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How To Steal Money From Online Banking

Five ways to rob a bank using the internet

This twelvemonth a depository financial institution robber stole £1.3 1000000 without touching a penny. Today's master criminals are swapping shotguns for software – here's how they do it

Applied science | Assay 3 October 2013
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So final century…

(Epitome: Rex Features)

Earlier this year, a man walked into a branch of Barclays in north London and stole £ane.3 one thousand thousand without touching a single banking company note. Instead, he posed as an It technician and installed a device to siphon off the cash electronically.

News of the robbery emerged last month when eight men were arrested, a week after police foiled a similar plot against Santander. Information technology seems that bank robbers are giving up shotguns for software. Hither's how they practice it.

Artificial tech support

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The Barclays and Santander plots involved installing a device called a keyboard video mouse switch. These are commonly used in data centres to command multiple computers from a single terminal, and by connecting it to a 3G router the crooks were able to remotely access Barclays' machines over the cellphone network. They used this to transfer money to their own accounts, simply Barclays noticed and reported the theft a day later.

"The hard function is non getting in the bank to exercise the transfer, only getting the money out of the bank into some form you can spend without getting caught in the process," says Steven Murdoch, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge.

Go phishing

If you can't rob a banking concern directly, go later on its customers. These days near of us know non to open suspicious emails claiming to be from their bank, but people practise notwithstanding fall for such phishing attempts, inadvertently handing over their passwords to crooks by logging in to fake websites. Many banks at present consequence physical tokens that provide secondary hallmark designed to foil these attacks, but not all do.

Convert your style to wealth

One unlikely fashion to take a bank's cash involves currency conversion. Swap $10 for pounds through your online account and you volition receive £vi.22 at current rates – your depository financial institution rounds to the nearest penny. Simply if you commutation 1 cent, the rounding means you will become 1 pence, a significant profit. Set software to practise this over and over, and soon y'all will be sitting on a tidy sum.

Banks prevent this by setting a minimum conversion amount or limiting the number of exchanges per twenty-four hours, but some take only realised they were under assault in one case it was too late. "Two of our banking customers have lost coin through currency-rounding attacks," says Mitja Kolsek of Acros Security in Maribor, Slovenia. "One of them lost around €xxx,000 before it noticed and blocked it."

Clone cards

Credit and debit cards are oft targeted by criminals, either by stealing individual cards or modifying ATMs to record carte du jour details and PINs. The account details are copied on to blank cards and then used to withdraw money or buy goods to sell on.

Many countries use a chip and PIN organization to prevent this, so criminals have got into the habit of taking cloned cards to the US, where the system is non nonetheless in widespread use.

Some take this even farther. Earlier this year, 8 people were arrested in New York for cloning cards and hacking bank systems to heighten each card'due south account limit, earlier withdrawing nearly $45 million from ATMs around the globe.

Distract with a DDoS

Bank robbers can knock out CCTV and disable alarms before they break into the depository financial institution. The electronic equivalent is a distributed deprival-of-service assail (DDoS), in which large volumes of network traffic hammer a bank's systems, giving criminals the embrace they need. "While the bank's IT staff is scrambling to proceed its servers online and running, criminals are transferring money from users' accounts," says Kolsek. Last year the FBI warned that criminals could become their easily on millions using software costing only $200.

More than on these topics:

  • forensics
  • criminal offense
  • hacking

Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24324-five-ways-to-rob-a-bank-using-the-internet/

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