobbies,” writes the folks at YourHackerz.com. It’s not clear where YourHackerz.com is located but experts suspect that most of the businesses are based overseas. These outfits, with a 100% guarantee, claim they will provide original Passwords, no questions asked. They require payment only after a buyer is convinced. They also guarantee “total privacy of your information and no legal hassles.”
SlickHackerz.com boast, “We are professionals interested in helping serious people for whom an e-mail password wouldl mean saving a marriage, knowing the truth, preventing a fraud, protecting their family, job and interests only when conventional ways and normal procedures do not work.”
All the services advertise that they will e-mail a screenshot of the target’s in-box or even send an e-mail from the target-s e-mail as proof that they’ve cracked the password. The customer then sends payment. One service, whose fee is only $33, then responds with the script from a scene from a Shakespeare play, with the stolen poassword hidden in the copy.
The FBI cannot police the Internet, a spokesman said. “The FBI is aware of these illegal services and we have been successful in the past in identifying criminal activity and working with prosecutors to bring indictments. Users of these services should know that just because a product is marketed on the Internet does’s mean it’s legal.”
According to FBI spokesman Paul Bresson, “Agents must be made aware of specific illegal acts ocurring in the United States before they can pursue a provider. They can’t investigate and online service without evidence of a particular crime.”
Alissa Cooper of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington says, “This kind of thing has been on the radar of law enforcement already, but with many of the hackers overseas in practice it takes a lot of resources and time to build up relationships with law enforcement in other countries. They’re starting to do that in the cybersecurity realm.”
Criminology Research Project, Inc., in monitoring newspapers from throughout the United States, obtained this information from the Washington Post in an article written by Tom Jackson. CRP realizes cybersecurity does not fall under “murder oriented subject matter,” nevertheless it does fall within the definition of general criminology. It’s important, in my opinion, that everyone become aware of this illegal activity. Any suggestions? Certainly…change your password often and hope for the best.
Just yesterday I attempted to sign on to one of my e-mail accounts only to be told that someone was already signed in! I promptly reported it to the FBI and received a speedy reply. However, what will be done? Very little in my opinion.
Cybersecurity is a new area for law enforcement is presents a most difficult dilemma. Law enforcement is accustomed to having a physical crime scene which is absent in this type crime. For thet present it seems cybercrime has out foxed law enforcement’s best efforts therefore, out of necessity, it is the obligation of each of use using the Internet to take computer security into our own hands.