British authorities stymied a massive bank heist that reportedly was dependent on a keylogger, the same kind of spyware that has jumped three-fold in the last year and puts consumers at risk from hackers and phishers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to reports in the British media from the BBC and the Financial Times, among others, the scheme was set to steal 220 million pounds ($423 million) from the London offices of the Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui.<\/p>\n
The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), the country’s cyber-cops, began investigating last October after the bank discovered that hackers had infiltrated its network and were using a keylogger to capture keystrokes.<\/p>\n
Keyloggers, a type of spyware, are used by hackers and increasingly, by phishers, to snatch users account information — such as log-in names and passwords — and grab other lucrative data, including credit card numbers.<\/p>\n
Police arrested an Israeli man, identified as Yeron Bolondi, 32, in Israel after an attempt was made to transfer 13.9 million pounds ($26.8 million) into an account there.<\/p>\n
If it had been successful, the robbery would have dwarfed Britain’s previous record, the armed theft of \u00a326 million ($50 million) from Belfast’s Northern Bank in December, a crime thought to have been conducted by the IRA.<\/p>\n
“From what we know from our SpyAudit data, there’s a good chance this wasn’t even a planned attack,” said Richard Stiennon, the vice president of threat research for Boulder, Colo.-based anti-spyware vendor Webroot.<\/p>\n
According to Webroot’s SpyAudit, a for-free spyware auditing tool it makes available on its own site as well as to EarthLink subscribers, 15 percent of enterprise PCs tested have a keylogger already installed.<\/p>\n
“It reminds me of how Microsoft was hacked back in 2004, when a Microsoft developer’s home computer lead the hackers into Microsoft. It all comes back to this ongoing trend of more and more malicious code being developed with keyloggers,” said Gregg Mastora, a senior security analyst with Sophos.<\/p>\n
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